Hi, i have a zfs mirror of 4TB drives and i want to add a third 4TB drive. Is it possible to turn zfs mirror to raid z1 without loosing my data?

Update:

so i know i cant turn a mirror to a z1 but how hard is it to add drives to raid z1? for example from 3 to 4

Hi guys! I almost finished my home NAS and now choosing the best topology for the main data pool. For now I have 4 HDDs, 10 Tb each. For the moment raidz1 with a single vdev seems the best choice but considering the possibility of future storage expansion and the ability to expand the pool I also consider a 2 vdev raidz1 configuration. If I understand correctly, this gives more iops/write speed. So my questions on the matter are:

1. If now I build a raidz1 with 2 vdevs 2 disks wide (getting around 17.5 TiB of capacity) and somewhere in the future I buy 2 more drives of the same capacity, will I be able to expand each vdev to width of 3 getting about 36 TiB?

2. If the answer to the first question is “Yes, my dude”, will this work with adding only one drive to one of the vdevs in the pool so one of them is 3 disks wide and another one is 2? If not, is there another topology that allows something like that? Stripe of vdevs?

I used zfs for some time but only as a simple raidz1, so not much practical knowledge was accumulated. The host system is truenas, if this is important.

Scenario...(I assume 3+ drives is going to be required for this scenario, not 2)...

I have 3 individual ZFS drives/partitions, which would be three vdev's.

Is it possible to pool the three drives/vdev's into a single pool without destroying the data?

I'm thinking of beginning my ZFS journey one step at a time, and wanted to start with individual ZFS drives/vdevs first. Then later, as I know more, plan more, buy more drives, then create the ZFS pool for full RAIDZ protection.

If not capable now, will the upcoming RAIDZ expansion have the capability of merging drives into a new pool, without data loss?

Or is ZFS storage planning set in stone? And I better know what I want, because there's no way to change the storage?

Hello, I am going to migrate from synology for good. I am doing a research on hardware, NAS software. I will upgrada my disks to larger ones but new disk will cost as much as or more than the hardware.

One of my biggest gripe with Truenas is upfront cost of forcefully buying all disks initially as far as I know. To the best of my knowledge disk can not be added to previously created vdevs. New vdevs must be created. Large disks are very very expensive. I usually buy a machine with lots of slots, and setup up the machine with raid 5 with 3 disks, add more disks when I have budget and need and convert to raid 6 in time. Synology gives this opportunity with SHR. Normal linux raid structures as well.

One of the comments that I received to a question about Truenas that it can now extend the vdevs.

Is this capability currently available? It there a gotcha, restriction that I need to know. How is the reliability of this new feature if it truely exists?

So I am currently building my Ugreen nasync dxp4800(4 possible bays) and while I got my ssds ready, I still need some HDDs. However my setup was already quite expensive and I want to start with 2 or 3 HDDs and add the rest later. How easy is it to add a drive later and add it to an existing pool and is this already possible in proxmox? Which raid level would you recommend?

If I start off with 3x 2tb drives and when those fill up can I put another 2tb drive in to add to the array?

I have created my zpool with raidz1 vdev using 3 disks and i thought i could easily expand over time. Now my drives are nearly full and i found out unfortunately that i can't simply add a disk to existing vdev. I have seen many posts that expanding vdev is in the works. Should i keep my extra drive as a spare until an upgrade comes?

Or can you recommend me another filesystem that i can easily expand over the time similar to what i had in qnap before converting to zfs.

Please note i am currently using the zfs filesystem bundled with proxmox