NVX Business Edition Max Capacity

Yes it will handle 3 tb drives.
The capacity will of course not be 12 tb, it will be around 8.3 tb.
I would upgrade your firmware to 4.2.23 first.
Then make sure you have a backup of your data.
It's worth checking each new disk with vendor tools before adding it to ensure the drive is good.
Then hot swap one drive at a time. Allow the NAS to resync after each drive is inserted and confirm that the volume is redundant before adding the next drive.
If you can, have one spare tested drive always available in case you have a drive failure - you don't want to have to wait for an order to be delivered.

vandermerwe wrote:

Yes it will handle 3 tb drives. The capacity will of course not be 12 tb, it will be around 8.3 tb. I would upgrade your firmware to 4.2.23 first. Then make sure you have a backup of your data. It's worth checking each new disk with vendor tools before adding it to ensure the drive is good. Then hot swap one drive at a time. Allow the NAS to resync after each drive is inserted and confirm that the volume is redundant before adding the next drive. If you can, have one spare tested drive always available in case you have a drive failure - you don't want to have to wait for an order to be delivered.

Thank you! Is there any advantage to starting from scratch and changing the RAID mode? X-raid/Flex-raid or is that not applicable to my machine? Sorry for the noob questions. I haven't been following the boards much.

There is an growth limit to expansion - no more then 8 TiB greater than your starting point (which is the volume size at your last factory reset, or your initial install). If there is a chance you will hit that, then it is good to start fresh.

Also, if you install all the new drives at once, if there is a problem you can power down and reinstall the old ones.

For most folks xraid2 is the better choice.

BTW, upgrade your firmware before you begin. There are bugs in NVX expansion, you can see the details if you search the forum.

Ahhh that's the "gotcha" I was looking for. I've upgraded the drives twice already. Started with 1tb drives then 2tb drives and now these 3tb drives will add another 3tb of usable space. Probably also a good reason to start from scratch so everything will defrag.

Thanks for your help.

If you started with 4 1 tb drives then you would only ( just) reach the 8 tb limit if and when you expanded with 4 4tb drives.

Often people do their initial install with only 1 drive (at one point Netgear recommended that). In that scenario he would have reached it on this expansion.

Anyway, doing a reset now would allow expansion up to 16 TiB in the future, without needing another reset. So even 5 TB drives would be ok.

Conceded

Thank you guys for your collective wisdom!