RN214 Drive issue -- Can I move them into 6 bay system

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RichWilson wrote:

 

I was thinking of getting the RN426 - 6 Bay, and migrating to this model from the RN214.

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You can certainly migrate disks from the RN214 to the RN426.  The NAS boot process will convert the OS partition to run Intel instead of Arm, which is pretty cool.  One caveat is that many apps are platform-specific, and the boot process doesn't touch them.  So you should uninstall apps before migration, and then reinstall them post migration.  BTW, the NAS configuration (shares, backup jobs, network settings, etc) won't change.

RichWilson wrote:

 

Or... Can I pull one of the 4 drives (each 2TB) and replace one with 4/6TB  drive?

You need to upgrade two drives to see any space increase- the capacity rule for single-redundancy XRAID is "sum the disks and subtract the largest.

So this also works.

1. Upgrading one drive to 6 TB doesn't increase space
2. Upgrading the second will increase space by 4 TB
3. Upgrading the third will increase space by another 4 TB.

Keep in mind that once you upgrade a drive to 6 TB, you can't upgrade a second drive to a smaller size (like 4 TB).  You can replace a drive with one that matches the original size, or you can upgrade it to be >= the size of the largest disk in the system.

The RAID array is most vulnerable when you are expanding it, so it is best to update your backup before you begin.  (Or whenever you are manipulating the disks - I dropped one once.  Very bad feeling when you do that.).