ReadyNAS 102. 2 Drives 1 Volume

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a1k3m1 wrote:

will i need to upgrade the 2TB drive to another 8TB and run them in RAID0? (The RAID0 speeds are not a concern)

 

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Just to clarify - RAID0 that spans multiple disks is faster than jbod - not slower.  The risk with creating a single volume with no redundancy is that when either disk fails you lose all the data on both drives.  With two volumes, you only lose the data on the drive that fails.  Although you are backed up, it still is inconvenient to need to restore everything (including reinstalling any apps).

So my own practice is either to use normal XRAID or (when maxing capacity) to use jbod with one volume per disk.  With multiple volumes you do need to manage the free space on each volume, but I haven't found that to be burdensome. 

If you go with two volumes, make the main volume the 8 TB one (since at the next expansion, you'll replace the 2 TB disk for a larger disk).  That makes it a bit simpler, since the system won't need to move the apps when that expansion occurs.

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a1k3m1 wrote:

 

What i am hoping to do somehow is to merge the 2 drives in the NAS together to gain 10TB of total usuable storage on just the 1 volume. Is this possible? 

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Since you are in RAID-1 now, you will need to destroy your current volume:

• uninstalling plex
• switch to flex-raid
• Destroy your existing volume
• Create new volume(s)
• Reconfigure shares
• Restore data from backup
• reinstall plex 

It is fairly tedious, your other option of course is to just get a second 8 TB drive and stick with XRAID for now.

There is a post from someone who did concatenate two RAID groups on different disks to create a single volume:  https://community.netgear.com/t5/Using-your-ReadyNAS/ReadyNas-214-adding-10Tb-disk-to-2-x-6Tb-existing-single-volume/m-p/1441098#M139265