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Possible to have two different size NAS drives
Hello, I recently purchased my ReadyNAS 212 system to replace multiple external hard drives I had for data backups. I initially had two 4TB drives in system, once I noticed I was running out of s...
harshofdhm wrote:
My goal is if I have two 12TB in both bays then at least I get 12TBNot sure if your goal is to get 12 TB with RAID redundancy or 24 TB without RAID redundancy.
If you'd let 2x12 TB finish syncing, you would have had a 12 TB volume, and your data would have been on that volume.
I also sketched out how to get 24 TB earlier. You set up the system with one disk, and then switch to FlexRAID. Then you can add the second disk, and set up a second 12 TB jbod volume. Alternatively (though I don't recommend this), you could concatenate the two RAID groups onto a single volume. Preserving your data is not possible (at least not from the Admin UI). So you'd need to offload it before you begin. One way to do that is to connect one of the two disks to a PC, temporarily format it, and copy the files from the NAS to that disk. Then copy the files back to the NAS after you install the first 12 TB.
BTW, you don't use ReadyTier to set up the volumes - that has a different purpose. I suggest you read through chapter 2 of the software manual here: https://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/READYNAS-100/READYNAS_OS_6_SM_EN.pdf
Your NAS is configured to use X-RAID - which for 2 bays is the same as RAID-1. In that configuration, you get the space of whichever drive is smallest.
So 2x12 TB will give you a 12 TB (10.9 TiB) volume size. But you need to wait for the resyncs to complete. There are two steps - one is to resync the old 4 TB setup, the second is to expand to 12 TB (which requires a second resync).
Thank you, StephenB !
So I reverted back to 3TB and 4TB setup. As you can see in the new attached screenshot, X-Raid is turned off and resync finished too but my free space is still 3TB. I still can't expand or change Tiers.
harshofdhm wrote:
So I reverted back to 3TB and 4TB setup. As you can see in the new attached screenshot, X-Raid is turned off and resync finished too but my free space is still 3TB. I still can't expand or change Tiers.
RAID-1 volume size is still limited to the smaller of the two drives (whether in flexraid or xraid). It's impossible to get redundancy otherwise.
If your goal is to maximize space, then IMO the best option to to set up 2 jbod volumes (one for each drive).
It is possible to set up a single 7 TB volume that spans both disks (with no redundancy). The downside is that if either disk fails, you lose all the data in the volume. With two volumes, you only lose the data on the disk that fails.
So instead of waiting for the re-sync of the second 12TB drive to complete, after which you would have had 12TB of space, you decided to start over? What is your goal here?
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