Zfs mixed drive sizes I'm now up to a mix of around 55 drives, still plenty of 6TB, a few 10's, 12's, 16's and maybe 7 or 8 18's. How data, reads and writes are distributed across drives with mixed sizes. --This depends on the size of your vdevs and the size of your pool. com/watch?v=11bWnvCwTOUTrueNAS Scale 24. This operation will result in replacing those, one at a time, with the new drives, which is a relatively quick and easy operation. but now, I’m considering ZFS. 10 Documentati @Jan-PhilipGehrcke Yes. At least I can gpart them to achieve the same size. It is also advised that one should use preferably different vendors or models from different production dates. Nov 24, 2024 · Yes, ZFS can handle mixed drive sizes. Single Disk Size(TB): The Size in Terrabytes of a single disk. Different drives have different strengths and weaknesses. unRAID uses a proprietary “data protection” method, where it uses the XFS filesystem, adheres it across multiple drives, and then saves recovery/parity information on the dedicated parity drive. The other raidz options have to re-stripe all the data across all the drives when you replace a failed disk, so it’s a lot more stressful on the drives. I would do a stripe of mirrors of the 1TB's, another of the 500GB, and a mirror of the 750GBs. " and the create button is grayed Do note that the data you already have in the pool will not re-shuffle itself across the vdevs when you add a new one, if your current vdev is almost out of space, adding a new raidz1 vdev to the pool will mean that new data will be mostly going to that, up until the point the available free space on both vdevs becomes close. But what about having disks from different Asking because one of the 4TB drives is in active use and I don't want to pull it out of my main PC if I can expect/suspect issues. Usable Storage Size: With your configuration, this would be the achievable storage size Got a bunch of spare drives and want a single volume with some redundancy? I take a look at 4 different software RAID solutions and compare the speed, usage We subtract this 4. Or even 2 pairs of 6TB drives in 2 Mirrored vDevs. AnyRaid-mirror: 12TB Usable Space. This in turn gives you a pool Of 3 vdev's. That’s 104 TB. ) ZFS and mixed drives sizes for a mirrored stripe arrayHelpful? Please support me on Patreon: https://www. I would like to have data redundancy somehow. Not good. They could even be different sizes, but ideally you want them they same to be able to use the max size of the largest disk. Number of RAID groups - the number of top-level vdevs in the pool. May 7, 2025 · Mixing drives of different sizes in a ZFS RAID setup is possible, but it comes with certain considerations. Correct me if I'm wrong but this sounds like you are trying to use zfs pools as the main array. ZFS: Drives with mixed capacities. Add the SSD's to the desired array(s) as desired (recommendations already in this thread). I partition them in 6TB increments, and leave any "leftovers" for my scratch pool. Potential pool HW: 3x 4tb TLC Crucial MX drives, 1x 4tb TLC Samsung EVO, 1x 4tb QLC Samsung QVO, 1x Silicon Power A55 (unknown NAND) . Dec 16, 2021 · One thing about the sizes of the devices: ZFS will expand. I'd like to migrate to Ubuntu and ZFS, but not quite sure what is possible with ZFS. Outputs. Then I can use raidz-1 with 2*4TB + 1TB(partition). But with drive capacity getting larger, you don't want to go too wide on your RAIDZ2 vdev either because of the time it will take to resilver a drive. A single vdev with all your drives would be 5*5 TB. Apr 13, 2017 · I am planning on setting up a FreeNAS ZFS pool using two 2 tb drives and two 1tb drives. Nov 27, 2017 · For example could I add a seven drive RaidZ3 of 2TB drives to the same pool as the 8TB drives? This pool will be mainly for Plex media storage. com/roelvandepaarWith thanks & praise to Go Aug 13, 2023 · Each vdev is responsible for its own redundancy, and each disk in the vdev must store the same amount of data. Any actions you perform after watchi Oct 16, 2014 · Using zpool iostats shows that even while some of the old devices are 90% full and the new ones only 50% full, writes are equally distributed between all devices, indipendently from the free % or space of every drive. For example, storage is as if every drive were the capacity of the smallest drive in the RAID group. Sep 5, 2024 · Create a single zfs pool with a single raidz2 pool using 4 or all 5 drives. You could put your 3x1TB into a RAIDZ1 and get 2TB available storage space from that, and put the 2TB drive on its own and use it to store backups or other data that doesn't need redundant protection, for a total of 4TB of storage space. TrueNAS Community RAIDZ expansion, best method when increasing disks and replacing with larger ZFS on 2 differently sized drives - for dummies - Dennis Lee Sep 19, 2017 · I want to create a RAID (actually a zfs raidz) with disks from different manufactures. Unraid made a lot of sense for me because I have many drives of different sizes. I want to combine all of these in the NAS If you can partition drives into a divisible factor, anything is possible with zfs with proper planning. I would like to be able to use ZFS because it sounds amazing but i would also like to be able to use hard drives of differing sizes in my NAS. Nov 11, 2020 · Im going to build my first (i stand corrected, second) NAS and i need help choosing the right software. Does ZFS use that extra 2tb at all? You should not mix drives of different sizes in a vdev or zpool. 