3 ms·
What he means is you can't add another disk in vdev. If you have a raidz with 3 disks, you can't add 4th one and rebalance. What you can do is either add anothe
by Elhana 10y ago
What he means is you can't add another disk in vdev. If you have a raidz with 3 disks, you can't add 4th one and rebalance. What you can do is either add another vdev to the pool, making it two+ striped raidz or you can replace your 3 disks with a bigger ones.
Reason for that is that adding a disk to vdev will require rebalancing everything and considering complexity of zfs, you better just make a new raidz with 4 disks and move data over, otherwise it might just take ages and complicate things a lot. This is obviously not ideal for a home user, but zfs was not created with a home users in mind.
Btrfs supposedly should let you do this, but their raid5/6 is still unstable - probably for a reason.
In fact, this is not such a big deal. You can add disks to a zfs mirror (and it is real n-way mirror, not btrfs raid1 thing with multiple disks), you can add mirror vdevs to raid10 setup. If you are making raidz1/2/3 just make sure you understand that you can't expand it by adding more disks.