this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
838 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
81373 readers
4317 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's great, I'd love to not have to buy one of those machines, and I have been running my JF on a laptop just running Linux with a single one of the 16tb drives.
If the drives added to the pool need to be formatted, is there a possibility that it wipes the data on it? I'll take a bit of time to read up on some of the options you mentioned.
Thanks for the help!
also, when and where did you buy those 16 TB drives? I badly need a few like those
Haha, it was a year and a half ago, and it was a Canada Computers sale. Just checked and it doesn't look like it's TOO much more expensive yet, but who knows for how long.
that's what I meant, yes, but you said you have 2 16 TB drives right? at least with ZFS, setting up a mirror can be done only starting with a single drive. It's a godsend.
first, you take the empty drive, check that it's actually empty, and if so, create a ZFS pool of a single drive from it, with zpool create. copy all your data over. you can use rsync, it has a bunch of options for preserving most filesystem metadata, and for printing progress.
when done, check that absolutely everything got transferred, and add the other 16 TB drive too to the pool with zpool attach. doing this will convert the pool with only a disk vdev, into a pool with a mirror vdev of 2 disks.
further recommended reading: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/man/master/8/zpool.8.html
you may want to enable compression from the beginning. if you do it later, existing data won't be compressed. media files mostly don't benefit from this. compression is enabled on the dataset level, with the zfs command, if you set it to lz4 (recommended alg) for the root dataset, everything will be compressed that way.
Oh this is perfect, thanks so much! I've got one of the hard drives in use but I could definitely wipe the other one to make a proper copy with the zpool.
Thanks for giving me a fun little week task!
also, when and where did you buy those 16 TB drives? I badly need a few like those