ReadyNas 4200 V2 processor

I wouldn't advise unplugging the fans, but maybe replacing them, if that's standard ATX with standard processors there is a chance that these are standard fans too. (I don't know that model, just guessing here)
I would advise against tossing the sinology too. You never know what could happen, having a device and a backup device is a good plan. I also don't know if the 4200 is subject to the 16Tb volume limit and the 8Tb expansion limit or not.
If you ever want to drop a windows on it, you may want to check that drivers are supported. But a debian shouldn't be a problem.

All 4.2.x systems are subject to the 16Tb volume limit and the 8Tb expansion limit. Personally I'd use flexraid on a 12 bay system. 12 disk raid5 or raid6 arrays are possible of course, but in my opinion you are much better off with smaller arrays (say 6 disks or less).

StephenB wrote:
All 4.2.x systems are subject to the 16Tb volume limit and the 8Tb expansion limit. Personally I'd use flexraid on a 12 bay system. 12 disk raid5 or raid6 arrays are possible of course, but in my opinion you are much better off with smaller arrays (say 6 disks or less).

By the time I'm done tonight, I will have migrated all 6 drives to the RN, 2x 1tb, 4x 2tb. I want to have dual drive redundancy so I'm going to break the xraid 2 and convert it to FlexRaid raid 6 as some suggested here.

should this give me 6Tb? I'm reading that Raid 6 will give me 4Tb with 4Tb unusable.

All 4.2.x systems are subject to the 16Tb volume limit and the 8Tb expansion limit. Personally I'd use flexraid on a 12 bay system. 12 disk raid5 or raid6 arrays are possible of course, but in my opinion you are much better off with smaller arrays (say 6 disks or less).

Assuming I'm going to add only 3Tb drives to the unit from this point on, by the time I get to 12 disk I'll end up with 20Tb. Why are you recommending 6 disk or less? Mainly for reliability I suppose?

In the next 5 years, I can only see my critical data growing to 10Tb of which I'm backing up to Carbonite as well as a remote server daily.

Using X-RAID2 dual-redundancy you would get 6TB (two RAID-6 layers - 6x1TB and 4x1TB layers).

Using Flex-RAID RAID-6 you'd get a 4TB volume.