FreeNAS raidz1 expansion

[Turretgaming]

I currently have 4 drives 2tb each in raidz1 and want to expand it with 4 more 2tb drives. Im using FreeNAS 11.2 and have no idea how to do it. I've heard that adding it will only stripe them so I can only lose one drive but I've also heard it would make 2 raidz1 combined in raid0 for a raid 50 allowing me to lose 2 drives (one per raidz1). Anyone have any idea how to do this. I'd like to avoid making a whole now pool and reassigning all 3 users and windows VM.

[Electronics Wizardy]

You can't expand a raidz. You need to delete the current pool and made a new raidz.

 

You can add the other 2 drives as a mirror, and add that to the zpool.

 

You can also just replace the current 2tb drives with 4 or 8tb drives and get more spaces.

[Turretgaming]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can't expand a raidz. You need to delete the current pool and made a new raidz.

 

You can add the other 2 drives as a mirror, and add that to the zpool.

 

You can also just replace the current 2tb drives with 4 or 8tb drives and get more spaces.

So if I replaced the 2tb drives with 4tb drives one at a time rebuilding the data each time it will expand to the new size when done? And there's no way to add drives and keep the redundancy? 

 

Edit: I have no way to back up my backup either as it's more data than my main rig has as I edit off it and backup 3 laptops and a desktop to and run Plex on.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Turretgaming said:

So if I replaced the 2tb drives with 4tb drives one at a time rebuilding the data each time it will expand to the new size when done?

Yep, when all the drives are swapped, you will have more space.

 

2 minutes ago, Turretgaming said:

And there's no way to add drives and keep the redundancy? 

You can add more vdevs in the pool. All the vdevs are being striped, but each vdev have redunancy.

 

2 minutes ago, Turretgaming said:

Edit: I have no way to back up my backup either as it's more data than my main rig has as I edit off it and backup 3 laptops and a desktop to and run Plex on.

You need to have a backup if you care about the data on it.

[Turretgaming]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yep, when all the drives are swapped, you will have more space.

 

You can add more vdevs in the pool. All the vdevs are being striped, but each vdev have redunancy.

 

You need to have a backup if you care about the data on it.

So I basically have three options. Swap them for bigger drives, or make another 4 drive vdev that is striped with each other and they still have there own redundancy, or lastly rebuild the whole thing. Any draw backs to the dual vdevs like other than I have a Max of 2 drive fails (one in each vdev) and it will be as easy as just click expand and pick another raidz1 (raidz1+raidz1=raid50 in theory). And the only draw back to swap them for bigger drives is I have 4 drives doing nothing but being paper weights.

[Electronics Wizardy]

13 minutes ago, Turretgaming said:

So I basically have three options. Swap them for bigger drives, or make another 4 drive vdev that is striped with each other and they still have there own redundancy, or lastly rebuild the whole thing. Any draw backs to the dual vdevs like other than I have a Max of 2 drive fails (one in each vdev) and it will be as easy as just click expand and pick another raidz1 (raidz1+raidz1=raid50 in theory). And the only draw back to swap them for bigger drives is I have 4 drives doing nothing but being paper weights.

Yep thatas about right.

[Turretgaming]

14 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yep thatas about right.

I'm not as screwed as I thought. I'll go with expansion of vdev cause I'm broke and can't pay 120$ per 4tb drive but I can do 80$ per 2tb so wish me luck. Also is there any tutorials on adding the vdev?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Turretgaming said:

I'm not as screwed as I thought. I'll go with expansion of vdev cause I'm broke and can't pay 120$ per 4tb drive but I can do 80$ per 2tb so wish me luck. Also is there any tutorials on adding the vdev?

You can easily add the drive in the freenas gui.

 

And for price per tb, those 2tb drives are a pretty bad value, the 8tbs are the sweet spot at around 140

 

[Turretgaming]

6 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can easily add the drive in the freenas gui.

 

And for price per tb, those 2tb drives are a pretty bad value, the 8tbs are the sweet spot at around 140

 

What 8tb is 140$ I'm seeing new 4tb at that price on Amazon? You got a link to it lol.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Turretgaming said:

What 8tb is 140$ I'm seeing new 4tb at that price on Amazon? You got a link to it lol.

https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Desktop-Hard-Drive-WDBWLG0080HBK-NESN/dp/B07D5V2ZXD/ref=pd_lpo_vtph_147_tr_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=KDS6EBV8K53ETEMHSFBX

 

Just take the internal drive out.

