What I currently have:
I built a media server using 6x 8TB HDDs (Western Digital Red NAS drives). I also have a “Western Digital 500GB WD Blue SN550 NVMe Internal SSD - Gen3 x4 PCIe 8Gb/s, M.2 2280, 3D NAND” SSD which is the “boot-pool” essentially running the OS. This server is running TrueNAS Core 13.0, and these 6x 8TB drives (which are 48TB total) are raided using RAID-Z1. These disks are part of a pool that we will call “komrad”. This pool has a total capacity of roughly 34.5 TB. I am near full capacity.
What I want to have:
I purchased an additional 2x 8TB HDDs (same as the others, Western Digital Red NAS drives). I want to expand the capacity of this pool by (hopefully) 16TB total. I already connected these drives to the available bays and SATA ports in my server. The new disks are already appearing in the TrueNAS UI, but they are currently not assigned to any pools.
I’m trying to add these to the pool, so I go to Storage > Pool and I click on the option to “Add Vdevs”
On the next page, I attempt to add these two new HDDs to the Data VDevs.
But when I try this, I get the following issues:
“This type of VDEV requires at least 3 disks” and “Caution: Addint data vdevs with differnet numbers of disks is not recommended. First vdev has 6 disks, new vdev has 2.”
Not only does it not let me do it, but it’s saying I would only get ~8TB out of it (rather than my expected or hoped for 16 TB).
What should I do to expand my storage? I suppose the worst case scenario is I would have to destroy the pool completely and re-build it and re-create the raid-z1 using 8x 8TB from scratch. However, to do that I would have to lose all my data, and to avoid that, I would have to somehow be able to back up like 34TB of data. Is this my only option? If so, how would you recommend I find a 34+TB backup storage solution?
Is there anything else I can do to expand my storage here? Is creating a new and entirely separate pool the only other thing I can do? If I do that, would I be able to set up a way to continue adding to my data in the “komrad” pool and have it spill over to the new pool once “komrad” is full?
How would I be able to expand my Z1 with one drive at a time, is there a way to do that?
What are all my options? What should I do?