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Comment by aus_ | Hacker News Reader

ZFS is great. But one thing scares me away from using it. With ZFS, you can't just simply add a new disk raidz set. You have to either build a new pool to send your data to, or :

1. Buy the same amount of (but larger) hard-disks 2. Replace them one by one 3. After the last disk is done, the size will grow. 4. Sell your old hard-disks.

Much more painful then other raid solutions.

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Depending on how you have the arrays organized, I'm sure you can expand a zpool with additional sets.

http://www.itsacon.net/computers/unix/expanding-a-zfs-pool/

zpool add -f poolname raidz[or raidz1,raidz2,etc] /dev/driveid /dev/driveid /dev/driveid ...

You'd then have a pool with another raidz section within it, whose size was represented by the capacity of each of the sections within.

You can apparently add a new raidz, though. So adding 3 new drives would be possible (but not very efficient):

http://alp-notes.blogspot.no/2011/09/adding-vdev-to-raidz-po...

[edit: perhaps there should be a listing of "replies added since you hit reply"-function (with a "confirm" to reply anyway-button) to cut down on redundant replies.. and trade them for upvoting reasonable replies...]

You can just add a new raidz (or any type of vdev) to the zpool.

For reference, you can also grow your pools by adding a new raidz array to an existing pool.

Edit: Looks like mbell and brianlweiner posted just before me. Bah :)

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