How to add drives to existing pool?

[Jaybau]

How do I add these drives to an existing pool without "Unmountable: Unsupported or no file system" problem?

 

Existing Pool "Torrents":

 

Devices/Drives (sdk, sdb, sda):

 

I tried adding only the xfs drives together, but ran into the problem of losing my partitions when I start the array.

[david279]

I dont think there is pools using xfs. Only btrfs and zfs. 

[itimpi]

Multi drive pools have to be in btrfs or ZFS format - you cannot have them in xfs format.

[Jaybau]

Just to be clear we are talking about Unraid pools, not filesystem btrfs/ZFS pools.

I thought there was a way to have JBOD in a pool from any filesystem format.

[itimpi]

1 minute ago, Jaybau said:

Just to be clear we are talking about Unraid pools, not filesystem btrfs/ZFS pools.

I thought there was a way to have JBOD in a pool from any filesystem format.

Not in the current release, only in the main array.   Perhaps you are thinking of btrfs format pools configured to use the Single profile?

 

in a future Unraid release (6.13?) when the current Unraid main array becomes just another pool type it will then be possible.

[Jaybau]

I wanted to create a new Unraid pool under the "Pool Devices" (not part of the array).

I have a bunch of disks with mixed filesystems.

Pool JBOD, with different filesystems, and the pool/share would look like one big drive.

 

EDIT:  I just read this:

 

Quote

When configured as a multi-device pool, Unraid OS will automatically select btrfs-raid1 format (for both data and meta-data). btrfs permits any number of devices to be added to the pool and each copy of data is guaranteed to be written to two different devices. Hence the pool can withstand a single-disk failure without losing data.

 

Edited July 17, 2023 by Jaybau

[itimpi]

21 minutes ago, Jaybau said:

I wanted to create a new Unraid pool under the "Pool Devices" (not part of the array).

I have a bunch of disks with mixed filesystems.

Pool JBOD, with different filesystems, and the pool/share would look like one big drive.

 

EDIT:  I just read this:

 

 

That statement is a little out of date as starting with the 6.12 release you can also use ZFS (although btrfs offers more flexibility).   As I said you cannot have mixed file systems in pools at the moment.

[Jaybau]

I think I finally figured it out...you need to use either btrfs or zfs for the actual filesystem pooling.

 

I added an Unraid Pool.

I used btrfs as the filesystem, as "single" (because I have drives of different size).  This will combine the storage of muliple drives into a single disk/pool.

zfs didn't have the option "single", for different drive sizes.

 

This was not without quirks...

 

I needed to format the drives (I had to move the data off the drives I was formatting because I was using xfs).

When I started the Array, the filesystem wasn't recognized, and needed to reformat (but I "erased" in the prior step where I was doing the configuration).

Need to make sure you get the expected pool size.  I didn't the first time, so needed to redo something.  I think this had to do with something Unraid setting the filesystem to auto, even after erasing.  So double check.

 

 

 

[JonathanM]

On 7/17/2023 at 4:29 PM, Jaybau said:

I used btrfs as the filesystem, as "single" (because I have drives of different size). 

Keep in mind that if one of the pool members fail, you will lose the whole pool. There is no redundancy in single profile. The pool members are NOT individually readable like they would be under the main Unraid array.

[Jaybau]

When I tried creating unraid non-array pools (with different drive sizes), unraid would remove my existing partition.  So I then assume pools have to be zfs or btrfs.

 

It is confusing me because unraid has something called pools (non-array), but perhaps unraid is just managing a zfs/btrfs pools, not creating it's own.

[itimpi]

1 minute ago, Jaybau said:

So I then assume pools have to be zfs or btrfs.

Single drive pools can be any supported file system.     Multi-drive pools have to be ZFS or btrfs.    Btrfs provides maximum flexibility in expanding pools, particularily with drives of mixed sizes, whereas ZFS normally provides maximum performance.