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Forum Discussion
Adding drives to ReadyNAS104
I appreciate any help on this issue. I have a ReadyNAS104 which is setup with two 4Tb WD Red drives as a RAID 1 setup. I purchased two new 3Tb WD Red drives to add storage to the RAID 1 setup. The system is "seeing" the drives but I cannot find how to add the drives for more storage to the setup. I want to keep the current RAID and just add the new drives for a total of 7TB RAID 1 setup. They are setup as X-Raid. Thanks in advance.
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Hi usmc198,
Welcome to the community!
There's should be an option when you right click the newly added drives to expand or add them into your existing RAID or volume.
Hope this helps!
Kind regards,
BrianL
NETGEAR Community TeamThanks for the quick reply. This is what I am seeing. I get no options when I right click.
usmc198 wrote:
I appreciate any help on this issue. I have a ReadyNAS104 which is setup with two 4Tb WD Red drives as a RAID 1 setup. I purchased two new 3Tb WD Red drives to add storage to the RAID 1 setup. The system is "seeing" the drives but I cannot find how to add the drives for more storage to the setup. I want to keep the current RAID and just add the new drives for a total of 7TB RAID 1 setup. They are setup as X-Raid. Thanks in advance.
You are having a problem because you can't add smaller drives to an existing RAID array. If you had started with 2x3TB, you could have added two more 4 TB drives. With XRAID you'd have ended up with 10 TB of storage in a single volume (not 7).
To get the full 10 TB that is possible now, you'd need to do a factory reset with all drives in place - which destroys your existing data, so you'd need to back it up first.
However, you can get 2 RAID-1 volumes that add up to 7 TB. What you need to do first is switch to flexraid (which is not destructive). Then insert the two new unformatted disks, and create a second RAID-1 volume.
You will need to create shares on it (and if you want to balance the storage across the two volumes, you will need to copy some shares). The built-in backup is one tool you can use to do that. Note that you can't use the same share name on both volumes. Also when you access the shares from a PC you won't see the volume names - just the share names (unless you are using admin credentials).
Thanks for the quick reply. Destroying the data is not an option, hence RAID. I have to step through any solution very gingerly. Thanks again.
usmc198 wrote:
Thanks for the quick reply. Destroying the data is not an option, hence RAID. I have to step through any solution very gingerly. Thanks again.
Then the flexraid option I outlined above is what you want. No data will be destroyed, all you need to do first is click on the XRAID button on the upper right of the screenshot you posted. That will change you to flexraid. Then you'll be able to create the second volume.
Note the RAID is not enough to keep your data safe, so you might consider investing in backup technology of some sort.
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