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Solved
ReadyNAS 104 in X-RAID mode does not expand adding an additional disk
Hi, I have a ReadyNas 104 (RN104|ReadyNAS 100 Series) running firmware version 6.9.1 and I had only one 2TB (WD Red) drive inserted into it. Everything is working fine but my drive is almost full. S...
DwaineB09 wrote:
If I understand you correctly, as soon as I install that first 8TB drive, that would then become the redunancy drive
There really isn't a "redundancy drive". The parity blocks (which are the redundancy) are scattered across all the drives - and data blocks also are scattered across all drives.
When you add your first drive (2+4+8TB) you will end up with a 6 TB volume size (4 TB bigger than what you have right now). 4TB of space on the 8 TB drive will be unused. The expansion will happen in two phases. First the volume will expand horizontally to 4 TB, then the system will reboot (or perhaps you will need to reboot it), and it will vertically expand to 6 TB.
When you add the second one (2+4+8+8), the system will expand to 14 TB. I'm not sure if there a reboot will be needed for this step or not.
When you upgrade the 2 TB drive (8+4+8+8), it expands to 20 Tb, and upgrading the last one will expand it to 24 TB.
This will work, but the resync times will be long (and take longer for each expansion step). Every data block on the disks is either read or written in each step. As the total size grows, that takes longer and longer.
If you could back up your current volume, it would be faster to do a factory install with 4x8TB in place, reconfigure the NAS, and then restore the files from your backup.
DwaineB09 wrote:
Also from what I can understand, I could get an 8TB external drive, plug it into the USB slot and use that as my backup drive
Backup is important, though of course over time 8 TB won't be enough for a 24 TB volume.
Almost all 8 TB external drives are SMR technology. Folks have had trouble with them in linux systems, so you might want to research that before purchasing an SMR model. Unfortunately the datasheets often don't say if they are SMR or not.
Hi Stephen,
Thanks for your reply.
I understand the situation now. In that case could I get let's say an 8TB external drive and attach it to the USB port on the front panel and use that as the redundancy drive?
The NAS will only use internal drives for redundancy. Also, many 8 TB USB drives use SMR technology, which is not well-suited for RAID - so removing the drive from the case, and deploying it internally isn't the best option.
You could create shares on a USB drive, and use that to temporarily to expand your storage. There wouldn't be a redundancy on the USB drive, and the performance would be much slower than an internal disk. But if you have archival material that isn't referenced very often you could use that approach for now. You could of course just also use a USB drive for backup.
FWIW, you only need one 4 TB drive added for redundancy. You'd be using RAID-5, which isn't a mirror. Partity blocks are distributed across the array, and allow any of the three disks to be reconstructed from the other two. In general, the capacity of an XRAID array is "sum the disks and subtract the largest", and the redundancy needed is size of the second-largest disk in the array, So 4x3TB would give you an 8 TB volume, 4x4TB would give you 12 TB. The NAS reports these sizes in TiB, so it would show ~7.2 TiB (not 8) and ~10.9 TiB (not 12)..
Thank you for your reply.
OK no problem.
This is my plan, currently I have two drives (a 2TB and an 4TB), I'm goint to upgrade that to a 2,4,8. Afterwards upgrade that to 2,4,8,8, then go onto 8,4,8,8, and finally hve 4 8TB drives.
If I understand you correctly, as soon as I install that first 8TB drive, that would then become the redunancy drive and I would get 6TB of available space in total (disrearding the TiB) and so one. Also from what I can understand, I could get an 8TB external drive, plug it into the USB slot and use that as my backup drive so I would have one internal 8TB drive as my redundancy drive and have an external 8TB drive as my backup drive and in the end have 24TB of available storage.
Would that work?
Is there anything wrong with that?
DwaineB09 wrote:
If I understand you correctly, as soon as I install that first 8TB drive, that would then become the redunancy drive
There really isn't a "redundancy drive". The parity blocks (which are the redundancy) are scattered across all the drives - and data blocks also are scattered across all drives.
When you add your first drive (2+4+8TB) you will end up with a 6 TB volume size (4 TB bigger than what you have right now). 4TB of space on the 8 TB drive will be unused. The expansion will happen in two phases. First the volume will expand horizontally to 4 TB, then the system will reboot (or perhaps you will need to reboot it), and it will vertically expand to 6 TB.
When you add the second one (2+4+8+8), the system will expand to 14 TB. I'm not sure if there a reboot will be needed for this step or not.
When you upgrade the 2 TB drive (8+4+8+8), it expands to 20 Tb, and upgrading the last one will expand it to 24 TB.
This will work, but the resync times will be long (and take longer for each expansion step). Every data block on the disks is either read or written in each step. As the total size grows, that takes longer and longer.
If you could back up your current volume, it would be faster to do a factory install with 4x8TB in place, reconfigure the NAS, and then restore the files from your backup.
DwaineB09 wrote:
Also from what I can understand, I could get an 8TB external drive, plug it into the USB slot and use that as my backup drive
Backup is important, though of course over time 8 TB won't be enough for a 24 TB volume.
Almost all 8 TB external drives are SMR technology. Folks have had trouble with them in linux systems, so you might want to research that before purchasing an SMR model. Unfortunately the datasheets often don't say if they are SMR or not.
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