Adding drives in Freenas

bugeyewrx · 10 Jun 2011 at 16:42

I've set up a server for streaming media to my HTPC and for general storage for my windows PC . It's an old Dell running Freenas and has a 500gb drive already installed .

I've got a 2tb drive to add and was just going to add it with the same volume name as the existing 500gb disk to create a single 2.5tb volume to keep thing simple when accessing the server from the pc's .

Not have had anything to do with servers before I wanted to know if this is the right approach or should I be keeping the drives as individual volumes ?

The other thought I had about this was about backup ...I plan to get an external 2tb usb drive and back up to that , adding extra internal and external usb drives as needed . Is the overlap in drive capacities just asking for problems ?

Skidilliplop · 15 Jun 2011 at 13:21

Spanning volumes over asymmetric disk sizes won't cause any problems as such. It just won't give you any real benefits. So you may as well just leave them separate.
The only benefit I can think of is if you need a directory larger than 500GB JBOD'ing them would make this easier. Else there's no real benefit.
If they were the same size you could RAID them to give either redundancy or a performance boost.

I'd probably say getting another 2TB drive and making them RAID1 is better than just using it for backup over USB (provided you backup the freenas config - which includes the RAID config - through the web interface to somewhere safe. Incase you need to re-install or update freenas.

bugeyewrx · 18 Jun 2011 at 12:23

Thanks for the reply Skidilliplop .... sort of came to the same conclusions , more based on the whole keep it simple sort of idea .

I'm a bit unsure about backing up using RAID incase something major takes out both drives .

I realised I can set up another server at work and back up my server at home to the off site one .... no idea of where to start on that though .

Skidilliplop · 20 Jun 2011 at 11:18

RAID isn't backup. RAID is resiliency, stopping a single component failure losing data. If the data you're storing is vitally important you should have a physically separate if not geographically separate backup.