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Expanding ReadyNAS 104
Hi, I have a 4TB in my slot1 for now, but would like to expand with some HDDs i found recently, the problem is, all of them are not equal. So i have a 2TB, 3TB, 4TB (Currently in slot1) and a fou...
The slot order doesn't matter.
The capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest". So your current 2TB+3TB+4TB should give you 5 TB - shown as ~4.5 TiB on the web admin ui. You aren't able to use 1 TB of space on the 4 TB drive. The way to maximize space is to get another 4 TB drive. That would give you 9 TB (shown as ~8.18 TiB in the web ui).
Note that you don't have RAID protection when you are adding a disk - so Netgear recommends a full backup before you do that. I agree with that advice (and would add that everyone should have a backup plan in place, since RAID isn't enough to keep your data safe).
Hi Stephen
The slot order does matter it looks like. As suggested, I bought a new 4TB added it and the synchronisation completed this morning, however when i added my 2TB in the slot 3, The expansion failed with a message saying i can only expand with equal or more capacity. So what do you suggest?
PrasannaB wrote:
The slot order does matter it looks like. As suggested, I bought a new 4TB added it and the synchronisation completed this morning, however when i added my 2TB in the slot 3, The expansion failed with a message saying i can only expand with equal or more capacity. So what do you suggest?
The slot order doesn't matter. But the order you add the disks does matter (no matter what slots you put them in). I was assuming that the two smaller disks were already in the NAS - obviously a mistake on my part.
You needed to start the array with the smallest disk (2 TB in your case). So the system wouldn't have accepted the 2 TB even if you had added it before the new 4 TB drive - because you already had a 4 TB volume.
So the options are to
(a) switch to flexraid, and add the 2 and 3 TB drives as jbod volumes. Then you'd move some shares to each volume (approximately balancing the free space).
(b) back up your data, and your configuration. Do a factory default with all disks in place, Then reinstall any apps, restore the configuration, and restore the data (in that order). This gives you a single volume with RAID protection.
The benefit of the first approach is that you don't have to start over. You give up RAID protection on the smaller jbod volumes, and you also lose the ability to expand those jbod volumes in the future. Plus you will sometimes need to move shares around in order to keep reasonable free space on all the volumes. Both approaches would give you the same amount of space.
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