Now I haven 't looked much into FREE NAS but I was wondering how do you expand the storage after...

[G+_Eric Harrison]

Now I haven't looked much into FREE NAS but I was wondering how do you expand the storage after you set it up? I'm guessing that it's possible without losing or moving your data from one FREE NAS to another.

[G+_Taylor Graham]

Kind of a complicated answer. You can create a new vdev (virtual device, like an array in freenas), and add that vdevs storage to your pool. For example, if you had a raid z2 vdev with 4x1tb drives, and you wanted to add 2x1tb drives, you would have to create a mirrored vdev with the two additional drives and add that to your pool. This would only give you another 1tb of space, and the mirror would reduce the redundancy of the pool. OR you could make a whole new raidz2 vdev (backup and delete your old one), and you'd have all the redundancy of a raidz2 vdev and 4tb of storage space as opposed to 3tb. Basically you're probably going to have to delete your volume, so hopefully you have enough space to back it up.

Read this if you arent confused enough already:

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volumes#Replacing_Drives_to_Grow_a_ZFS_Pool

 

Also use the freenas forums. Users there are super experienced and you'll get used to cyberdog yelling at you soon enough.

[G+_John Mink]

The short answer is, there's no easy way to expand ....

 

The long answer is, if you try anything, back up first