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Forum Discussion
radioguru6613
Sep 02, 2015Aspirant
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...
radioguru6613
Sep 02, 2015Aspirant
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.
mdgm-ntgr
Sep 02, 2015NETGEAR Employee Retired
X-RAID2 uses standard RAID levels. The automation of expansion is what makes X-RAID2 special.
- radioguru6613Sep 02, 2015Aspirant
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
- StephenBSep 03, 2015Guru - Experienced User
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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