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Forum Discussion
FlexRAID expansion (OS 6.7.1)
I've been playing around with how I am going to manage my RN516 and EDA500, looking especially at expansion options once I've disabled XRAID so as to allow for two separate volumes. In so doing, ...
According to this site, Flex-RAID has supported volume expansion since 4.2.15, so it's apparently not a new feature.
Afaik, there are indeed some changes with Flex-RAID since 6.7.0. So horizontal expansion should be more "flexible", as well as more features for the RR4360X.
- I know that prior to 6.7.0, to horizontally expand under Flex-RAID, you need to add as many disks as in the smallest vdev. Let's say you create a 3 HDDs RAID5 array. To horizontally expand it, you need to add another 3 HDDs to trigger the expansion. A second vdev will be created (3 HDDs RAID5 array), and both will be concatenated in the BTRFS volume (in single mode). If you add another 3 HDDs, a third vdev will be created, and so on.
- Based on your description, it seems that this changed, as you were able to expand from a 2 HDDs RAID1 to a 3 HDDs RAID5 while in Flex-RAID.
- Still prior to 6.7.0 (but I think this didn't change), to vertically expand under Flex-RAID, you need to upgrade all the HDDs. It will then extend the existing RAID array in place (instead of creating sub arrays like in X-RAID).
If you want to experiment, you could use a virtual machine and small virtual drives. I guess 20-50GB would work. I have found minor discrepancy on the behavior of X-RAID on virtual and hardware, but that shouldn't be a problem in Flex-RAID mode.
I've never even gotten the virtual machine to work without completely crashing the host Windows machine. Maybe it doesn't like VirtualBox 5.x? I run plenty of other virtual machines, so it's not a general issue.
I'm finding that things work a little different with a NAS and an EDA500 than with a NAS alone, and I doubt the virtual machine has EDA500 emulation.
As for the comment on OS4.2.x supporting FlexRAID expansion, OS4.2.x always had different capabilities than OS6.x. This horizontal expansion capability is definately new in 6.x. jak0lantash says it was added in 6.7.0, and I'll believe that until shown otherwise. I no longer have any systems on anything earlier. But it was definately not there when I was experimenting with a 4200 and an earlier version.
Horizontal expansion capability is there in both mdadm for the RAID volume and BTRFS for the file system,so it's good to see that they have put those together into an easy-to-use option in the GUI for FlexRAID instead of reserving it for XRAID. Maybe we'll get some documentation on it before too long. But I thought I'd play around with it a bit before I move my RN516 + EDA500 into place as my primary system. I've got to figure how I'm going to split my existing shares on the legacy systems over to it, and future expandability is a part of that.
It's good to see that they are adding more functionality to flexraid.
One thing I hope they do is allow people to go from RAID-1 -> JBOD. A lot of people get caught by surprise when they add their first disk, and this option would give them an easy way to undo the automatic behavior.
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