16TB limit?

If I am not mistaken, Volume Expansion will not work beyond 16TB. In order to support 16TB or greater, you will have to factory reset with that capacity in place. This is due to the limitation of the EXT4 filesystem tools that are used to expand the filesystem.

Also, it would be advisable to have your NAS on the latest FW v4.2.27.

Thanks for the info, I appreciate it. :)

zorro wrote:
I have 2 x 6-Bay Business Edition Nases, and I would like to know if there is way to check if they have a 16TB volume limit.

There are two expansion limits for your ReadyNAS.

One is that a volume growth is limited to 8 TiB over its lifetime. The second is that a volume cannot grow over 16 TiB.

You can create a larger volume size than 16 TiB if you use disks of the same size, and do a factory reset with them all in place. That volume can't be expanded though.

Note the above limits are on the actual volume size, not the raw disk capacity. For instance, 6x3TB single redundancy is under to 16 TiB limit, as is 6x4TB dual redundancy.

I see. I wasn't aware that there are such limitations on volume expansion. Are these limitations applicable to the latest Nases as well?

zorro wrote:
I see. I wasn't aware that there are such limitations on volume expansion. Are these limitations applicable to the latest Nases as well?

The RN100 family has an absolute cap of 16 TiB on its volume size. The other new NAS products have no limit.

Neither has the 8 TiB growth limit.

I just did a fresh install of a 4.2.27 Readynas Business Pro system with 4x4TB and 2x6TB.
I get 18TB available, but in the logs an error :

Continuing with volume expansion or migration. Do not interrupt the system during this time. When complete, email notification will be sent to the alert contact list.

Then, a couple of minutes later
Volume expansion failed

This is reported after every reboot.

We've had the same error when starting out with 4 x 4TB and then adding in the 6TB's one by one (error came after adding the last 6TB).

All disks are WD RED's.

Do you have a backup of all data stored in your NAS?

Just want to know if you tried to perform a factory reset with all of the 4x4TB and 2x6TB drives inserted?

4x 4TB and 2x 6TB was the last test I did, but same error.


There is no data on this NAS so I can experiment all I want.
We do have a similar NAS in the field we would like to upgrade, hence the testing we're doing.

Is there a way to create an additional volume on OS 4.2.X systems, as that would probably solve the issue.

It seems that 6TB disks are currently not supported on ReadyNAS Pro Business Edition.

Kindly check this link: http://www.readynas.com/app/hcl_disk

As per StephenB's earlier response on this forum:

StephenB wrote:
You can create a larger volume size than 16 TiB if you use disks of the same size, and do a factory reset with them all in place. That volume can't be expanded though.

I am well aware that these are not on the list, but that is not the issue as we have some running (backup's) with 6TB in place and they run perfectly.

Having 18TB available but that ast disk not wanting to sync, is where I get puzzled.
I'm not expanding anything, these disks are all put in at once during a factory reset.