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Forum Discussion
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readyNAS capacity
Hi! I'm new to the NAS world and I'm lost 🙂
In my office there has always been a ReadyNAS pro 6 that was quite unused.
We decided to repurpose it and I have updated (successfully!) to OS 6 and changed the RAM so that it is now 4gb.
I added some disks (some were new one and some unused ones) and now there are:
- one 0.5 TB disk that I will soon hot swap with a 1TB one
- three 1 TB disks
- two 4 TB disks
We need data protection, we don't need it to be super fast, and possibly "big" storage.
Having the disks so uneven in size, I thought that RAID 10 could give me the characteristics I wanted and most storage. I thought the system wold have the 0.5 GB, one 1TB and one 4TB disks as storage, and the other for copies, leading to 5.5 TB storage, that would became 6TB after swapping the 0.5TB disk.
After creating the volume, I couldn't choose which disks would be storage and which one copies. Now the system says I have a 1.35TB volume, that it is 1/4 of what I expected. What did I do wrong?
Thank you!
clavz wrote:
Having the disks so uneven in size, I thought that RAID 10 could give me the characteristics I wanted and most storage. I thought the system wold have the 0.5 GB, one 1TB and one 4TB disks as storage, and the other for copies, leading to 5.5 TB storage, that would became 6TB after swapping the 0.5TB disk.
It's a pure RAID-10 setup, so all disks are treated as equal size. You ended up with 3 paired 0.5 TB partitions, so 1.5 TB total. If you'd swapped the 1 TB disk before setup, you'd have 3 TB - still wasting the space on the 4 TB drives.
If the simplest recovery is the primary objective, you could also create three RAID-1 volumes. Or maybe a 4x1TB RAID-10 volume plus a 2x4TB RAID-1 volume.
Why not just use X-RAID? 1x500GB + 3x1TB + 2x4TB XRAID would give you 7.5 TB of space, which would become 8 TB after you replace the 500 GB drive. But personally I'd just take out the 500 GB drive, and leave one empty slot. It's likely very old, and doesn't add enough storage to be worth the bother. I also don't see a lot of value in getting a new 1 TB drive, as the price difference between 1 TB and 4 TB is so small. 3x1TB+3x4TB XRAID would give you an additional 3 TB of storage for perhaps $20 USD over the cost of a 1 TB drive.
Do be careful to purchase NAS-purposed or enterprise class drives though - many desktop class drives in the 2-6 TB range are SMR, which aren't a good fit for RAID (or ReadyNAS in general). Avoid WD Red - Red Plus or Red Pro are fine, as are Seagate Ironwolf. WD Reds are also SMR (poor decision by WD).
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clavz wrote:
Having the disks so uneven in size, I thought that RAID 10 could give me the characteristics I wanted and most storage. I thought the system wold have the 0.5 GB, one 1TB and one 4TB disks as storage, and the other for copies, leading to 5.5 TB storage, that would became 6TB after swapping the 0.5TB disk.
It's a pure RAID-10 setup, so all disks are treated as equal size. You ended up with 3 paired 0.5 TB partitions, so 1.5 TB total. If you'd swapped the 1 TB disk before setup, you'd have 3 TB - still wasting the space on the 4 TB drives.
If the simplest recovery is the primary objective, you could also create three RAID-1 volumes. Or maybe a 4x1TB RAID-10 volume plus a 2x4TB RAID-1 volume.
Why not just use X-RAID? 1x500GB + 3x1TB + 2x4TB XRAID would give you 7.5 TB of space, which would become 8 TB after you replace the 500 GB drive. But personally I'd just take out the 500 GB drive, and leave one empty slot. It's likely very old, and doesn't add enough storage to be worth the bother. I also don't see a lot of value in getting a new 1 TB drive, as the price difference between 1 TB and 4 TB is so small. 3x1TB+3x4TB XRAID would give you an additional 3 TB of storage for perhaps $20 USD over the cost of a 1 TB drive.
Do be careful to purchase NAS-purposed or enterprise class drives though - many desktop class drives in the 2-6 TB range are SMR, which aren't a good fit for RAID (or ReadyNAS in general). Avoid WD Red - Red Plus or Red Pro are fine, as are Seagate Ironwolf. WD Reds are also SMR (poor decision by WD).
While StephenB addressed how to get the most from your drives, I'm going to address something else you said.
You said you want "data protection". Unless the NAS is that protection (it's only backup, all files exist on and can be recovered from another source), you may be expecting more from RAID than it is intended to do. The primary purposes of RAID are the creation of a single volume from multiple smaller drives and continued access when one of those drives fails. Note that I did not include "backup", because it isn't. A RAID array can still go bad and be unrecoverable. If you peruse the forum, you will find a lot of messages from users who found that out the hard way and either had to jump through (sometimes expensive) hoops to recover their data or ended up losing it. Even if you have two totally independent volumes in a NAS which back each other up (which is not what RAID does, but you can manually configure), a single hardware or software fault within the NAS can corrupt both.
For backup to be independent of a single device fault, that backup must be completely independent. A USB drive (very do-able given the size of your NAS volume), another NAS, or cloud backup would fill that bill. If you also want to protect against theft, fire, flood, etc., then that backup must also be off-site. Rotating of USB drives to an off-site location, a remote NAS, and cloud backup are options there.
I also suggest you look very closely at the age of those drives. This is your opportunity to replace them while you don't have a lot of data on the NAS. A couple of 10TB drives would give you more space than you have now and lots of room to grow by adding more drives as you need them.
Thank you, I really appreciated. We will run a backup. The three disk are the original ones, but the use was not really intensive and I think we are gonna change them soon if the new network architecture will prove to be useful.
Thank you, I didn't understand how RAID 10 worked, then. I will switch to X-RAID.
Thank you for the advice on SMR drives, the 2 4 TB drives are ironwolf. I have been lucky ordering them without knowing.
The 1 gb has been sitting in another unused nas of a colleague of mine. Probably not gonna use it after the suggestion on old disks (or maybe I will swap it later? It looks like this X-RAID is really flexible).
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