Expanding a pool

Hello,

I hadn’t really thought it would be an issue to expand the pool when I first created it as its also pretty large. It seems I can’t just add disks to the existing pool. So I am a little worried if its possible to do and how to do it.
I am running TrueNAS-12.0-U8.1.
If I understand correctly from what I’ve read , the only way is to create another vdev and this can be added to the existing pool’s space ? So extend the 60tb to lets say 90 tb ?

This server already has 6 x 16TB drives on z2.
This server has 4 last available slot’s for disks. So I can add up to 4 x 16TB on z2 in order to add it to the group if I understand correctly on how it must be done ?

Is there any other way ? Thanks for your help in advance.

The latest version of TrueNAS, TrueNAS Scale Electric Eel which is now in Beta supports RaidZ expansion.

There are some caveats, for best data usage you will want to rebalance your data, but that would allow you to add extra disks to your existing RaidZ2 vdev.

Thus, if I were you, I’d start by upgrading to TrueNAS Core 13.0, and then begin you migration to TrueNAS Scale Dragon Fish (24.04), and by the time you finish that, you should be able to migrate to Electric Eel in October, when the new expansion feature is released.

Hello,

In the past , I had some pretty bad experience by jumping train on the Freenas (back then), from one train to another. I would prefer to upgrade to 13 and onwards to 22 but not sure if everything will work.
Also I have a vm on bhyve running on 12 and I think I read some pretty big issues with users who upgraded to 13.

Is it completely stable (trouble free) to ugprade in your opinion from 12 to 13 now or not yet ?

Thanks

13.0 is extremely stable… much better than 12.0

You can always add drives as a whole vdev… can you do that?