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New ReadyNAS 316 single to dual redundancy and future-proofing
Hi Everyone,
QUESTION: on a 316 (with OS 6) and with only 3 or 4 drives, can I go from single redundancy to dual redundancy without having to re-format my drives? That is, if I add a 5th drive...
It would be a matter of days. Of course you should make sure your backup is up to date before you add a disk to the NAS. No important data should be stored on just the one device regardless of the RAID level used. The sync when you add a disk puts heavy stress on all disks. If disks are failing this sync can finish them off.
It can be done while the NAS is on but performance will be reduced during this time. If you do use the NAS during the resync that's fine, but the sync will take longer than it would otherwise.
It is best to setup dual-redundancy from the beginning (switch to Flex-RAID, destroy default volume, create new RAID-6 volume, re-enable X-RAID) as the conversion to dual-redundancy does take quite some time.
With an existing volume you would need to disable X-RAID and get the next disk added to add parity and once the disk has been added re-enable X-RAID.
Note with dual-redundancy if you had 6x6TB disks and wanted to expand further you would need 4 disks with higher capacity.
It is advisable to schedule a balance to run every few weeks and volume usage should be kept to about 80%.
Thank you so much for the rapid reply.
Can you (roughly) define what you mean by "quite some time" in the context I described (perhaps 4 or 5 x 6TB drives, planning on using the snapshot manager to make frequent snapshots). Is this something measured in hours, days, weeks, months or (yikes!) years?
Also, if I do disable X-raid, add the parity disk, re-enable xraid, is this something that can be done live? We are only 2 or 3 light users, so there won't be much overall load to the system other than the re-factoring.
Thanks again,
Damon
It would be a matter of days. Of course you should make sure your backup is up to date before you add a disk to the NAS. No important data should be stored on just the one device regardless of the RAID level used. The sync when you add a disk puts heavy stress on all disks. If disks are failing this sync can finish them off.
It can be done while the NAS is on but performance will be reduced during this time. If you do use the NAS during the resync that's fine, but the sync will take longer than it would otherwise.
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