[Turretgaming]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Desktop-Hard-Drive-WDBWLG0080HBK-NESN/dp/B07D5V2ZXD/ref=pd_lpo_vtph_147_tr_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=KDS6EBV8K53ETEMHSFBX

 

Just take the internal drive out.

Awesome. Thanks for the help much appreciated

[Mikensan]

go to pools, expand the pool which you wish to extend, just below the arrow you clicked to expand a gear icon should appeart. Click that, and you can expand the pool by adding a vdev.

[Turretgaming]

41 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

go to pools, expand the pool which you wish to extend, just below the arrow you clicked to expand a gear icon should appeart. Click that, and you can expand the pool by adding a vdev.

And I need to make sure the new vdev is raidz1 like the original vdev?

[Mikensan]

3 minutes ago, Turretgaming said:

And I need to make sure the new vdev is raidz1 like the original vdev?

Yup.

 

Now this will ultimately still have a 1 disk fault tolerance, but per vdev. So in theory a maximum of 2 disks (1 in each vdev) could fail and you'd be fine. However! If 2 disks fail in vdev 1 or vdev 2, then the entire pool is lost.

 

So just make sure you have a plan for backups

[Turretgaming]

47 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

Yup.

 

Now this will ultimately still have a 1 disk fault tolerance, but per vdev. So in theory a maximum of 2 disks (1 in each vdev) could fail and you'd be fine. However! If 2 disks fail in vdev 1 or vdev 2, then the entire pool is lost.

 

So just make sure you have a plan for backups

I might take the Linus approach of Google.

[Jarsky]

8 hours ago, Turretgaming said:

And I need to make sure the new vdev is raidz1 like the original vdev?

 

When you're needing to extend in FreeNAS, you go into the Pool Manager, select the existing pool and go to Extend which will take you to select the Physical disks for the "Virtual Drive"....simply select 4 new disks to add, and it should automatically default to raidz1 - then just click Extend. You'll then see the new raidz1 under the pool...it should look something like <pool name> ---> raidz1-0 ---> raidz1-1 

 

 

Just to clarify, it is the vdev that has the raid level (raidz1)

The zpool can be expanded by adding additional vdev's. 

The zpool data will only be striped across multiple vdevs when the vdev's are deemed to be equal by FreeNAS. Until then it will write data only to the empty vdev. 

 

As each vdev is its own raidz1, you can only lose 1 disk in each vdev. 

If you lose 2 disks in a vdev, you lose all data in that vdev - which includes any files striped across it as above 

If you lose 1 disk in  each vdev, your data is at risk but available. 

 

As stated above, you can expand the vdev itself by swapping out the 2TB's for larger disks 1 at a time and rebuilding. Once all disks in the vdev have been swapped and rebuilt, then you can expand the dataset across the entire logical disk. 

[Turretgaming]

8 hours ago, Jarsky said:

 

When you're needing to extend in FreeNAS, you go into the Pool Manager, select the existing pool and go to Extend which will take you to select the Physical disks for the "Virtual Drive"....simply select 4 new disks to add, and it should automatically default to raidz1 - then just click Extend. You'll then see the new raidz1 under the pool...it should look something like <pool name> ---> raidz1-0 ---> raidz1-1 

 

 

Just to clarify, it is the vdev that has the raid level (raidz1)

The zpool can be expanded by adding additional vdev's. 

The zpool data will only be striped across multiple vdevs when the vdev's are deemed to be equal by FreeNAS. Until then it will write data only to the empty vdev. 

 

As each vdev is its own raidz1, you can only lose 1 disk in each vdev. 

If you lose 2 disks in a vdev, you lose all data in that vdev - which includes any files striped across it as above 

If you lose 1 disk in  each vdev, your data is at risk but available. 

 

As stated above, you can expand the vdev itself by swapping out the 2TB's for larger disks 1 at a time and rebuilding. Once all disks in the vdev have been swapped and rebuilt, then you can expand the dataset across the entire logical disk. 

