ReadyNAS 314 and adding additional HDDs

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JJKing wrote:

The 314 has a 16TB capacity limit. 

Let's start here. It doesn't have a 16 TB capacity limit.  

The original data sheet number came from the largest drive available at the time, which was 4 TB.  Today the largest drives on the HCL are 8 TB, so you could get 32 TB jbod if you wanted to stay on the HCL.  10 TB drives likely also work, so you could reach 40 TB jbod.  

RAID syncs take longer with bigger drives, so that is a consideration.  The array is vulnerable to failure while it is syncing.

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JJKing wrote:

I am hoping that the 2 x 4TB RAID 1 will be seen as 4TB and not 8TB in the capacity limit.  If that is the case then adding 2 x 8TB drives in a RAID 1 will see the total capacity as 12TB and not 24TB if all the individual HDDs were added together. 

 

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You are perhaps confused on volume capacity.

You have two choices here (assuming you want to avoid a factory reset).  

(a) You can use XRAID, and simply add in the additional 8 TB drives to the existing volume.  If you do that, the total capacity - available storage in the volume - will be 16 TB.  The rule for XRAID single redundancy is "sum the drives and subtract the largest".

(b) You can switch to flexraid and then create a second RAID-1 volume with the new 8 TB drives.  That would give you a second volume of 8 TB, so you'd have a total capacity of 12 TB.  Shares can't span volumes, so you'd to create new shares on the second volume (possibly copying data over trom the old volume via the built-in backup jobs).

(a) gives you the most space, (b) is more robust.

Here's how to tell if you are running xraid already:  Look on the volumes tab of the web UI.  You'll see an XRAID button on the far right.  If there is a green stripe running through the button, then XRAID is enabled.  If there is no green stripe you are running flexraid.

Make sure you are in the mode you want before you insert the new drives.