Just watched this and wanted clarification - I always though that if you had a selection of say, 4 x 320GB drives in a RAIDZ2, replaced one with a 500GB and then thought you might as well replace the others with 500GB, once all of them had been changed to the larger capacity, you would be able to utilize all of the 500GB capacity?
So to put it another way, you start a pool with 4 x 320GB
You then replace all drives with 500GB capacity drives
Only once you had replaced all of them, would you gain the extra space.
Is that wrong as I would be keen to know - not because I’m planning for that situation, but it might generally be helpful to know.
It’s a tedious process as you have to wait for each drive to resilver before replacing the next one. I might do a video on it to show the process but I did not want to do get too far out of scope in that particular video.
This is how I upgraded my 3x500GB RaidZ to a 3x10TB RaidZ. Aside from the long resilvering process, it does indeed work.
Unfortunately I named the original pool name as “RaidZ3x500GB” which was now incorrect. Thankfully it is possible to rename a pool, though I’ve never tested this.
Update: I tried this and it broke my pool. See this new thread I made on the topic.
Thank you @chris@LTS_Tom & @edisondotme , much appreciated. I was a bit concerned though do appreciate Tom needs to do bite sized videos and outline info about everything can’t be included! I would say it’s a good plan to replace each failed/old hard drive with a higher capacity when it happens, and of course if money permitted.
I’m still running my test setup, it’s been 9 months now and the only issues I have are with Plex, not FreeNAS it self (yes, soon I’ll dip my toe in TrueNAS!).