Sounds fair enough. I get a performance bump cause the stripe raid and I still have one disk fail over (when a disk goes out I shut down the server till I can replace it and I'm looking into the hot drives which lay dormant in your system till a drive fails then FreeNAS moves over to the hot drive when a drive fails all on it's own and begins rebuilding) so I went with that I ordered 4 Seagate 2tb barracuda drives and another hotswap Bay for my 4U server (I have a total of nine 5.25 bays that can be filled with three 5 bay hot swaps for 15 total hotswap bays) and when it gets in on Wednesday I'll update everyone on how it went. Thank you all so much for the help.

[Jarsky]

awesome, look forward to an update 

[Turretgaming]

On 3/20/2019 at 12:46 AM, Jarsky said:

awesome, look forward to an update 

Got the drives and new hotswap Bay and took more time to put all the drives in than it did adding the vdev. I went from 500gb free to 7tb free. My first vdev is completely full and my second is going to be 6tb free by the end of the day lol. Thanks for the help everyone.

[Turretgaming]

On 3/20/2019 at 12:46 AM, Jarsky said:

 

 

On 3/18/2019 at 3:24 PM, Mikensan said:

 

Any idea if an SSD cache will be useful? I use Plex in a Windows VM (FreeNAS plugins are broken in 11.2 so I made a VM) and have 3 user shares in FreeNAS. I don't think it will be useful for Plex since the VM needs the cache in it's VM drive not the FreeNAS drive.

[Mikensan]

3 hours ago, Turretgaming said:

 

Any idea if an SSD cache will be useful? I use Plex in a Windows VM (FreeNAS plugins are broken in 11.2 so I made a VM) and have 3 user shares in FreeNAS. I don't think it will be useful for Plex since the VM needs the cache in it's VM drive not the FreeNAS drive.

on a 1gb network and no iSCSI/NFS shares, I don't see a SLOG/ZIL device being useful. Even then you would just partition out maybe 20-60gb of the SSD and maybe another 100 for l2arc to get the most out of your SSD.

 

However using the SSD as a normal vdev in a pool, mapping it to plex, then storing transcodes on there - would be useful if you're going to transcode multiple 1080 streams.

[Turretgaming]

2 hours ago, Mikensan said:

on a 1gb network and no iSCSI/NFS shares, I don't see a SLOG/ZIL device being useful. Even then you would just partition out maybe 20-60gb of the SSD and maybe another 100 for l2arc to get the most out of your SSD.

 

However using the SSD as a normal vdev in a pool, mapping it to plex, then storing transcodes on there - would be useful if you're going to transcode multiple 1080 streams.

I think I'll save $50 then and grab another 2tb drive as a hotspare since one of my old 2tb drives is failing smart (temps report once and a while and has 5 bad sectors) since my server hadn't been shut down in a year the drives didn't seem to like it. So $100 for a SSD or a hotspare for the drive that has a foot in the grave. Gonna protect my data since I'm not home a lot and I don't want it to fail and me not get back in time to swap it out and rebuild the data.

[Turretgaming]

Correction I think it just died while moving 40gb of TV shows to my Plex Windows VM (move to file on server share from main rig then from the VM move it to the partition data disk for Plex to see) cause the transfer stopped and the web gui won't load any disk data and errors out when selecting pools 

[Jarsky]

not a good sign, but yeah an SSD is fairly pointless on a 1Gbit network unless you're doing a lot of Random I/O which you wouldnt really be doing with a media server. So yup definately invest in the hdd's rather than ssd's. 

[Turretgaming]

11 hours ago, Jarsky said:

not a good sign, but yeah an SSD is fairly pointless on a 1Gbit network unless you're doing a lot of Random I/O which you wouldnt really be doing with a media server. So yup definately invest in the hdd's rather than ssd's. 

well the disk did fail out right and the volume is degraded so I've shut down the system again and will wait till next Friday when I get my commission check and but a replacement drive and a hot spare. what where the odds it failed so fast. I guess near a year of up time then being shut down wasn't the best for the drive but its a seagate barracuda (All my drives are this one here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01IEKG402/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1) so it should be good for more than just a year of uptime and a few terabytes of read and writes.