Raid 5 expansion?

[maximilian009]

Hi,
I am just wondering: Is it possible, to extend a running RAID 5 system with a new hard drive of the same manufacturer and same size?
E.G. I have 3 x 2TB in Raid 5 -> 4TB useable storage
-> I want 6 TB storage -> Insert 1 x 2 TB -> Overall storage 8 TB -> useable storage 6 TB....
Is this possible with FreeNAS 8 or does i need a special Raid Controller?
Thanks in advance!
Max

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

no, you can't add to a vdev like RAIDZ (raid5). You can add to the zpool the vdev is in, but this is not the same thing

RAID controller isn't the issue,you should be using FreeNAS' built in software raid (using zfs) if you want to do RAID.

 

[maximilian009]

So is there any solution for an extendable storage with redundancy?
I dont want to by 4TB (what is sufficient right now) and 1 - 2 years from now buy another 4 hard drives to put everything from the 4 TB system to the one with 6TB.

 

[palmboy5]

Like Joshua said, you cannot add to a vdev, but you can have multiple vdev's within a single zpool pool. So here is what I gather from what you said:

You currently have:

yourPool
---raidz1
------2tbDrive0
------2tbDrive1
------2tbDrive2

with a usable capacity of 4TB.

You can add 4x 2TB drives later on like you said, which would add 6TB of usable space.

That setup would look like:

yourPool
---raidz1
------2tbDrive0
------2tbDrive1
------2tbDrive2
---raidz1
------2tbDrive3
------2tbDrive4
------2tbDrive5
------2tbDrive6

The size of yourPool will be 10TB as seen by applications and ZFS. Only zpool really knows that the pool actually consists of two separate RAIDZ arrays.

 

[PrinterElf]

Similar question(s) along the same lines...
At present I have 3 independent disks: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB. All in use, with about another 1TB of storage dotted around the rest of the house, all of which I'd like to combine/empty into one location.

This Jubilee weekend (thank you ma'am), HDD prices are starting to return to some sense of pre-flood normality, and it's finally feasible for me to purchase 4x2TB disks to fully populate the server (HP Proliant Microserver).

Q1. If I buy the 4 disks and use up all the SATA connections in the server, is it possible to individually mount the existing disks (already UFS formatted) externally either via USB or eSATA, and transfer the data across to the newly created RAIDZ1 array?

Q2. If at a (much) later date I then purchased 4x 3TB disks, and given that in theory I may have no more SATA connections remaining, would there be any way of migrating the data in the existing array to the new disks (i.e. substituting them one at a time and restoring from the parity data), and then expanding the storage to 9TB? Or am I talking out of my backside....?

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Q1 - yes, just mount and move data over
Q2 - yes

 

[PrinterElf]

Q1 - yes, just mount and move data over
Q2 - yes

You're bad for my bank balance....