I started with 4x 4TB HDDs in a RAIDZ2 about 2 yrs ago on an old PC and I quickly ran out of space a few months down the road. The snapshots of my backups were taking up most of the space.
So I bought another 4x 4TB, a PC IT mode HBA, some 3.5″ adapter brackets, and molex splitter-adapters for SATA power, and finally installed every tonight. Physical install took the longest… having to remove the power connector for the motherboard, all four DIMMs to install the drives in various remaining bays that in retrospect probably weren’t meant for hard drives.
After everything installed… I have a total of 15.17TiB from 8x 4TB drives.
Mixed feelings really. Relieved I’m no longer living at 95%+ full. Disappointed I’m nowhere near 32TB which admittedly is a false expectation due to marketing math 1000 vs 1024 and RAIDz2.
I guess by my math I could have a theoretical max of around 20TiB usable if i were able to run a single RAIDz2 vdev instead of two. Since I have two RAIDz2 vdevs I lose 4 drives to parity.
You’d think there would be a way to grow the existing RAIDz2 vdev but nope. I hope dRAID support comes soon as that seems to do what I think I want.
Makes a lot more sense to have 6 data drives and 2 parity, instead of 4 and 4.
Sorry for the rant/speech. I’m sure ppl who know this already knew this years ago. I didn’t find this out until after I had built my freenas and loaded it with data. And ppl that didn’t know this probably wouldn’t ever care to know.
Ending on a positive note… the drives and available space seemingly came online immediately with no delay whatsoever!
Still running Freenas 11. I think I’ll upgrade after a few days of this being stable.