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Adding drives to a freenas server

I built a FreeNas server last year with one 3TB WD RED drive knowing that it was risky and that I would eventually add more drives for space and redundancy/error checking. My question is how do I get it setup in such a way where I have 2 striped drives for space and speed and 1 drive for error checking. I was reading that it was possible and even preferred to setup Freenas ZFS partitions with odd numbers of drives for this reason. Can someone explain how to do that? Am I thinking about this wrong?

 

Thanks,

 

Elliott35

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In this vid Logan is talking about it. Can someone explain what he is talking about? The link will bring you to the specific time in the video that im confused about. 

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You would have to copy the data off to anouther driver, then add the drives and make a raid z1. There is no way to convert the single drive to a raid z1 without copying your data off, like you can on btrfs or hardware raid cards.

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See that has me confused.... How can i have 6TB backed up to 2TB. And what is Raid Z1

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Just now, elliott35 said:

See that has me confused.... How can i have 6TB backed up to 2TB. And what is Raid Z1

raid z1, z2, z3 is the level of the raid that is equvent to raid 5 and 6. The number after the z is how many drives can fail without losing data.

 

The parity drive isn't a backup. It stores enough data so that you can lose 1 or 2 drives and still have all your data. It basically calculates the difference between the drives so that it will be able to restore all the files if a drive fails.

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Well that all just sounds like magic to me but I think I can make it work. I can get 2 more drives and have a system that will have increased speed and redundancy with raid z1? And if im following correctly the different z raids are just ZFS-raid equivalents? If a drive fails in raid z1 I would be able to see that in Freenas, shut the system down and swap the drive? Will it auto rebuild the data? 

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Also, say i did this and made a raid z1. Would i be able to convert that to a raid z2 or z3 in the future?

 

 

And i feel like a noob... But hey, someones got to ask the dumb questions!

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As far as I know you can't change the raid/z-level (is it so called?) afterwards so you have to backup and set up the new z2/3 if you want to change.

There are some OS you can do that (unraid, Windows and rockstor) but freenas is not build for that.

I know you can set up snapraid and greyhole in openmediavault to get sth like you want  but no idea if that's possible with freenas

 

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13 hours ago, Aekim said:

As far as I know you can't change the raid/z-level (is it so called?) afterwards so you have to backup and set up the new z2/3 if you want to change.

There are some OS you can do that (unraid, Windows and rockstor) but freenas is not build for that.

I know you can set up snapraid and greyhole in openmediavault to get sth like you want  but no idea if that's possible with freenas

 

It isn't. You can however always add a drive to the system and copy from the array and back.

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So how does it work when you need to replace a drive? do you just swap one out and freenas does the rest?

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1 hour ago, elliott35 said:

So how does it work when you need to replace a drive? do you just swap one out and freenas does the rest?

It would if you had multiple drives in your zpool, so in this case if you are looking to backup your data I suggest you add several new drives (and the big thing with freenas is really add as many drives at once as you can afford) and then copy the data from the one drive to those drives. Or better yet if you have somewhere else like your Desktop PC you can copy the data from that one drive to the Desktop first and then wipe that drive and add all the drives in a new pool potentially so that the data is backed up on the multiple drives in that pool. 

If you quote me or are replying to me please @ me. Thanks

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