Hey c/Selfhosting, I’m finally dipping my toes into creating a NAS for my household, after saving up funds for awhile. Hopefully this is an okay place to ask a dumb question:
Is it possible to gradually add drives to a NAS while maintaining a RAID array?
I’m about to pull the trigger on an aoostar WTR Pro (4 bay), but budget will only allow for 2x 4tb drives to start off with. I’m wanting to do RAID1 for data redundancy, but eventually I’d want to add another 2x 4tb drives to get to 8tb of RAID1. Is this possible without having to copy out all the data from the NAS? Would I have to start the initial setup as RAID10 instead of RAID1? I wouldn’t mind doing trial and error with it if storage wasn’t so expensive down here in NZ, and the whole household’s data is going to be on it. Thanks for any guidance in advance
Context: Currently the plan is to either go with the 4 bay or 2 bay R1 pro with the Intel N150, install TrueNAS, Immich and Jellyfin, pretty lightweight stuff (I hope). Trying to keep it around NZD1000.
It’s way too late at night for me to give an in-depth answer, but I just wanted to let you know that if you plan on adding drives over time, you might want to check out running the disks in JBOD instead of RAID and the use ZFS to create the storage volume. Redundancy supported, and you can add disks whenever you need more space. The disks don’t even have to be the same size.
Agreeing with this, expanding a RAID array is not necessarily impossible, with something like RAID 5, and the right RAID setup, you could theoretically add an identical disk without wiping it all in the rebuild. RAID 1, you’ll 100% need to copy the data somewhere that isn’t the 2/4 disks in the meantime. In an environment where storage is expensive, RAID 1 is not suitable imo.
ZFS makes it so easy though. Throw a mismatched disk in? No big deal, it’s in your pool now. Want double parity for extra peace of mind? You can do that. It self-heals so you don’t need fsck, its maximum limits are too big to realistically matter on human scales, and the documentation on it is pretty good.