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Is it possible to mix HDD sizes on Netgear RN104
Hi guys,
I currently have an old Netgear RN104 and it's has been running flawlesly for about 8 years now (thank God!). I'm running it with 4 WD 2TB Red's. Everything is setup on Raid5
The question is, if I'd like to put bigger disks (let's say 4TB each), can I take out one disk of 2TB, replace it with 4TB and put it back in? I wonder if the Raid system won't complain if one disk would be bigger than the others?
If the above step would work fine, I'd repeat it for all the other disks one by one.
Thanks!
viliusp wrote:
The question is, if I'd like to put bigger disks (let's say 4TB each), can I take out one disk of 2TB, replace it with 4TB and put it back in? I wonder if the Raid system won't complain if one disk would be bigger than the others?
First check that you are running X-RAID. Do that by looking at the volume tab in the admin web ui. If you see a green stripe on the X-RAID control, then it is enabled. If you don't see that stripe, then click on the control - which should enable it.
Then you can hot-swap one of the disks. Wait for the resync to complete before hot-swapping the next. The capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest".
One thing to consider is the cost-effectiveness of the upgrade. If you get four 4TB drives, the cost is about $450 US, and you gain 6 TB more space than you have now. If you get two 8TB drives, you gain the same space for slightly less (~$400 US per current amazon prices). Plus if you need to upgrade again, you can simply upgrade another 2 TB drive to 8 TB, and gain 6 TB more.
Also, make sure you don't get an SMR drive. WD Red Plus are ok, current WD Red drives are not.
Note that the RAID volume is unprotected while the disks are resyncing, so having a backup of the data is recommended.
4 Replies
viliusp wrote:
The question is, if I'd like to put bigger disks (let's say 4TB each), can I take out one disk of 2TB, replace it with 4TB and put it back in? I wonder if the Raid system won't complain if one disk would be bigger than the others?
First check that you are running X-RAID. Do that by looking at the volume tab in the admin web ui. If you see a green stripe on the X-RAID control, then it is enabled. If you don't see that stripe, then click on the control - which should enable it.
Then you can hot-swap one of the disks. Wait for the resync to complete before hot-swapping the next. The capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest".
One thing to consider is the cost-effectiveness of the upgrade. If you get four 4TB drives, the cost is about $450 US, and you gain 6 TB more space than you have now. If you get two 8TB drives, you gain the same space for slightly less (~$400 US per current amazon prices). Plus if you need to upgrade again, you can simply upgrade another 2 TB drive to 8 TB, and gain 6 TB more.
Also, make sure you don't get an SMR drive. WD Red Plus are ok, current WD Red drives are not.
Note that the RAID volume is unprotected while the disks are resyncing, so having a backup of the data is recommended.
That's great insight!
The reason I was thinking about stepping into 4x4TB since the 104 version seems to be supporting up to 16TB per volume (I presume this is X-RAID volume). If I'd jump for the 2x 8TB drives I'm over the limit already.
Or I'm misreading the specs?
Thanks!
The 104 will support a larger volume than that, though it is going to slow down the bigger it gets because it's quite underpowered. The spec you are reading is based on the drives that were available at the time of it's release, not an OS limitation. You could theoretically fill it with 16TB drives, though I would never try to go that big on a 104.
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