Adding a disk to pool
Added by Tom Vaughan about 1 year ago
I was under the impression that I would be able to use the "Grow" option to add a new disk to an existing pool. I am currently trying to do this but Nexentastor will not let me. I have 5 1TB disks set up as RAID Z1. I am trying to add a 6th 1TB disk. After doing some research I think what "Grow" really means is that you can add another raid set to an existing pool. So if I wanted to grow my current pool of 5 1TB disks I would have to add another set of 5 1TB disks to our san making a total of 10 disks. Is this correct? Or is it possible to add a single new disk to an existing pool?
Replies
RE: Adding a disk to pool - Added by Roman Strashkin about 1 year ago
You cannot grow "RAIDZn" pool. You can extend it by adding new "RAIDZn" vdev-group.
GROW operation for existing "RAIDZn" pool equal to RECREATE operation.
RE: Adding a disk to pool - Added by Jason Litka about 1 year ago
Expanding a vdev has been a major item on the list of most home and SMB users for years but unfortunately it hasn't been done. Most of Sun's enterprise customers add disks in large groups, not one or two at a time, so adding another vdev to an existing pool isn't typically an issue, therefore making that (complicated) enhancement request a very low priority.
This would have been of a lot of value to me last year when hard drives were in short supply. I was putting together a system with 12 disks and had to buy them 1, 2 or 3 at a time due to supply issues with the particular model I was buying. It took me around a month to get all the drives in and that delayed the project. With the ability to grow a vdev I could have started as soon as I had 4 (I wanted raidz2, performance wasn't important, capacity and resilience was).