X-Raid going from 8 to 6 drives and increase capacity.

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 dannieboiz wrote:

When I first setup the NAS, I just used whatever drives I had laying around I have a total of 8 drives at the moment, 6x 2TB and 2x 3Tb

 

I realized that I'm not utilizing all the spaces this way and have almost 2Tb of wasted space, per the X-raid calculator,

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8 drives with XRAID will be using dual redundancy - to avoid wasting space you need the four largest drives to be the same size.  You should have a 12 TB volume with protection against two disk failures.  The NAS will show this as ~10.9 TiB.

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dannieboiz wrote:

I can get away with 6 drives 2x each, 2tb, 3tb and 4tb,

This will use single redundancy, and the volume will be 14 TB (shown as ~12.7 TiB).

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dannieboiz wrote:

 

Would X-raid automatically reallocate the space or do I need to factory reset and start over?

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You'd need to start over - XRAID won't do this automatically.  It is possible to get there via from the linux CLI, but the commands are a bit tricky, so it's probably not a good path.

You are giving up dual redundancy (protection from two disk failures) but gaining 2 TB more space.  If you don't actually need the space, perhaps just leave well enough alone for now - the extra protection is worth something, and as you say the power savings are minimal.

If you do want a bit more space, you could also just upgrade two 2 TB drives to 4TB.  You'll still waste 2 TB of space, but your capacity will go up to 14 TB (same as you'd get with (2x2+2x3+2x4 single redundancy).  That would be automatic, and avoid the factory reset.