Times are tough, using old disks with ZFS and expansion?
So as you are all aware hard drive prices are sky high and im down to my last few terrabytes.
In order to free up space on my primary unraid array I planning to use 11 old 2TB drives i've held onto for decades (more than 10 years old).
I've checked the drives and out of the 13 2TB drives only 2 of them are failing so im happy to bring them back into use.
I've plugged a few of them into my HP 2600 disk shelf and attached it to the primary server, did a full preclear on them as i was initially planning to add them to the array and barring the two failures they are fine.
I have since cleared them and reformatted them with xfs and temporarily created a snapraid system with 2 parity drives and its working well but not storing any information yet.
The problem with this is that each storage drive acts as its own individual drive, can not be turned into one large share and is outside of the unraid infrastructure but it does work.
Ive tried using merge fs to create a pool with a single mount point however this doesnt allow for creating a share as far as I can find, Im also having difficulty understanding the configuration.
I dont want to add these to the unraid array as they are old, slow and low on storage capacity.
So the questions I have are as follows:-
Is it correct that the new ZFS on Unraid is now expandible one disk at a time as long as they match the size or are larger than the rest of the pool and if so are there any drawbacks?
If i create a Z2 pool with 2 parity and the rest of these 2TB drives as storage can it spin down and be idle most of the time as the data on the drives wont be accessed very often (old pics, vids, documents).
Can I create a share that specifically points to the ZFS pool or is this only available for the Unraid array?
For the experts out there barring just getting another 18TB drive or 2 to add to the array have you any other suggestions?
Thanks Folks Ive been using Unraid for a few years but so far I haven't need to go outside of the unraid array configuration.