Can you expand Raidz?

OpenZFS founding developer Matthew Ahrens opened a PR for one of the most sought-after features in ZFS history—RAIDz expansion—last week. The new feature allows a ZFS user to expand the size of a single RAIDz vdev. For example, you can use the new feature to turn a three-disk RAIDz1 into a four, five, or six RAIDz1.

How do you expand your pool in Raidz?

There’s another way to expand on a raidz:

1. Pull out a drive and insert a newer, larger capacity drive.
2. Replace the “failed” drive with this new drive, and resilver it.
3. Repeat until you have replaced all drives.
4. Turn on autoexpand so the pool will take up the new capacity.

How do I expand my ZFS pool?

Once all disks in a vdev are replaced by larger ones, you can expand the pool by running zpool online -e or by having the autoexpand property set to on (though I wouldn’t really recommend the latter; pool expansion should be a conscious decision).

Can you expand FreeNAS pool?

The OpenZFS team loves to tease easy expansions but, even now 3 years later, you still cannot live expand a FreeNAS ZFS Storage Pool. Basically you replace every drive sequentially with a larger drive and then ZFS will automatically make the pool larger when every drive is replaced.

Is ZFS better than RAID?

ZFS is an awesome file system that offers you way better data integrity protection than other file system + RAID solution combination.

Is ZFS better than ext4?

ZFS may be the best-known enterprise-grade transactional file system to use storage pools to manage physical storage space. ZFS supports advanced file systems and can manage data long term whereas ext4 cannot.

How do you add a disk in ZFS pool?

To add a new virtual device to a pool, use the zpool add command. Note – With zpool add –n, you can perform a dry run before actually adding devices. In the following example, a mirror is added to a ZFS configuration that consists of two top-level mirrored devices.

Which is better FreeNAS or UnRAID?

When to Use FreeNAS and UnRAID Our take is that FreeNAS is the better solution for those seeking traditional RAID with a tried and true volume manager/file system, while UnRAID is better if you’re seeking maximum capacity for non-critical data sets.

What is a ZFS pool?

Instead of forcing you to create virtualized volumes, ZFS aggregates devices into a storage pool. The storage pool describes the physical characteristics of the storage (device layout, data redundancy, and so on) and acts as an arbitrary data store from which file systems can be created.

Is ZFS faster than RAID?

If you carefully test RAIDz2 versus RAID6, the first thing that stands out is just how fast the writes are. Even sync writes, which you might intuitively expect to be slower on ZFS—since they must often be “double-committed,” once to ZIL and once again to main storage—are significantly faster than they were on mdraid6.

How reliable is ZFS?

ZFS is a highly reliable filesystem which uses checksumming to verify data and metadata integrity with on-the-fly repairs. It uses fletcher4 as the default algorithm for non-deduped data and sha256 for deduped data.

Can you make a second RaidZ pool in ZFS?

You can add a second group of 4 disks to the original pool. (Adding a new vdev in ZFS terms). The new vdev should ideally be the same type as the first, so if you first 4 disks are set as raidz1, the next four should be as well. You can make a new, independent pool out of the new disks.

How can I increase the size of my RaidZ pool?

When they have all been replaced the size of the pool should increase. You can add a second group of 4 disks to the original pool. (Adding a new vdev in ZFS terms). The new vdev should ideally be the same type as the first, so if you first 4 disks are set as raidz1, the next four should be as well.

Can you add a second group of disks to a RaidZ pool?

You can add a second group of 4 disks to the original pool. (Adding a new vdev in ZFS terms). The new vdev should ideally be the same type as the first, so if you first 4 disks are set as raidz1, the next four should be as well.

Can you add a hard drive to a ZFS pool?

So it’s important to understand that a ZFS pool itself is not fault-tolerant. If you lose a single VDEV within a pool, you lose the whole pool. You lose the pool, all data is lost. Now it’s very important to understand that you cannot add hard drives to a VDEV. This is the key limitation of ZFS as seen from the perspective of home NAS builders.