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Forum Discussion
nicksmith10
Aug 24, 2015Aspirant
Brand New ReadyNas 204 2 x 3TB drives only show as 2.72TB
Hi all, Sorry for the possible noob question here but I am completely new to NAS. Just decided to invest in a new NAS 204 and bought 2 x 3TB WD Red drives to install from out of the box. W...
mdgm-ntgr
Aug 24, 2015NETGEAR Employee Retired
With X-RAID the volume is redundant (you have two disks, so you have RAID-1, where the volume can withstand the failure of one of the disks). If you add one more 3TB disk your volume capacity will double and you will have RAID-5.
Disk manufacturers measure 1KB=1000 Bytes whereas like most computers we use 1KiB=1000 Bytes, and also like most computers we leave out the i when writing it.
So (2-1) * 3 * 1000^4 / 1024^4 gets you roughly 2.72TB. There are of course overheads, and there is the 4GB OS partition as well as the swap partition which use up a little space on the disks.
Please note that whichever RAID level you choose backups are still important. No important data should be stored on just the one device.
nicksmith10
Aug 24, 2015Aspirant
Thanks mdgm,
Just did some research on RAID which helped a lot, that makes complete sense now !!
If one of my disks fails then the data is still safe because of the other one...
I didn't even think about that !!
That's awesome if I need more I will add another 3TB at a later date, thanks for your help.
Although could I add a 4TB ? or are they all supposed to be the same ?
Nick
- mdgm-ntgrAug 24, 2015NETGEAR Employee Retired
Yes you can add a 4TB disk but note it will only use 3TB of that disk till you add a second 4TB disk.
Do note that there are other problems than disk failure that can happen so backups e.g. to a USB disk, another NAS are important. Do not store important data on just the one device. - JennCAug 25, 2015NETGEAR Employee Retired
Hello nicksmith10,
This may also help calculating the approximate volume size you get from combined disks in a RAID (XRAID and Traditional/FlexRAID): http://rdconfigurator.netgear.com/raid/index.html
OS partition, swap partition, etc are not deducted yet.
Regards,
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