Hello,
I have had one node running on a 1TB HDD for 9 months, I bought 2 more 1TB HDDs, I was confusing how to add this capacity to my node. I read through the Internet about that and found that I can extend a hard drive capacity on Win10. So, I turned off my node, installed the new hard drives on my PC, and extend the capacity on the first hard drive which the node was running on it with the 2 new ones (The disk management on Win10 shows that these 3 hard drives are spanned volume and dynamic type), now I have only one hard drive appears in This PC on Win10 with a capacity of almost 2.72TB, of course, the data on the first hard drive was not removed.
I edited the storage parameter in the configuration file to 2.70TB and started my node again, everything seems ok, the node is running well and the dashboard shows total disk space as 2.70TB
I would like to know if what I did is correct regardless that everything seems ok now, or that there is a better way
Your probability of failure just increased. If you lose any one of those drives you will lose the whole volume and with it your node.
Been there done that not good
As your node will grow everything will slow down to crawl
Not talking about the failures
As others have said, instead of having 1 big node (which is goign to fail if any 1 of the hardrives fail), it’s better to have 3 different nodes (1 per harddrive) that way if a single hard-drive fails then the others can keep going. Also, I’d recommend only having 1 node vetting at a time as it takes months with current ingress and with 2 nodes it could take half a year for them to be vetted and become useful.
Unlike as everyone said, I am running 9 HDDs of different capacities combined via Windows Storage Spaces (with redundancy) with no real problems so far.
Did you open the config.yaml in a text editor (not notepad.exe) with elevated rights before editing?
You’re right, I read about that here
I think that it depends on luck and operating conditions. Of course, the possibility of damage to one of the hard drives is possible, but if one of them was damaged if they were combined in this way, would it damage the rest?
I edited it by Notepad++ with administrator privilege
It depends on if you enabled redundancy. If not, there is a high probability of losing node data when 1 of the HDDs fails.
That sounds like the correct way to do it. Can you please provide a screenshot of your config.yaml and your node dashboard?
That may be, but you probably have plenty of HDD space to spare. 3TB in total would fill up in about 9 months. It would really be wasteful to remove a third of your potential income for redundancy. With 3x 1TB I would definitely recommend going for separate nodes.
i would just leave it and take the gamble that it will run for 9 months and then migrate the node to a single larger disk or maybe something with redundancy… but thats just my preferred choice to avoid grief, not the most efficient solution to do redundancy.
new nodes are kinda pointless to do redundancy on, but as they age they get much more worth saving due to the long periods it takes to spin up new nodes.
It’s 9.50 TiB after redundancy.
My main reason going for this was that I wanted to try out storage spaces and only having a really funny mix of older (often more than 50000h) hard drives at hand 
You can still easily fill up more than that, so you’re still throwing potential income out of the window if that’s all you have for nodes. But at least at that point it won’t be a third of your income. I am curious though, you have 9 pretty old HDD’s running. How long have you had those running your node and how many have failed in that time?
I think the node is sitting at about 7 TiB, so I can disable the redundancy any time I feel the need for moar node data
The node has been running since 12-2019, I had to start over in mid 2020 however because I managed to make some stupid identity mistake (can’t even remember what it was exactly, tho there might be a thread about it here on the forums), so there might have been some days or weeks where the server was not running. All of the drives are still alive.
Here is a CDI dump:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) SAMSUNG HE753LJ
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : SAMSUNG HE753LJ
Firmware : 1AA01113
Serial Number : **************
Disk Size : 750,1 GB (8,4/137,4/750,1/----)
Buffer Size : 32767 KB
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 1465149168
Rotation Rate : Unknown
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ATA/ATAPI-7
Minor Version : ATA8-ACS version 3b
Transfer Mode : ---- | SATA/300
Power On Hours : 42419 hours
Power On Count : 558 count
Temperature : 25 C (77 F)
Health Status : Good
Features : S.M.A.R.T., APM, AAM, 48bit LBA, NCQ
APM Level : 0000h [OFF]
AAM Level : FEFEh [ON]
Drive Letter :
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(2) ST2000DM008-2FR102
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : ST2000DM008-2FR102
Firmware : 0001
Serial Number : ********
Disk Size : 2000,3 GB (8,4/137,4/2000,3/----)
Buffer Size : Unknown
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 3907029168
Rotation Rate : 7200 RPM
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ACS-3
Minor Version : ACS-3 Revision 5
Transfer Mode : SATA/600 | SATA/600
Power On Hours : 22440 hours
Power On Count : 40 count
Temperature : 34 C (93 F)
Health Status : Good
Features : S.M.A.R.T., APM, 48bit LBA, NCQ, TRIM
APM Level : 8080h [ON]
AAM Level : ----
Drive Letter :
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(3) ST2000DM008-2FR102
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : ST2000DM008-2FR102
Firmware : 0001
Serial Number : ********
Disk Size : 2000,3 GB (8,4/137,4/2000,3/----)
Buffer Size : Unknown
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 3907029168
Rotation Rate : 7200 RPM
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ACS-3
Minor Version : ACS-3 Revision 5
Transfer Mode : SATA/600 | SATA/600
