ReadyNAS 212 erase all data

---

Acajohn29 wrote:

For the first year or two that I had my device I had one 6TB drive in it. I recently decided to add another drive and wanted to go big so I got a 14TB and plugged it in. It seemed to mirror the first drive and only recognized 6TB of space. 

---

Yes, that is what it is designed to do.  The second disk converts the volume to RAID-1 mirroring.  So no space increase.  Starting over with XRAID won't change this.

 

---

Acajohn29 wrote:

Ultimately I decided to get another 14TB drive, naively thinking the two 14ers would let me start fresh. The data from the original 14TB, all 6TB of it, is still showing on the first drive, (which I put in bay 1, and later switched to bay 2, but nothing changed), and while syncing only 6TB of space is indicated. Please help me get the two 14TBs installed without data and with their actual drive space.

---

This actually is the right answer.  The NAS is still mirroring, and the volume should expand to 14 TB with no data loss. This happens in two steps - first the original 6 TB volume is resynced, when that is finished the NAS will expand that volume by 8 TB.  There will be no data loss.

 

Note the NAS shows space in TiB (1024*1024*1024*1024 bytes, instead of 1000*1000*1000*1000 bytes), so it should show 12.7 TiB when expansion is complete.

 

---

Acajohn29 wrote:

 

Is it actually possible to erase all data and start over?

 

---

Yes.  You could have done a factory default from the boot menu - that would have destroyed your volume and started over.  But you'd still be using XRAID, since that is the default.  If you'd done that with 6 TB + 14 TB you'd still have ended up with a 6 TB (empty) volume.  If you do it now, you'd end up with a 14 TB (empty) volume.  But as I said above, if you just wait for the resync to completely finish, you should end up with a 14 TB volume anyway (without data loss).

 

 

Another approach (which would get you more space) is to switch to flexraid by clicking the XRAID control on the volume page. Then you could create two different volumes (giving you 28 TB of total space).  While you could end up doing that later, I am thinking that 14 TB is still a big step up for you, and that you probably are better off keeping RAID redundancy for now.

 

You haven't said anything about backing up your data - if you aren't doing that now, I suggest that you should put a backup plan in place.  Devices (disks and NAS) can fail, and recovering the data is in many cases impossible.