2*20 TB + 2*5 TB (mirrors) is possible (25 TB)… but the 20 TB part is somewhat risky due to the large size of the drives. Now you have a mirror of 1TB drives. After the summer I plan to buy two more 22Tb drives. However : you still need to keep track of disks, the resilvering process could take hours to days, and resilvering happens for each drive replaced. 5MiB) of space from the ZFS partition to get its "usable" size: 17997852311552 - 4 * 262144 - 3670016 = 17997847592960 bytes. You replace one drive with a 1TB drive, ZFS will resilver, then you replace the other 500GB drive with 1TB drive, ZFS resilvers. patreon. Raw Storage: The sum of all Drives. With performance, it is a similar Sep 8, 2020 · Looking for info on combining different size drives in a vdev and using all of each of the drives space, while still maintaining parity; say a vdev of 10 4TB drives and 2 10TB drives in Z2, and having, well, some amount more than 40TB of formate usable space. The options you presented don't meet my needs unfortunately. The remainder becomes a third vdev. We simply multiply the usable ZFS partition size by the vdev width here. May 22, 2025 · The AnyRaid-Z1 feature will apply the same concepts of ZFS RAID-Z1, but while supporting mixed size disks. The vdev will be limited by the smallest drive at vdev creation, with space expansion possible only when the limiting drive has been replaced with a larger one. ZFS will only use the size of the smallest disk in a given vdev. If you mix disks of different speeds, disk writes will only go as fast as the slowest disk. Mirrored vdev's is essentially taking two drives that are mirrored making a vdev. Those two disks are WD Red 3TB 7200 rpm. I'd like to buy 2x 6TB drives, to use in a mirrored configuration. Jul 21, 2024 · This is less of a feature request and more of a "what are the odds that this ever happens", but here goes: I'm sure plenty of unRAID users love the ability to upgrade drive slots piecemeal, and run an array with multiple different drive sizes. Group widths - ZFS can support all possible group widths (greater than or equal to the physical disk count). Adding additional disks or replacing disks with large ones is easy (though you do typically have to stop the array for a short time to do so). Apr 16, 2014 · Hi Everybody, I know that RAIDZ vdev should consist of the disks of the same size. There are numerous ways, one could be to partition the drives and create a mirrored vdev (if that is the intention of your combining) out of a 1,5 TB partition of your 2 TB drive and the 1,5 TB drive. 1 vdev of (6) drives is going to be fairly easy if the drive size isn't terribly big, say ~2TB-8TB/ea. Oct 22, 2023 · I understand for ZFS you have to pretty much use the same capacity drives in a vdev because it will only see the smallest drive. 12 is only for cache pools, you cannot create zpools in the main array. For example, if you mix drives of different sizes within a vdev, the usable storage space will be the size of the smallest constituent disk. raidz to cheap out on disks needed) May 3, 2024 · When using drives of different sizes in the same vdev, the smallest size is applied to all drives. In the QNAP I can mix disks of differing sizes in a RAID5 (in my case I have 2 x 3TB drives and 2 x 4TB drives), on the understanding that the RAID array will be limited by the size of the smallest disk - so I lose 2TB of raw capacity. I know you can do this with zfs or raid0 with two of the same size drives but I was told by someone that I could combine these into one storage using lvm or something? I usually suggest that all drives be the same brand and some kind within a RAID group. (Disk reads will be constrained by the slowest disk, too, but the performance there might be variable. net/pricing?via=nascompares-summerGet yourself an UnRAID License HERE - https://unraid. (Three drives gives you two drives of usable space, five drives gives you 4 drives of usable space, etc. In the video, you lose 1 of the 12 TB drives and you’ve degraded ALL 4 vdevs. How shall I setup my system? Feb 21, 2020 · Hi Guys, Newb here to freeNAS. The excess of the 12TB drives goes into a vdev with the 4TB solo drives. Since this isn't the best method, I really wanted to start using omv on a rp5 that I had leftover from a different project. Here Be Data-Eating Dragons. 