New disk

[cormiodo]

Hello everybody,
probably this question has a simple answer, but I can't solve my problem (sorry for my english, I am italian).
My FREENAS consists of 3 discs 3TB (in addition to the boot disk); the problem seems simple: I have to add a new 3TB HDD, because I'm almost out of space.
Right now I'm doing some tests and then I do not care if my current situation involves risks in the event of a malfunction of HDD (I am aware of losing the data).
The problem is that when I try to add a new disk (with volume manager), the system reports this error:
You are trying to add a virtual device consisting of 1 device(s) in a pool that has a virtual device consisting of 3 device(s)
What does it mean?
Obviously I can not recreate the entire pool, because I have not other 3 disks to back up data;
In the documentation I read that with Volume Manager is possible to add a disk to an existing volume; something wrong?
Right now the situation is not serious, but in the future I will need to add other additional disks and I don't want re-create the volume from scratch every time. Is there a solution, or FREENAS is not able to do this and I have to find an alternative solution?
Thanks for any response.

 

[gpsguy]

Unfortunately, you can't add another disk to your existing vdev (3 x 3TB disks). You can add additional vdev's, for example, another set of 3x3TB drives. If you want all 4x3TB drives in the same vdev, you'd need to backup your data somewhere, recreate the pool with all 4 drives, and restore it. I know it's not what you want to do, but that's how it works. Another way to increase volume size, is to replace each disk in a vdev, one at a time and wait for each one to resilver. Once all have been upgraded, the volume size will expand. Note: We don't recommend RAIDz1 with 2TB+ sized drives.

If you are adding disks slowly over time, you might consider mirrors. Then, you only have to add a pair of disks each time you want to increase the size of your volume.

You could add your new 3TB disk as it's own volume. But, it's harder to manage the storage and you wouldn't have any fault tolerance on this volume.

 

[cormiodo]

Thanks gpsguy, unfortunately it was what I was afraid;
I imagined that the only solution was to create a new volume, but it is not what I look for.
I think that, unfortunately, I will have to find other solutions, because as I said, in the future I will have to add more disks and I have absolutely no room to create a mirror system. Thanks anyway for your kind and quick response.