Adding a drive to a 'simple' storage space...

Question

I have a Simple (no resiliency) storage space with 2 HDD (2 x 14TB). I want to add a 3rd drive to increase pool space, but I'm a little confused about how that will work.

The storage space currently has 2 columns (one for each physical disk) and I know that cannot be changed without creating a new storage space. If I add a 3rd disk to a storage space with 2 columns and were to write some data, a stripe would only be written to any 2 of the 3 disks (i.e. Disk 1+2 or Disk 1+3 or Disk 2+3)? If it had 3 columns, the stripe would be written to all 3 disks. Is that correct?

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Hi. Thank you for your question and reaching out. I’d be more than happy to help you with your query.

Adding a third drive to your Simple (no resiliency) storage space will increase the total storage capacity of the pool, but it will not increase the resiliency of the pool. To increase the resiliency, you will need to add additional drives to the pool, and configure the pool to use a RAID type that has the desired level of resiliency. For example, if you want to increase the resiliency of the storage pool to two-way mirroring, you will need to add four additional drives and configure the pool to use RAID-1. You can also use other RAID types, such as RAID-5 or RAID-6, for higher levels of resiliency.

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