3. In my case I have a mirror of two drives: one with 3TB and the other with 4TB, so the vdev is 3TB in size. That is a disk might be used by more than one vdev (aka group), which is of course a major risk, but I understand perfectly that this is an old PC giving a new life as a NAS (I have one at home as well). Nov 20, 2019 · I'm the first time to install a freenas server, I have 4TB*3 and 8TB*3 disks, I want to pool using all 6 disks in raidz2, and update 4TB disks to 8TB later, but when creating pools in the GUI, It says "Mixing disks of different sizes in a VDEV is not allowed. Next up, we need to calculate the allocation size or "asize" of the whole vdev. Sep 7, 2024 · Download UnRAID - https://unraid. No vdev has less than 6 devices, so you’re getting space efficiency. Additionally, you mentioned replacing the 1T drives. I am using a fourbay device and wonder which is the best way to mix my harddrives. Number of Drives: This is the count of Drives you can give ZFS. I certainly did get my terminology wrong . Short and definitive answer: You can NOT do that with ZFS. RAID-Z1: 12TB Usable Space May 24, 2024 · It allows you to assemble a JBOD of any and all types and sizes of drives, where you can dedicate one or two drives to hold parity data. youtube. You then take two more drives and mirror them, creating a second vdev. WARNING: This video is for entertainment purposes only and may be disturbing to some ZFS users. Good luck maintaining that thing when a drive will fail. Also I understand the drives in a vdev should be identically sized or the vdev will only allocate space as if all drives were the same size as the smallest in the vdev. So you'd start with 6TB or 9TB usable space. Number of drives per RAID group - the number of drives per vdev. Assuming the drives are all the same size, a mirror array has the same usable size as 1 drive (no matter how many disks you use), whereas RAIDZ has N-1 drives of usable space. , SATA, 3 TB, 7200 rpm. Is there any chance of that being supported in ZFS at A pool of single mismatched disks - your #2 option - will perform poorly from the get-go, not just once you've reached some arbitrary size - zfs will distribute the writes in proportion to the amount of free space available on each vdev in the pool. Right now i have a 6TB seagate drive and i am looking to get a couple 8tb WD elements drives to shuck. I strongly recommend against that. – Jan 4, 2023 · Individual files cannot span disks. I searched "mixed disk" in the search and didn't see any results. As for expanding in future, you can not. The thing that strike me most in your case is the partitioning. 3 x 10 TB + 3 x 12 TB HDD (raidz2 datapool) for cold storage data (the creation of which is my current problem) Proxmox VE Version: 8. Apr 15, 2024 · Yes, the maker of the disk does not matter, you could have a WD, a Seagate, an HGST. I would like some redundancy (be able to lose at least 1 drive) so I believe a raidz setup is ideal Jul 10, 2016 · I currently have a 4 uneven drive unRAID box. I am looking at replacing my Synology 816, running SHR, which is at max capacity. It's nice because if you need to add space, you can pick up two more drives, and again add them as a mirrored vdev. https://lawrence. 0 No hardware RAID controller is installed, and everything is running on ZFS. Another point I notice is that I can't mix different drive capacities ino the same vdev; all your examples illustrate that I must group 1TBs together and 500GBs together into some given vdev configuration. (From my understanding) I would partition the 2TB drive into 2 * 1TB parts. Be careful though, as you cannot remove vdevs after adding them without destroying the pool. Does ZFS expects devices of all the same size for a striped array? I have a zfs pool with 1 vdev composed by 2x3TB drive in mirror. Say you have a mirror with 2 500GB drives. Jun 11, 2024 · I’ve a question: How come that if I use the WebUI to extend (attach) a drive that is bigger (12 TB) to a smaller one (10 TB), that the WebUI creates a different partition sizes and shows me “Mixed capacity” under storage? BUT… If I use zpool attach in the terminal, the WebUI doesn’t report “Mixed capacity”. e. You CAN mix different size drives in the same Pool though so you could do a Mirrored pair vdev of each size and then combine the 3 vdevs into a single Yup got it. When you combine drives of varying capacities, RAID z1 will treat each vdev as if all its drives are the size of the smallest drive in that vdev. I have read I can create separate pools (which I need to figure out), etc, but trying to get updated info (thats not I've been using a bunch of different drive sizes for storage that I would just swap in when needed in an usb hdd bay. 5MiB (4x 256KiB + 3. ). Since the disks will probably have small differences in size (several MB probably) the RAID creation will fail if not all partitions are the same size. I have other 2 disks: WD caviar black of 2 TB and I would add them in the pool as mirror vdev to extend the size of the pool. I read this post which seems to suggest my two options are to lose 1tb per 2tb drive using RAIDZ or to use this command (which doubles the space required for data redundancy): zfs set copies=2 poolname Feb 18, 2011 · Thanks for the explanation, Gea. However, the pool's usable capacity is determined by the smallest drive in a RAID-Z configuration: In your scenario, if you mix 2TB and 1TB drives, the usable space of the larger drives will be capped to match the size of the smallest drive in the RAID-Z group. Mixing vdevs of diffrent capacities is no issue. Note that this means that you can have mixed size drives in a vdev but you can only use the