New to Multiple Drive NAS Setup

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eondesigns wrote:

 

...My question is, what configuration options would I have for the following:

 

2 x 1TB drives

2 x 2TB drives

 

As they are mixed sizes does that rule out RAID? Will they all just appear as 4 networked drives? Do they all become one BIG network drive? or something else?

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By default they would appear as one XRAID volume, with 4 TB of space.  The NAS reports space in TiB, so it would report ~3.6 TiB.

 

You would want to make sure that the 1 TB drives are installed when you do the first set up (you can of course have all four drives installed).

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Just to add a little bit more confusion - they are not all identical, for example 1 of the 1TB drive has an 8MB cache the other is a 32MB cache. Unsure of the 2TB drives at the moment.

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That doesn't matter.

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They are all WD Green Edition drives though

 . 

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They are not the best choice for NAS - WD Red drives are better options.  You should check on the hardware compatibility list.  Your drives will likely work, but if they aren't on the HCL, Netgear can (and often does) deny support.  The HCL is here: http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/20641/~/hardware-compatibility-list-hard-disks

 

If you use them, I suggest running WDC's lifeguard diag on them first - both the "long test" and the destructive "write zeros" test.

 

BTW, RAID doesn't guarantee data safety, so there still is a need for backups.

Hello eondesigns,

 

This may also help calculating the approximate volume size you get from combined disks in a RAID (XRAID and Traditional/FlexRAID): http://rdconfigurator.netgear.com/raid/index.html

 

OS partition, swap partition, etc are not deducted yet.

 

Volume expansion article will help you understand how to expand the volume in case you decide to in the future.

 

Regards,