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Mixing disks of different sizes & multiple volumes
Hi all,
in a test setup I have the following disks:
disk1: 320G,
disk2: 500G,
disk3: 1000G
these three are in a flex-raid raid5 (3x320G).
According to the knowledge base (see [1]) it should be possible to utilize the leftover space by creating additional volumes.
The GUI doesn't offer any option to create additional volumes. The 'create volume' button remains inactive all the time. I'd expect to be able to create a second volume as raid1 using 180G from disk2 and disk3 and a non-redundant volume using the remaining 500G from disk3.
When I switch to X-Raid the system automatically creates an additional raid1 using 180G from disk2 and disk3 and groups it into the first volume.
Can anybody help me with creating additional volumes using leftover space through the GUI? (I know how to create them from the shell but this breaks other things in the GUI and this would of course be beyond the supported functionality).
Many thanks in advance!
firmware version: 6.9.2
[1] https://kb.netgear.com/21387/What-is-the-volume-capacity-when-installing-disks-of-different-sizes
Actually, it does not say what you claim it does. You are trying to mix different RAID modes, which the example does not do. But most importantly, check the units it is applicable to, which are all legacy systems running OS 4.2.x, which you are not.
The only way you can utilize all of your drive space is to have each drive as a separate JBOD volume. Your best bet is to ditch the 320GB for a 1TB, and you can then use all of the space with a single XRAID volume.
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Actually, it does not say what you claim it does. You are trying to mix different RAID modes, which the example does not do. But most importantly, check the units it is applicable to, which are all legacy systems running OS 4.2.x, which you are not.
The only way you can utilize all of your drive space is to have each drive as a separate JBOD volume. Your best bet is to ditch the 320GB for a 1TB, and you can then use all of the space with a single XRAID volume.
Many thanks for your explanation. I have been misleaded by the date of last update of the knowledge base article which is end of 2016. I just assumed this would apply to recent models / the recent OS. Kudos to the support team for updating the knowledge base also for discontinued models!
The example in the article itself doesn't say anything about raid levels so my assumption is not void.
Anyway, this seems to be a functionality that has been removed in OS 6 (silently?). Still I'd appreciate to have this functionality and I believe for home or small business users different disk sizes are a quite common scenario. The underlying technology (Linux md/mdadm/btrfs) copes perfectly which such requirements, so it should be mainly a GUI question.
z3non wrote:
Still I'd appreciate to have this functionality and I believe for home or small business users different disk sizes are a quite common scenario. The underlying technology (Linux md/mdadm/btrfs) copes perfectly which such requirements, so it should be mainly a GUI question.
Netgear has been making some changes to FlexRAID over the past couple of months - adding support for more RAID modes, and more sophisticated management of RAID groups. The documentation hasn't really caught up yet - IMO there aren't enough examples, and no clear description of the limitations.
I think your use case seems to fit into that more advanced framework, and you certainly aren't the first poster to want the ability to use the wasted space on the disks. I agree it would be good to add it. Ideally all the functionality of mdadm would be built into FlexRAID.
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