Addring Drives to Pool Later

[CrypticCodex]

Long story short I've been shucking drives and 5 of the 8 had no issues... The other 3 I can't seem to get working for the life of me. I've tried Kapton tape and cleaning the partitions on Windows with Diskpart in cmd. It's a mix of WD EasyStore and Elements, if that matters to anyone.

 

I'm tired and want to start transferring data overnight so it's close to being done in the morning. I've read that it's OK to expand and add drives later with ZFS if the drives are the same capacity. Is that still true even when I add three drives to the 5 that work?

 

Thanks for your help!

[dinecoj]

If you start with two drives you can't nicely expand the pool via HexOS, but can probably drop and recreate the pool with the third drive later on. Not sure if/how data would be retained

[PsychoWards]

Data will not be retained when creating a new pool. With 2 drives Hexos will only give you the option to have a mirrored setup, with 3+ drives Hexos will create a RaidZ1. There is currently no way to expand a mirrored to a RaidZ1 pool and I highly doubt that this will ever be possible.

If you have a 2 drive mirrored pool and want to extend it, you need to backup all your data, create a new RaidZ1 pool (with all your drives) and if you want to add more drives in the future you can then do it.

[Joe4evr]

  On 1/5/2025 at 9:21 PM, markrieder said:

I heard that Raidz1 can also be created with 2 disks.

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Whoever told you that is wrong., Z1 requires a minimum of 3 drives,

[Mawson]

That should be totally fine!

[markrieder]

What if I only have 2 drives and later want to add another 2? If I start with 2 disks, Hex automatically selects the mirror option to which I cannot add additional disks. So you recommend to start 2 drives RAIDz1 to which I can already add another 2 drives? RAIDz1 is built for 3 disks, but I heard that it also works with 2 disks. Of course, I will have to do it through TrueNAS because Hex does not have these functions displayed in the UX, but these functions are in the background.

[markrieder]

I don't have a mirror created. It was just a consideration that with 2 disks, Hex will offer me only a mirror, but I need a RAIDz1 with 2 disks so that I can expand later. Everything is just a test and we are not supposed to transfer any data, that's what the developers said because it's a beta version and not a fully functional OS.

[markrieder]

That's not what I meant. I heard that Raidz1 can also be created with 2 disks. It would be better if I want to add more disks later.

Edited January 5 by markrieder