ReadyNAS 212 adding additional hard disk for data backup

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Barathidasan wrote:

 

I purchased another 4TB (Seagate ironwolf ) hard disk and properly shutdown the NAS and added new 4TB in the bay and Power ON. after booting it started syncing automatically in x-raid mode.

Correct.  When XRAID is on, that is the behavior.  You can tell if it is on by looking at the XRAID control on the volume tab of the web ui.  IF it has a green stripe, then XRAID is on.

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Barathidasan wrote:

Can i not use this new hard disk for data backup as additional storage instead of using as RAID? How to do it?

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What you should have done before was turn XRAID off before inserting the disk.  Then you could have either added the disk to the current volume or you could have created a second volume.  Note that two volumes are more robust.  If you have a single volume, then when either disk fails you lose all the data.  With two volumes, you only loose the data on the disk that fails.

Now, the situation is more difficult.  The system has already switched over to RAID-1, and it doesn't provide any way to undo that.

You can

• switch to flexraid, destroy the current volume, and create two jbod volumes (or an 8 TB single volume).
• enable ssh, and attempt to convert the RAID-1 volume back to JBOD using the linux CLI

Both require backing up the data first - Sandshark has described the second process here, but there is risk of data loss.  https://community.netgear.com/t5/Using-your-ReadyNAS-in-Business/Reducing-RAID-size-removing-drives-WITHOUT-DATA-LOSS-is-possible/td-p/1736125