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Forum Discussion
z3non
Feb 26, 2018Aspirant
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]) i...
- Feb 27, 2018
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.
z3non
Feb 27, 2018Aspirant
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.
StephenB
Feb 27, 2018Guru - Experienced User
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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