[SOLVED] Best way to add storage to existing ZFS pool?

officialbananas

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Feb 19, 2024
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I have 2 14tb drives in a mirror-0 setup (I presume is raid 1), running a media server on those drives. I just purchased 2 20tb drives that I want to add to the existing zpool on which those 2 drives reside. After some research, the easiest way seems to be running a raid 1+0, where i can add another 20tb of usable space into the existing zpool. I'm wondering if there is a better way to do this? The problem that I see with other raid setups is that I have different sizes across the 4 drives, so it would be difficult to have something like raid 5... but I'm not sure if I'm missing anything. If there is a "best" way to do this, please let me know! I'm not too keen on performance, I'm just storing movies/shows on the drives.

Thank you!

Here is a screenshot of my `zpool status`.

1732488750431.png
 
Just add the two disks as second mirror (resulting in "miror-1"). If you are not seeking performance there is no need to rebalance or do any other additional steps.

If you want to switch to RaidZ1 you would lose some capacity as only the same amount of space is used for all devices. This means 14 TB for all four.

Note that you need to start from scratch by destroying ZFS01 and rebuilding it. Note also that this is definitely NOT recommended with these very large drives. (And you only get the performance of a single disk.)
 
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