Switching from a Stripe Setup to one with Redundancy

[Mathew]

Hello,

When I originally setup my Nas4Free I only had the money for 2 hard drives. At that time maximizing storage was the most important thing so I setup a Stripe VFS virtual device. Now, I am going to soon be adding 2 more hard drives and and would love to have some redundancy. What is the easiest way to switch from a stripe setup to one with redundancy, and what is the best setup? I will have 4 X 3Tb drives in my system. I would also like to add that I would like to have a setup that would make further expansion relatively simple if I need to add again down the road. Thank you guys in advance for your help!

[crowi]

Hi Mathew,

no way to go from stripe to redundancy the easy way, you need at least one copy/backup of your stripe pool.

At 4 drives you can choose to go to two mirrors (2x2 HDD) in one VDEV or to use RAIDZ1 (4 HDDs with one used for redundancy).

I'd recommend to use RAIDZ1.

Backup your data, clear the config, install the 4 HDDs, create a RAIDZ1 VDEV/Pool of all four HDDs, fill it with the backuped data, ready.

Later on you can add other VDEVs to this Pool or exchange step by step your HDDs with biger ones.

Good luck,

Crowi

[Mathew]

Thank you for your reply! I think the best way for me to do it then probably is to move all my files over to external drives and then move it all back over. I will start that process tonight while I am waiting on my new drives to arrive from NewEgg. Thank you for your reply!