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Forum Discussion
Converting JBOD TO XRAID
Hi all new here, please be gentle. I have a Readynas 104 with latest firmware. I have two problems. (questions) For some reason the DLNA seems to keep playing up or vanishing. While my TiVo was ...
Thanks for the reply..
So as I currently have 4 disks in there already added to the volume, will I have to destroy the lot before being able to press the xraid?
I don't completely understand "Now, AT NO TIME, you need to "remove" a disk. The explanations you found are only for the calculation of the capacity. YOU DO NOT NEED TO ACTUALLY REMOVE A DISK FROM THE NAS, just to "remove" the capacity of the disk to calculate the volume capacity"
I'm getting confused between "physical removal" and "software removal"?. From memory at the moment there are no options to" software remove a drive" I guess that's because the nas sees the 4 drives a one single volume, if I click the box on the left there IS a "destroy" option, I expect that is for ALL the volume, or all 4 drives.
What happens if I destroy the four dives (one volume)the try xraid? That being 3x2tb and 1tb drives? Or would it be better to leave the 1tb out after I destroy it?
When I finally manage to activate x raid will it set up the backups automatically?
If I leave the 3x2tb drives in there, add a 4tb later, will the nas see it as 4tb or 2tb drive, or as said above will the nas use it all for backup? Wouldn't that then mean I end up with 4tb of usable space, an 6tb of backup. I'll explain myself, 3 drives of 2tb,4tb usable one drive as backup. But as you said it will use the biggest drive for backup (or did I read that on google?) I doubt the nas is going to transfer the backup data from the old 2tb drive to the new 4tb, the make it available for use by me afterwards?
Thanks
So as I currently have 4 disks in there already added to the volume, will I have to destroy the lot before being able to press the xraid?
I don't completely understand "Now, AT NO TIME, you need to "remove" a disk. The explanations you found are only for the calculation of the capacity. YOU DO NOT NEED TO ACTUALLY REMOVE A DISK FROM THE NAS, just to "remove" the capacity of the disk to calculate the volume capacity"
I'm getting confused between "physical removal" and "software removal"?. From memory at the moment there are no options to" software remove a drive" I guess that's because the nas sees the 4 drives a one single volume, if I click the box on the left there IS a "destroy" option, I expect that is for ALL the volume, or all 4 drives.
What happens if I destroy the four dives (one volume)the try xraid? That being 3x2tb and 1tb drives? Or would it be better to leave the 1tb out after I destroy it?
When I finally manage to activate x raid will it set up the backups automatically?
If I leave the 3x2tb drives in there, add a 4tb later, will the nas see it as 4tb or 2tb drive, or as said above will the nas use it all for backup? Wouldn't that then mean I end up with 4tb of usable space, an 6tb of backup. I'll explain myself, 3 drives of 2tb,4tb usable one drive as backup. But as you said it will use the biggest drive for backup (or did I read that on google?) I doubt the nas is going to transfer the backup data from the old 2tb drive to the new 4tb, the make it available for use by me afterwards?
Thanks
Ok, first off, per your description, you are not in JBOD configuration. With JBOD, each drive is a separate volume, and you can easily remove one. It sounds like you are in RAID0 mode, where all drives are combined into a single volume with no redundancy. That is the most vulnerable configuration, because the loss of any drive loses everything.
Second, you said you want XRAID so you don't have to make backups. RAID is not a backup system. It is more fault tolerant than not having it, but there are plenty of bad things that can destroy the whole volume. You'll find lots of examples here in the forum.
While BTRFS does have the capability to shrink a RAID volume, Netgear has not implemented that in ReadyNAS OS6. You could SSH in and try it manually, but you really will need to have a full backup before you try just in case it fails. Then you could still do a factory default, choose XRAID, and restore the backup -- which is the supported way to make that change.
Sandshark wrote:
With JBOD, each drive is a separate volumeNope. You can have a single JBOD per disk, but you can also have a single JBOD on several disks. Already had that discussion here and already proved it.
Sandshark wrote:While BTRFS does have the capability to shrink a RAID volume, Netgear has not implemented that in ReadyNAS OS6
Because the RAID array uses mdadm, not BTRFS. On top of the RAID array is built a BTRFS volume, but BTRFS doesn't take care of the RAID. Which is a good thing as BTRFS RAID5/6 is currently considered as "badly broken".
OP's need is simple, backup the data, go back to an X-RAID compatible volume configuration, insert the all drives, activate X-RAID and leave the NAS do the rest.
jak0lantash wrote:
Sandshark wrote:
With JBOD, each drive is a separate volumeNope. You can have a single JBOD per disk, but you can also have a single JBOD on several disks. Already had that discussion here and already proved it.
Not by everybody else's definitiion of "JBOD", so I guess Netgear is re-purposing terminology. But I can see not wanting to use "RAID0" since it's not redundant while "RAID" implies it is. And RAID0 also implies striping, and I think they are not doing that, either. Most use "spanned" as the term for that. It's still just as vulnerable -- lose one drive and you lose the entire volume.
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