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Forum Discussion
3220 Horizontal Upgrade Planned
Just wanted to make sure I'm reading the manual correctly. We launced a 3220 box wtih 8 out of 12 drives populated, each drive is a 4TB red and the box has had some traffic with minor file loading an...
The manual does say that you need to switch to xraid in order to expand horizontally. That is easy to do, and with OS 6 it is non-destructive. Your data will remain intact, and you will still have dual redundancy. (If for some reason you do see a warning, and are asked to type "DESTROY", then certainly stop!)
Though I am a huge fan of the WD Red drives, I'd be a bit worried about vibration with 12 in the chassis. You might want to add WDC Red Pros (which are spec'd for 16 bay NAS, and are enterprise class). I'd leave the existing Reds, but would likely replace any failed drives in the future with the Pro.
Just a thought...
Thanks Stephen,
Actually the new 4 are PRO Series drives (WD4001FFSX) to be exact but you answered my #1 question, I won't loose the volume. It's not a production machine .. YET .. however after a couple of weeks of testing it's finding it's place to replace the Synoogy units that were in the rack before it.
I wasn't confident in a propriertary raid format (X-Raid) so I opted to launch with the more establisted Raid-6 however I didn't read far enough in to see the discaimer about the need to be in X-Raid to expand the system.
The button has been pushed, not it's just a matter of time for the system to become X-Raid.
Thanks again.
X-RAID2 uses standard RAID levels. The automation of expansion is what makes X-RAID2 special.
I guess the only quesiton that remains is, power down the box and install the 4 new drives or hot entry the drives before I hit the convert switch?
Also out of curiousity, what if any drawbacks are there to adding the 4 drives and creating a new Volume based on those 4 units in say a RAID-10?
ML
Convert to xraid now, and then hot insert the drives. I suggest one at a time, letting each resync complete before starting the next (then its easier to diagnose if something goes wrong).
Resync on a large array like this will take a while though. So if you have a backup it might actually be quicker to rebuild the volume from scratch and reload the data.
Your alternative idea of setting up a second volume is fine. Of course you are giving up 8 TB of capacity (12x4TB RAID-6 is 40 TB, 8x4TB RAID-6 + 4x4TB RAID-10 is 32 TB). You'll also need to manually balance storage across the two volumes.
The RAID-10 volume would be faster - in part because the new disks are faster, and in part because RAID-10 writes are faster than RAID-6 writes. The two smaller volumes would be more resilient to disk failures than one massive RAID-6 array, and a resync when a drive is replaced in the future will be faster.
If you are ok with giving up the space, I'd go for the two volumes myself.
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