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Quick question about expanding a volume with a ReadyNAS Pro 6
Dear Community, I have A Ready NAS Pro 6 3x1TB It is runnign verison 4.2.30 Wondering if I could expand and create the best redundancy as possible. I was thinking 3x4 WD Red drives - Enter...
peteophoven wrote:
I believe I cannot expand the current volume over 8 TB right?
There are two expansion limits with XRAID:
- a volume cannot grow more than 8 TiB over it's lifetime
- a volume can expand over a 16 TiB ceiling
The first limit applies here.
If you initially installed 3x1TB, then you can grow your volume to about 10 TB.
If you initially installed 1TB, and then added the other two, then you can grow your volume to about 9 TB.
If you have a 9 TB ceiling, then you can replace two of your 1 TB drives (one at a time) with 4TB models, and install the third 4 TB drive in an empty slot. You'll end up with a 9 TB volume.
If you have a 10 TB ceiling, then replace one of the 1 TB drives, and install two 4 TB drives in empty slots. You'll end up with a 10 TB volume.
Once you hit the expansion limit you need to do a factory reset to expand further. That will destroy your data, so you will need to restore it from a backup.
peteophoven wrote:
... but want to be smart about adding the drives to allow for maximum redundancy, so if two drives fail I will still be okay,
You have single redundancy now. If you want dual redundancy, then you need to have four drives of the largest size - not three.
You'd follow the guidance above to expand the volume. There is a checkbox that let's you choose to add the final drive for redundancy. You'd check that box, and install the fourth 4TB drive in an empty slot.
peteophoven wrote:
...I was thinking 3x4 WD Red drives - Enterprise.
WD Reds are good drives (I use them in my own ReadyNAS). They are NAS-purposed, acoustically quiet, run cool, and have 3 year warranties. But they are not enterprise drives.
WD Red Pros are the enterprise models. They run at 7200 rpm, so they use more power and your NAS will have higher temps. Performance will be better in some cases (in others your network limits your performance, not the drives). They have 5 year warranties.
If your volume capacity was 1.8TB when you last did a factory default (wipes all data, settings, everything) you can't expand past 9.8TB.
You can't expand past 16TB. You can do a factory default with higher capacity disks in place.
OS6 doesn't have these limitations.
You could update your regular backup (e.g. to a USB disk), verify your backup is good, power down, remove your 1TB disks (label order), put the 4TB disks, do a factory default (wipes all data, settings, everything) and restore your data from backup.
To be able to use dual-redundancy you'd need at least four disks (RAID-6 requires a minimum of four disks) and the capacity of two disks would effectively be used for redundancy. Note that parity is distributed amongst all the disks so there is no dedicated parity disk.
Dual redundancy provides some protection against dual disk failure, but backups are still important. Don't store important data on just the one device.
Starting over with a factory default and the new drives (plus the old if you like) is going to be your best long-term solution. And if you are going to factory default, now is a good time to think about upgrading the unit to OS 6.x. But 6.7.0 and 6.6.1 have a lot of problems, so I recommend 6.6.0 for now. Since the Legacy to OS6 .bin file is constantly updated to the latest version, I'm not sure where you would get the file. I believe there are instructions on creating one burried deep in the thread for OS6 on Legacy NASes.
If you have a current backup device capable of handling all the data, then just update the backup and get going. If you don't, you could put one 4TB drive in a USB enclosure, back up to it, factory default with everything else in the NAS, restore backup, then add the last 4TB into the array. But you really should have an onging backup strategy.
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