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First time setting up a NAS (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by Zurgo@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hey c/Selfhosting, I'm finally dipping my toes into creating a NAS for my household, after saving up funds for awhile. Hopefully this is an okay place to ask a dumb question:

Is it possible to gradually add drives to a NAS while maintaining a RAID array?

I'm about to pull the trigger on an aoostar WTR Pro (4 bay), but budget will only allow for 2x 4tb drives to start off with. I'm wanting to do RAID1 for data redundancy, but eventually I'd want to add another 2x 4tb drives to get to 8tb of RAID1. Is this possible without having to copy out all the data from the NAS? Would I have to start the initial setup as RAID10 instead of RAID1? I wouldn't mind doing trial and error with it if storage wasn't so expensive down here in NZ, and the whole household's data is going to be on it. Thanks for any guidance in advance

Context: Currently the plan is to either go with the 4 bay or 2 bay R1 pro with the Intel N150, install TrueNAS, Immich and Jellyfin, pretty lightweight stuff (I hope). Trying to keep it around NZD1000.

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[-] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 weeks ago

For RAID that's pretty much it as far as I know, but I'm pretty sure it can be a lot simpler and more flexible using some of these newfangled filesystems that are out nowadays like LVM and ZFS and maybe BTRFS? I can't pretend I'm super up to date on all the latest technologies, I know they can do some really incredible stuff though. I'm not familiar enough to recommend it, but it might be worth looking into what they can do for you if your NAS supports it. From what I understand they don't use RAID at all, although they might be able to simulate it, instead they treat disks as JBOD (just a bunch of disks) and use their own strategies to spread whole filesystems and partition structures across them in various safe and redundant ways that are way more flexible, that don't care about disk size or anything like that, they'll handle any shapes and sizes and I think they can be expanded and contracted pretty freely. I think ZFS in particular is really heavily used for this and supports some crazy complicated structures.

this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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