Hello to all Proxmox wizards 🧙‍♂️

I recently started my journey from ditching Synology and going Proxmox.

I had Proxmox VE 8 and now I upgraded to 9.

For starters I created a ZFS RAIDZ2 pool of 4x Samsung 990 EVO Plus 2 TB (nvme). This is much more than enough storage for VMs and LXCs, I needed a fast and snappy storage for databases, and all other things running on the thing. I have also "enabled" monthly zpool scrubs.

Now I want to also do a tank volume; ZFS RAIDZ2 - 5x 24TB Seagate EXOS; to store media files for Plex and other files that don't need high speed and snappy responses (school stuff, work documents,...)

My question is... let's say down the road I would like to pop another HDD to the tank volume to expand it. On Synology this is simple to achieve, since I use basic RAID6, but as I was looking around ZFS it seems to be a pain in the ass or even impossible to expand an existing volume (before the raidz_expansion).

I noticed that the latest Proxmox Backup 4 offers "live RAIDZ expansion" and I also upgraded the zpool of my nvmes and it said that it enabled the "raidz_expansion" flag.

Since I haven't purchased the HDDs yet I would like to hear your advice on how to implement such a tank volume with future expansions in mind and to prevent my dumbness from costing me time and my nerves?

Also how does typically a zpool expansion work? Do I just pop a new disk in and run a command and everything gets handled or is there some more manual work? How "safe" is the expansion operation if something fails during?

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Specs of my Proxmox

* I am planning on upgrading memory to 128 GB when adding HDD tank volume; allocating 64 GB of RAM to ARC (I hope it will be okay since the tank volume will store mostly media files for plex and other files that don't need a super high IOPS or read/write)

Thank you in advance for your help 😄

https://github.com/kneutron/ansitest/blob/master/ZFS/zpool-expand-raidz-example.sh

Until raidz expansion lands in a stable ZFS release, you need to add another vdev properly (same number and size of disks) to balance the pool.

Please test and provide feedback, the code is commented.

Hey guys, I'm quite new to zfs and mass storage of data in general. I am hoping posting here will help both me and other newbs like me in the future. I have a basic setup: a 10TB drive with all my data on it, and 2x 10TB brand new drives in my 5-bay home NAS. The idea is for me to start as cheaply as possible and expand my data storage capabilities over time. I was going to start with Z1 across the 2 new drives, transfer my files from the old 10TB data drive to the new pool, format and add the 10TB itself to the pool, and add 2 more drives to the pool next year as my storage requirements increase over time. What is the state of RAIDZ expansion in 2024? I've read the GitHub PR, the GitHub general discussion, and many how-to articles and watched many tutorials on how to do it, but OpenZFS documentation seems to still behind on this topic. Will pool expansion result in data loss? Will parity be inferior to a pool set up as a 5-drive pool from the start? Can I really start out using zfs with one vdev 2 drives 1 parity and scale that to 50 drives 1 parity? Thanks.

I hope I have all my terminology correct. I knew what I was talking about when I set this up, a year later and I'm a little rusty

I have a raidz2 vdev in a zfs pool made up of 5 16tb exos drives. I am in need of additional storage space in the same vdev. I only have the means to add a few drives, and one at a time most likely.

I know this feature has been right around the corner for a while:

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/12225

It seems to be in beta now! My data is not so mission critical that I need to await full integration, I can try the beta.
Is it as simple as running zpool attach POOL raidzP-N NEW_DEVICE?
Am I missing anything?
Any warnings I should heed?

Hello, I'm currently setting up my first home-built NAS server. Moving from two QNAP boxes to a custom build. I'm a photographer and store all my photos on the NAS, for processing and working on in Lightroom.

(14gen i3, 32GB ram, 250GB M.2 for the OS, and a 4-6 Ironwolf drives for storage, TrueNAS Scale 24.04).

I'm trying to plan for future expansion. I'm considering a Raidz2 instead of Raidz1 for increased redundancy, but trying to figure out how frustrating it will be in the future to add storage.

Right now I have 4x 8TB Ironwolf drives, and my understanding is that I could make a RAIDz1 with storage space of ~20TB, or I could make them a RAIDz2 with ~14TB of space. But I know I will need more storage in the future. For instance, I will probably want to have a 5x 8TB RAIDz2 with ~20TB of storage within a year. I'd rather wait for a year to buy another hard drive if possible.

I'm getting conflicting information online about this. Most people seem to say that it's impossible to just add another disk to a RAIDz2 array without wiping all the data and starting again. But this page seems to imply that it is possible to add one disk to make a 4x8TB RAIDz2 to a 5x8TB RAIDz2: https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/scaletutorials/storage/managepoolsscale/

Can someone please help me understand if this is possible? Thank you!