RAID 5? MORE HDDs?

Hello! This is my first levelone forum post! Please be gentle.
I have a TrueNAS Core storage that’s currently at 82%. It’s mostly video data, but has a bit of everything. It’s 4 -14TB HDDs (NAS drives) running mirrored (so 28TB total capacity currently). The current MB/setup isn’t going to accept more drives (except maybe via USB). The cost of HDDs seems quite high compared to when I set this up. I have no idea for current HDD specific market trends.
Do I change over the system to a raid 5 setup (cheaper, riskier)?
Upgrade Drives?
Change system?
Add new system?
Thanks for any advice!

How many drives are able to be installed total?

You can’t change ZFS’ raid-level on the fly, so unless you have another 28 TB laying around somewhere you can’t really do much with this.

Since it’s a mirror, the new vdev-growth feature in Electric Eel won’t help you either because you can’t (easily) mirror on one disc. You’re on Core, so this doesn’t apply anyway.

The only thing you could do is basically intentionally murder the mirror by ripping out 2 discs, mounting in a degraded state, and then praying that none of the remaining 2 discs dies while you transfer over to the new pool.
Even that still leaves you with the issue that your new pool now has 3 discs (2 old + 1 new), and you then have 2 more discs that you can’t attach to the pool unless you do it in a mirror vdev.

Copied myself from a different thread:

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It’s got 5 now via sata, with 1 bad connector. I hadn’t considered PCI slots as @Dutch_Master has suggested (duh! feeling dumb). So obviously I’ve got a ton more expansion opportunity. Now just to figure out drive prices. :confused:

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A very valid option. Also maybe do a copy to the external shelf, upgrade the capacity of the main array (keep in mind, the larger capacity the drive that you go with, the longer the recovery time), but expansion may be the most cost effective option in your case.