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Forum Discussion
ReadyNas 3200 upgarde 1TB Hard drive to 2TB Hard drives
Hello, I have a ReadyNas 3200 with 12 1TB Hard Drives populated. I went and put a 2TB Hard drive in bay 12, waited for it to show green on the readynas webpage under volumes, then populated bay 1...
Hello ifix,
Yes I am using X-Raid 2;
I am using version 4.2.27
We purchased a company and inherited this device. I want to use this as our main local file server, but for now the data on it is not important to us. I am currently just testing the device so I can get comfortable with it before moving all corporate data there.
Currently it shows 9TB usable; I saw the x-raid 2 animation and it says you can just add drives and more storage will be made available. There isn't a way for this device to just realize there are now (2) 2TB hard drives in place of 2 1TB Hard drives and just expand the total space? I was hoping to as disks fail or as storage needs grow just replace the 1TB drives in there for 2TB. Thats what turned me on to this device to begin with.
Is there not a way for me to simply dynamically increase capacity?
Well the problem with anything that's in raid is that no matter what size drive you use you're going to end up with only being able to use the amount of space on that drive that equals the smallest hard drive you've got in your array.
You can do Flex-Raid and add in drives all all different sizes and it will use all the available space possible, but the problem with that is there's no redundancy and each time you'd want to add a bigger drive, you'd have to delete the volume and then start over (which would be rather tedious.)
If you're planning on running mission critical stuff off of this Nas box then I'd recommend enterprise drives but if you're just using it as a file server or whatnot then I'd buy the cheapest 2TB drives I could get my hands on and throw them into an array and start out with 12 2TB drives. Me personally I just picked up a few seagate 8TB archive drives (spoiler alert, they aren't really meant for RAID but I've picked up all mine for $200 or less) and then add additional drives as I find them. So far I have 5 in a 6 bay unit.
You can also update your unit to readynas 6.0 (look up 6.0 legacy here on the forums and there should be a guide.) Software 6.0 has a much more robust set of features that are in my opinoin easier to use. It would install nicely on your unit. If I were you depending on what you're going to use the box for in the future I'd look at 3TB or 4TB drives to start off with and add as many as you want in the future. It's much easier to expand that way than having to back up all your data, wipe out your volume and then install new drives and a new volume.
And if you have no use for all 12 bays, let me know! I have a pro 6 (6 bay unit.) Perhaps I could buy that unit from you if you were interested (have always wanted a 12 bay unit!)
Thank you for your help. Do you know what this is talking about?
http://www.readynas.com/?p=656
That shows them simply adding disks, which is what I thought I would be able to do.
I read this device can't handle 3 or 4TB drives. Is that not true? I tried a 3TB drive in it, and it wouldn't recognize it.
I keep forgetting this is Netgear's proprietary raid system... Yes in theory it looks like it should work that way as described. You'll have to restart the device and see if it automatically expands or not and if not there's a manual way of doing so.
I can't remember off the top of my head what size you can bump up to... might only be 2tb drives.
2TB drives are the max supported. Larger capacity disks may work in bays 1-4
Green disks such as the one you inserted will likely have very high failure rates in a 12-bay system. They are not designed for use in such a system.
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