Downsizing 2 drive nas

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Sput1985 wrote:
I have many times inceased the size of my nas by replacing a drive at a time resyncing and then rebooting the device.

Can i reverse this process to take 2tb drives out and replace with 1tb drives. There is less then 1tb of data on the nas so there isnt a space issue removing drives.

Thanks

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You can not. As far as I understand, the system will need to rebuild the array using the entire disc space even though most of it is empty. In theory you could have 50 GB placed at the beginning of the disc, 100 GB in the middle and 10 GB at the end of the disc. The system should then move the data around to fit the smaller disc. RAID does not work this way.

You didn't say which NAS you have.

For the latest OS6.x devices, the underlying BTRFS does allow for shrinking of RAID volumes, but Netgear has not implemented it in ReadyNAS OS.  I think it would be a bad idea to go in and try to manually shrink without being prepared to do a factory default and restore the data if it fails (which is the supported method of downsizing).

For OS4.x or 5.x NASes, the answer is a simple no.