capacity of the smallest drive. The only caveats are: Aug 16, 2023 · Yes, you can add a pair of 6TB drives as a Mirror vDev. The parameter is optional and has no impact on capacity calculations. g. ZFS determines the number of groups by the least common multiple (LCM) of the group width (D+P) and the number of physical drives minus spares (C-S). Performance may be irregular because ZFS will tend to favor the vDev with the most free space. so if either of the 4TB drives fail I can get data back using the 1TB partition and the other 4TB drive. May 5, 2023 · I would do 12x8TB. From my understanding: The WebUI uses the whole disk size for the You cannot throw different sizes of drives into any ZFS vdev and get what you are hoping for, this includes dRAID. I currently have a mixture of disks I would like to use in my ZFS setup. As an example, if you have 2x4TB drives, 2x2TB drives and 2x6TB drives all in a Raidz2, then ZFS would only use the first 2TB on each drive, giving you 8TB usable (6 * 2 - the 2*2 parity drives). video/truenasMy Previos Video on TrueNAS: How To Expand A ZFS Poolhttps://www. 5 days ago · Greetings! I am totally new to Truenas and will setup the system tomorrow. 1) Is the following setup possible:. This is not possible, the zfs support added in 6. The following output of zpool iostat mypool shows how data is striped across single drive vdevs of different sizes: Apr 25, 2025 · ZFS only needs the group width and all groups will have the desired size. Dec 24, 2016 · I apologize if this question has been answered before. However, I have a 4x10tb mirror and see a 12tb drive going for cheaper than a 10tb drive by $30 USD. May 25, 2025 · But it seems that what you want to do is a mirror between a drive and a stripe. Importantly no drive is part of more than 2 vdevs. Nov 29, 2016 · There are ways around this -- for example, you could partition the drives to present three 3 TB devices and two 1 TB (remainder of the two 4 TB drives) devices to ZFS -- but it's going to seriously complicate your setup and it's unlikely to work the way you plan. Let’s take a more mixed up scenario of 1x4TB, 2x6TB, and 1x8TB drive and compare usable space between traditional and AnyRaid pool types: Mirror: 10TB Usable Space. If you have 5 Drives in your Server you can enter 5 here. Do not try this at home. It's worth noting that even though your devices are from the same manufacturer and have the same number of RPMs, the throughput will be different between them for a given IO size (because the 2TB drives probably have higher byte density per ring), and the number of IOPS will be the same Dec 21, 2016 · Finally, you can always add more vdevs of any type and size to your pool (although similar sizes/types are recommended for performance reasons), so your pool size will grow (span, essentially RAID 0). You may be able to create a mdadm RAID0 with the small drives and then pass the resulting device to ZFS to make a mirror. Then once I've moved my data I'd like to add in 2 of the old 3TB drives as another mirror. Repeat for your remaining drives. The usable space will be as if all drives where 3TB in size until each 3TB drive is replaced by a 6TB drive. Single drive cost - monetary cost/price of a single drive; used to calculate the Total cost and the Cost per TiB. Regardless, if you have a mix of a lot of different drive sizes you COULD give zfs a shot if you have multiples-of-2 with closely similar drive size (like 480GB and 512GB together in a column. With unRAID you can mix and match drive sizes with the only rule that the parity disk(s) must be as large or larger than the largest data disk in the array. Feb 21, 2015 · Merging 3 drives of different sizes is always difficult, but it works to some extend - if you really want to. And within a RAID group, you often get the worst of every drive. The disks will be roughly the same, e. Dec 2, 2024 · 2 x 512 GB SSD for Proxmox (zfs-raid1 rpool) 2 x 1 TB SSD (zfs-raid1 vmpool) for VMs, databases, etc. net/pricing?via=nascomparesShould You I'm setting up a Truenas SCALE system to take over from an ageing QNAP NAS. Then, when the vDevs are balanced, (if ever), then ZFS will stripe across the vDevs equally. I have one 22TB drive and four 4Tb drives. But in my use case. I have a 4tb drive and a 6tb drive and I would like to combine them into a roughly 10tb drive/store. The problem is: Can zfs handle vdevs using disks with different size and different speed? Jan 4, 2022 · There are always numerous complaints about bad ZFS performance in Free/TrueNAS-related forums (where superficial knowledge (or none at all) about ZFS seems to be the norm), which almost always can be traced back to using the wrong pool configuration for the job (i. In OP's case, he has 4 4TB drives and an 8TB drive, making the drives all divisible by 4, for a total of 6 partitions (well, 4 full drives and 2 partitions, really, but zfs doesn't care) vdev 1 4TB + 4TB (1/2 of 8TB drive) vdev 2 Mar 24, 2018 · Before answering your question, a disclaimer: obviously it's simplest to just use duplicate hardware. I bought some gear, and am wondering on mixing drive sizes. gzuxxcf yimot oofyfzq smvnw xko zcb eeockj wawczw suchh bvyvv