How do I add a second 10 tb disk on my ReadyNas 214

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Chessdude wrote:

For the benefit of those not familiar with the ReadyNas 214, it has 4 disk bays and total storage capacity of 24 TB.

The datasheets for ReadyNAS uses the largest compatible disks at the time the product is launched, and generally aren't updated later.  In the case of the RN214, that was 6 TB.

The largest compatible disks for the RN214 are two 16 TB Seagate IronWolf/IronWolf Pro models.  So if the datasheet was updated, it would show a 64 TB capacity.  There is no known limit to the actual disk size, but sync times do become much longer when use bigger disks.

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Chessdude wrote:

Hi all. Im planning on adding another 10TB Seagate Ironwolf disk to my ReadyNas 214 as the currently installed similar disk (10TB Seagate Ironwolf)  is almost full. y question is which bay do I install the 2nd drive, and does it matter which slot it goes into. I'm not really bothered about backing up as I have that already taken care of externally. 

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The first thing to understand is that if you want RAID protection, then adding a second disk will not increase the capacity.   You'd need to add 2 disks in order to do that.

The formula for capacity with XRAID is "sum the disks and subtract the largest".   That extra space is used for RAID recovery blocks.  That gives you protection from routine disk failures.  It also makes it possible to easily "vertically expand" the volume later on (upgrading at least two of the 10 TB drives to a larger size - for instance 16 TB).

If you do want RAID redundancy than you

• hot insert the first new drive
• wait for the resync to complete
• hot insert the second new drive
• wait for resync to complete

At that point you'd have a 20 TB volume (~18.2 TiB).

But if you can only afford one disk right now (or don't care about RAID protection), then you need to switch to FlexRAID.  The best approach is to create a second volume with the new disk, and to shift some shares over to it.  Generally you want at least 15% free space with BTRFS. So you'd

• switch to FlexRAID by clicking on the XRAID control on the volume tab.  (if there is a green stripe on that control, then XRAID is enabled).
• hot insert the new drive
• select the drive from the graphic on the volume tab
• create a new JBOD volume

At that point you'd have two 10 TB volumes (~9.1 TiB).