Single drive to 4 disk raidz

[oumpa31]

Currently I am running my Jails/plugins on a single 128gig SSD. I've done some looking around and now that those low gig SSD's have come down in price i am trying to decide if i should get 3 more 128gig ssd's. If i can just add them to the existing disk to make a 4 disk raidz. Not sure if it's possible to expand a single drive like that.

And if i can't, i'll get 3 500gig ssd drives and put them in a raidz then move my jails info to that drive that way i don't have to re-install all my jails/plugins. and just move my vm's to that pool.

I know i'll have more space with with the 3 500's but if i can just expand a single drive to 4 that would be easier.

Any help would be great.

 

[anmnz]

If i can just add them to the existing disk to make a 4 disk raidz. Not sure if it's possible to expand a single drive like that.

You can't.

A thing you could do is to "attach" a second disk to your current disk, making a 2-way mirror. Then add another mirrored pair to it. 4 disks total, double your existing capacity (same as RAIDZ-2 would give you).

 

[oumpa31]

You can't.

A thing you could do is to "attach" a second disk to your current disk, making a 2-way mirror. Then add another mirrored pair to it. 4 disks total, double your existing capacity (same as RAIDZ-2 would give you).

That's what i was afraid of.

I think i'll just be going to newer bigger drives and move my current jail pool to a bigger pool so i can also put my vm's on that pool also.

 

[Arwen]

There is a way to create a 4 disk RAID-Z1 with 1 degraded disk. You then copy from the single disk to the RAID-Z1. When done, you replaced the "failed" disk in the RAID-Z1 with the single disk.

However, in general, most FreeNAS users can't perform this task. It's perfectly safe if you have backups. But, can be too tricky for many users.