I have a cache for appdata to speed up video recording performance for zoneminder, unfortunately it has all my appdata and VM and docker stuff on it. Right now it is one 3TB HDD, and I would like to add a matching drive to expand it to 6TB. I want to make sure I do this right so I dont upset any of my data on it currently. Also I need to check, but I think my 3 parity array disks and my appdata disk are on my SAS expansion car, and it only has one cable with four ports on it. Can I get a second cable for it and move the current 3TB cache disk to the new cable and add the second disk or will that mess things up?

 

At some point, perhaps first?, It would likely be a good idea to move VMs and other apps off the drive except for zoneminder. I have an 8TB parity array, and I guess I'm just using it for movies, songs, and pictures, storage... I dont think any of the other dockers need to be on the appdata cache I made, it has no redundancy. I do run piehole and unbound as dockers on my unraid, but I think its on the appdata cache, with no redundancy. I dont know if other dockers and VMs will take a huge hit in performance being on the parity array? This is an older 40 thread XEON machine, so not super fast, but lots of threads.

nas-diagnostics-20230212-2136.zip

Edited February 13, 20233 yr by Kuleinc

That cache is XFS, it cannot be expanded, you'd need to backup all data, recreate the pool using btrfs, convert to raid0 assuming you want to use all the space from both devices, and restore the data.

Can I just add the new physical disk as BTRFS move data to it, and then format the existing drive and add it as RAID 0?

You can create a new btrfs pool with the new disk, move the data over, then add the other disk, initially it will be added as raid1, but you can convert to raid0 after.