Rebooted to Degraded Volume and RAID Groups appeared without XRaid

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Craigatitus2 wrote:

 

I found out that 6+ bay units like mine will start off with RAID 6 for 6 drives and if I Factory Reset with only 5 drives in it will create the volume as RAID 5.  After that i should be able to horizontally expand the volume to 6 drives and still maintain RAID 5.

 

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Hopefully that is the case.  Let us know how that turns out.  

If all the drives were the same size, it would convert to RAID6 on the 6th drive.  But with unequal drives already forming multiple RAID groups, it won't be able to do that, so I think it should expand as RAID5 (with one 2TB RAID1 layer from the 6TB drives).  You should have started with the 5 smallest drives and added the last larger one as 6th.  If you didn't do that, I think it may still expand.  That doesn't follow the rules Netgear has published, but I've seen reports here that it works as long as there is or ever was already at least one drive the same size as the added one so the proper layer size already exists.  It's certainly possible for it to work (the XRAID "wedding cake" structure isn't violated), it's just a matter of whether the logic looks for that situation.

Those RAID group layers will be the same ones you saw in FlexRAID, it's just that XRAID hides them from you because it's controlling them.

Well after the resync finsihed on the 5 drives in X-Raid Raid 5 I put in the 6th drive, deleted the old volume off of it, and then X-Raid took over and started a resync again with all 6 drives still in Raid 5.   So that makes me very happy.

So If all goes well in about a day or so I'll see if my volume is all back to normal and then i can start thinking about putting some data back on it. 

Good to know it works as we expected.  Now that you know you'll get the structure you want, you can start putting data on it.  It'll slow the re-sync a bit, so whether you do it or not just depends on how soon you want to be able to use it again.