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ReadyNAS104 - Adding and Removing Drives
My 4 bay ReadyNAS104 is currently running with 3 drives used and 1 bay spare. The 3 bays are fitted with WD Red 3.5" HDD's (2 x 2TB and 1 x 4TB). I want to get another drive for additional storage for the last empty bay, but am not sure if I should stick with the 4TB size or go to my preferred 8TB size. Can I continue to mix and match HDD sizes? I intend to replace the older, smaller 2TB drives with larger drives in the future, to provide more storage capacity. How do I do this now if I buy an 8TB HDD, and then want to remove one of the 2TB drives to provide a free bay in the NAS?
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Once all bays are full, you cannot remove one and have the NAS re-sync. If you still want a free bay, then you need to replace one of the 2TB's now. If you do that, you will end up with one 2TB x 3 layer (2 TB from each drive), one 2TB x 2 layer (one from the 4TB and one from the 8), and 4TB unused (from the 8TB). With one of the pieces of each layer used for redundancy, so you only get 6 TB when all is said and done. If you next replace the other 2TB with an 8TB, you'll have full use of all drives after redundancy. If you do decide to finally fill the last bay, it must be with a drive at least as large as the largest in the other bays. Since every layer of the RAID needs one drive's space for redundancy, regardless of whether there are 2, 3, or 4 drives with segments of that layer, you get the best use of the drives by using all 4 bays, so I'm not sure why you are reserving one.
aks wrote:
There is a useful online drive configuration and capacity calculator by Netgear here.
This can be helpful, but one drawback is that it doesn't cover expansion cases. There are expansion paths that won't work, and the tool isn't designed to give you guidance on them. With XRAID, the safe path is to either (a) replace a failing disk with one of the same size or (b) replace or add disks that are at least as big as the largest installed drive.
And ReadyNAS only support volume expansion - at the moment there is no way to remove disks from an existing volume without degrading it.
For single redundancy XRAID, the capacity rule is simple enough that you don't need the tool: just sum the disks and subtract the largest. If you want to see the volume size in TiB, google will convert for you. Try entering 24 TB in TiB in google search.
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