New NAS & Giving Up X-RAID

kmmcd wrote:

If I have found any disadvantage of X-RAID, it is the inconvenience that Windows does not report the actual utilization of individual volumes; instead, Windows Explorer reports each volume as total utilization of the total NAS capacity.

There is some confusion on terminology here.  With X-RAID you only have one volume.  Files and parity blocks are  spread across all the disks (with large files have data blocks on all the volumes).

ReadyNAS Shares are BTRFS sub-volumes (not volumes).

kmmcd wrote:

Furthermore, the documentation says that volumes can be expanded (how I cannot tell so far) but they can not be reduced, providing fertile ground for my making largely irreversible mistakes.

That is true with X-RAID also.  There is a way to do it manually with SSH, but it is tricky, so I wouldn't recommend using that method unless you have a backup.

Shares are another matter.  There is no need to manually expand them with ReadyNAS, and that should also be true with the Asustor.

But there likely will be a learning curve on managing the RAID if you ever have unequal size disks.