Installing RAID 0

[thedancingmilk]

I received a 2tb drive for Christmas to add to my FreeNAS box. I am looking to install RAID 0 in order to view the NAS as one big hard drive. Is it in anyway possible to create the RAID without having to format the drive I already have? If so, a tutorial would help me as I'm a bit of a noob. Thanks.

 

[warri]

No, if you want to create a ZFS mirror, you have to format both drives in the progress. Backup your files to another hard drive first.

 

[toddos]

No, if you want to create a ZFS mirror, you have to format both drives in the progress. Backup your files to another hard drive first.

Actually, if you want to create a ZFS mirror (equivalent of RAID1), you can. That's the one place where ZFS allows you to add drives. Doing a stripe (RAID 0), however, can't be done.

thedancingmilk, assuming your existing drive is formatted to ZFS, the best you can do is to also format your new drive to ZFS and then add it to the existing pool. The result will not be RAID0/striping and existing data will not be rebalanced, but it will look like one large hard drive as far as storage space is concerned.

WARNING!

Please read this. This is unsafe. RAID0/striping has no redundancy, nor does adding a non-mirrored drive to a pool. If either drive dies, you will lose the contents on both of them.

 

[thedancingmilk]

So I've added the new hard drive and FreeNAS has detected the new drive. It seems way too simple to go to Storage > Volume Manager then to extend the current volume that I have, selecting the new hard drive and click add volume. Underneath the add volume, it says existing data will be cleared. Will this format the ENTIRE volume, or the new hard drive that I've just added? I understand that striping the data in unsafe, but my NAS is only used for storing films and TV. Thanks for the help so far.

 

[thedancingmilk]

Turns out it was the incredibly simple way that I explained. 3.57TB of space available now :D

 

[toddos]

Simple, yes. Safe, no. Please, please, please read the link I posted above. Your data is not safe, and if a single drive dies you're going to lose it all. This is not like old WHSv1 Drive Extender type pooling, where if you lost a drive you'd only lose the data on that drive. You. Will. Lose. Everything.

And maybe that's okay, but if it's not then you need to seriously rethink your storage configuration.

 

[cyberjock]

Toddos - I admire your attempt to save him.. it's a sticky.. so yeah. If he didn't read it I'm not sure who he can blame.