Slightly off 3TB drive sizes

[tascion]

I recently built a FreeNAS setup. As recently as having it finished yesterday.

Of the 8 drives I have, all of them were purchased as "3TB" drives. One of the drives is 2.9TB, while the others are 2.7TB. The smaller ones were what I expected and this is the first time I've gotten more than I paid for and had a problem with it. I can't merge them all into a single raidz2 using the basic interface, and haven't been able to figure out how to use the manual controls.

I've read numerous things about the issues of using differently sized drives, and I didn't plan to do it. On the other hand, I don't mind giving up 200GB of space on a single drive to configure the merged volume.

While I've found tons of warnings, and tried to avoid being in this situation, I haven't found clear directions for how to do it now that I am in need of a solution.

Please help me with some guidance or direction. I keep ending up creating a 7 drive array with a one off drive as an additional stripe volume.

 

[joeschmuck]

I suspect there is a reason that you do not have your answer yet. Please read the forum rules and post your system specs as outlined in our rules. The rules are very short but important in order for us to provide you a good fast answer. If I knew what version of FreeNAS you were running and the specific hard drive model and how the drives are identified (ada0, ada1 or da0, da1) then I'd tell you what you need to know.

What I can tell you is that you need to destroy any vdevs which you have already created, so that is the first step. Worst case is you need to use the command line to create the pool. It's not hard, you could do a Google search on "freebsd zpool create" and figure out the command.

Well this old man is headed to a nap.

 

[tascion]

Hello, I shall search google as suggested. In the meantime:

Server Specs
motherboard make and model: ASUS P10S-M WS LGA 1151 Intel C236 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
CPU make and model: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU G3900 @ 2.80GHz
RAM quantity: 16206MB
HDD

1. ada0 - 3.0TB - MK0371YHKK3LVA
2. ada1 - 3.0TB - WD-WCC4N5XU8C0A
3. ada2 - 3.2TB - WOL240379200
4. ada3 - 3.0TB - WOL240379219
5. ada4 - 3.0TB - 679KT8LAS
6. ada5 - 3.0TB - MK0371YHKN48BA
7. ada6 - 3.0TB - MK0311YHJWKTPA
8. ada7 - 3.0TB - 679KKUHAS

hard disk controllers: motherboard supports sata raid 0/1/5/10
network cards: Dual Intel I210 10/100/1000Mbps
FreeNAS-11.0-U4 (54848d13b)

 

[joeschmuck]

So lets see if this works, please follow this step my step and if something does not work, tell me the last step that worked okay and the error you are having.

1) Open the FreeNAS GUI
2) Select the Storage icon on the top of the screen.
3) Select "Volume Manager"
4) Select Manual Setup
5) At this point you should see all 8 of your hard drives listed, if not then you need to destroy the dataset as I previously instructed.
6) Enter a volume name, for this example I will call it "bigpool".
7) Do not select Encryption.
8) While holding down the CTRL key, click on each one of the hard drives listed so they are all highlighted.
9) At Group Type select RAID-Z2.
10) Select "Add Volume".
11) Your new volume should be build at this point.

If this doesn't work let me know, we can go through the command line way of doing things.

 

[danb35]

Ah, you're using the "white label" disks from GoHardDrives.com. Good luck with them--mine wasn't so good. In any event, the standard volume manager won't let you combine disks of different capacities into a single vdev, but the Manual Setup @joeschmuck lists above should do it.

 

[tascion]

Hey guys,
Thank you @joeschmuck and @danb35 for you help and input. It turns out though that things had an annoying solution. Joeschmuck, you tipped me off, because I've already tried doing what you directed me to several times before you posted them.

The answer is: Don't use your girlfriend's mac while trying to ctrl + click multiple items. To select multiple items, in MacOS, use Command + click.

Linux, I like it, but it's not common enough to go to instead of Windows, so I mostly putter around with it as a hobby. Windows is like the family car. I'm not sure who fixed it or with what, but it mostly works as long as you don't push it, and I can make it do what I need. I've no idea how to describe MacOS because I don't use it much.

Anyway, thanks again. I'll keep learning and so forth, and I hope my next problem will either have as easy of a fix but without the frustration, or be more worthy of pestering you lot.

 

[joeschmuck]

Glad you got it working.