Duo with 2x2tb drives (4tb raid possible?)

andefeldt wrote:
I have a ReadyNas Duo with two 2TB drives installed. Can I use the two drives in a raid mode as one big drive with a capacity of 4TB?

Yes - as a single RAID-0 volume.

Note however it is not recommended as you are doubling the risk of drive failure compromising *all* your data (ie one drive failure would result in data loss from both drives). Better to configure each drive as a separate RAID-0 volume so that if a drive fails, you only lose the data on that specific drive

andefeldt wrote:
And does the Duo support 4TB usb drives as a backup drive?

No - 2TB max as for internal drives

Ok. Is there any way that you can back up 4tb of data then?

I found somewhere in this forum (I can't find it now, of course) that 4tb USB drives worked, while 3+tb internal drives didn't on the duo. Would my only possibility of backup be to backup to another 4tb NAS unit via LAN?

andefeldt wrote:
Would my only possibility of backup be to backup to another 4tb NAS unit via LAN?

yes, another nas or a 4tb drive connected to a pc.

Ok.

But what about this idea - it's not perfect, but wouldn't this work:

- Connect 2 x 2tb usb drives to the ReadyNas Duo
- Select 2tb of contents from the NAS for each usb drive
- Backup the first 2tb to the first usb drive and the last 2tb to the second usb drive.

It shouldn't be a problem splitting up the data from the NAS for each usb drive as the NAS isn't completely full, hence it might "only" contain ~3,5tb of data.

Possible?

If one decides to go with the NAS to NAS backup solution, then I need to buy a second ReadyNAS unit, right? I can't use any 4tb NAS or can I?

To back up to another NAS it would be best if the other NAS supported rsync. The initial backup would be made with NFS which will take some time. But then change the job to rsysnc and run the backup job a second time. This will verify that all files have been copied over as it synchronizes the files between the two units. It will should only take f few minutes. Then schedule a backup to run at a specific time and it will automatically synchronize the files between the two shares. I back up 4 shares from one NAS to another like this and it rarely takes more than just a few minutes per share, unless I have added a lot of videos.

Not all NAS devices support rsync, but all ReadyNAS devices do. I would recommend going to the Ultra series to gain the additional speed, and you might want to consider going to a 4 bay for greater future expansion.