Power On Hours : 23837 hours
Power On Count : 23 count
Temperature : 35 C (95 F)
Health Status : Good
Features : S.M.A.R.T., APM, 48bit LBA, NCQ, TRIM
APM Level : 8080h [ON]
AAM Level : ----
Drive Letter :
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(4) TOSHIBA MK2002TSKB
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : TOSHIBA MK2002TSKB
Firmware : MT4A
Serial Number : *********
Disk Size : 2000,3 GB (8,4/137,4/2000,3/----)
Buffer Size : Unknown
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 3907029168
Rotation Rate : 7200 RPM
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ATA8-ACS
Minor Version : ----
Transfer Mode : SATA/300 | SATA/300
Power On Hours : 65235 hours
Power On Count : 120 count
Temperature : 40 C (104 F)
Health Status : Good
Features : S.M.A.R.T., APM, 48bit LBA, NCQ
APM Level : 0080h [ON]
AAM Level : ----
Drive Letter :
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(5) ST2000DL003-9VT166
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : ST2000DL003-9VT166
Firmware : CC32
Serial Number : ********
Disk Size : 2000,3 GB (8,4/137,4/2000,3/----)
Buffer Size : Unknown
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 3907029168
Rotation Rate : 5900 RPM
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ATA8-ACS
Minor Version : ATA8-ACS version 4
Transfer Mode : SATA/600 | SATA/600
Power On Hours : 58277 hours
Power On Count : 1610 count
Temperature : 32 C (89 F)
Health Status : Good
Features : S.M.A.R.T., AAM, 48bit LBA, NCQ
APM Level : ----
AAM Level : FE00h [OFF]
Drive Letter :
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(6) TOSHIBA MK2002TSKB
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : TOSHIBA MK2002TSKB
Firmware : MT4A
Serial Number : *********
Disk Size : 2000,3 GB (8,4/137,4/2000,3/----)
Buffer Size : Unknown
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 3907029168
Rotation Rate : 7200 RPM
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ATA8-ACS
Minor Version : ----
Transfer Mode : SATA/300 | SATA/300
Power On Hours : 65220 hours
Power On Count : 121 count
Temperature : 42 C (107 F)
Health Status : Good
Features : S.M.A.R.T., APM, 48bit LBA, NCQ
APM Level : 0080h [ON]
AAM Level : ----
Drive Letter :
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(7) PC601 NVMe SK hynix 256GB
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : PC601 NVMe SK hynix 256GB
Firmware : 80002111
Serial Number : *****************
Disk Size : 256,0 GB
Buffer Size : Unknown
# of Sectors :
Rotation Rate : ---- (SSD)
Interface : NVM Express
Major Version : NVM Express 1.3
Minor Version :
Transfer Mode : PCIe 3.0 x4 | PCIe 3.0 x4
Power On Hours : 15345 hours
Power On Count : 131 count
Host Reads : 31726 GB
Host Writes : 42139 GB
Temperature : 38 C (100 F)
Health Status : Good (100 %)
Features : S.M.A.R.T.
APM Level : ----
AAM Level : ----
Drive Letter : C:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(8) TOSHIBA DT01ACA300
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : TOSHIBA DT01ACA300
Firmware : MX6OABB0
Serial Number : *********
Disk Size : 3000,5 GB (8,4/137,4/3000,5/----)
Buffer Size : Unknown
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 5860533168
Rotation Rate : 7200 RPM
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ATA8-ACS
Minor Version : ATA8-ACS version 4
Transfer Mode : SATA/600 | SATA/600
Power On Hours : 13819 hours
Power On Count : 129 count
Temperature : 35 C (95 F)
Health Status : Good
Features : S.M.A.R.T., APM, 48bit LBA, NCQ
APM Level : 0000h [OFF]
AAM Level : ----
Drive Letter :
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(9) ST2000DM006-2DM164
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : ST2000DM006-2DM164
Firmware : CC26
Serial Number : ********
Disk Size : 2000,3 GB (8,4/137,4/2000,3/----)
Buffer Size : Unknown
Queue Depth : 32
# of Sectors : 3907029168
Rotation Rate : 7200 RPM
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ACS-2
Minor Version : ACS-3 Revision 3b
Transfer Mode : SATA/600 | SATA/600
Power On Hours : 24105 hours
Power On Count : 25 count
Temperature : 33 C (91 F)
Health Status : Good
Features : S.M.A.R.T., APM, 48bit LBA, NCQ
APM Level : 8080h [ON]
AAM Level : ----
Drive Letter :
Only 3 of them are older than 50k hours, it seems.
The 750GB Samsung was made in 2009 though 
Yeah, but at that point you would risk the entire node on a single failure. There’s not really a way back for you now since you can’t split up a node into several ones. This is why I usually recommend running separate nodes. Though you have a few drives that would be too small to run a node on their own even. Just seems wasteful that you are sacrificing your only 3TB HDD to redundancy. Because of the size difference you are still effectively sacrificing 25% of available space.
I do love seeing how resilient HDD’s are these days. This is my experience as well. I have 15 HDD’s spinning 24/7 and haven’t had a single failure since I started my nodes in feb-2019. I can’t actually see the power on hours for the HDD’s in my drobo, but there are 2 250GB HDD’s in there that must have about 100k hours on them by now. 2 others that would have to be at at least 80k hours. In my Synology I have 3 over 60k and 3 more over 40k. The remaining ones are below 25k.
I will migrate to a single high capacity HDD some day anyway. Also, if I get bored of CHIA, I can just use my CHIA server for Storj without having to start at zero (and sell off my current single-purpose Storj server).
I don’t care too much since all these HDDs were completely free of any monetary charge
In my private NAS there are 4 2.5 inch 2TB drives spinning nearly 24/7 since 2014. I don’t even know if they are rated for 24/7 use…
I’m pretty much there already. It’s keeping my HDD space warm until Storj needs it, lol.
That’s the kind of prices I like
Probably not, most 2.5" HDD’s aren’t. But hey, if it works!
It does work and ofc I regularly make backups of the more important data on there