For the last several years I’ve had a storage shelf attached to my home server supporting roughly 30TB of redundant storage making use of ZFS, which I’ve been quite pleased with. I use it to store all my various media, and back up all of my other computers to it. As part of my backup scheme I also back up some of the data from the array to a remote array in another location.
Unfortunately as the years have passed the data stored has grown and the array has been nearing full for quite some time. I’ve put off expanding the array as there’s always more pressing/interesting things to spend project money on, and a bit of a battle with myself about *really* needing more than 30TB of storage.
Finally a deal came along on disks that was too good to resist, and I ordered twelve more 6TB disks to complement the eight I had already. As is always the way it goes, this also necessitated changing out the storage shelf I had to accommodate the additional disks as well. Fortunately a friend was swapping some of their storage hardware at the same time and had some HP D2600 storage shelves they gave to me for a good price.
Racking up two of them, and plugging them in to my HBA was pretty quick and painless. After which comes installing all the drives, and configuring the ZFS pools.
With only a minor hiccup, in that ZFS needs the same level of redundancy for each sub-pool, I couldn’t add the new twelve disks as a new sub-pool to the existing eight. I needed to create a new, separate, ten disk pool, move the data over, destroy the old pool, and create a new sub-pool with the original eight plus the two left over from the twelve. With all that done I’ve now got a bit more than 80TB usable space and plenty of room for growth so I can forget about it for the next few years.