ReadyNAS Ultra 6 expansion

ruudpel wrote:
So now that I'm using six drives, I'm pretty obligated to keep using six unless I am willing to do a factory default?

Yes

ruudpel wrote:
If that's the case, doesn't it make more sense to use six 3TB drives? What will my volume be with 6 x 3TB drives?

6x3TB would give you a 15 TB volume size (reported by Frontview as 13 TB, because it uses "power of two" units - technically called TiB. If your current drives are healthy, it would be cheaper to replace some of them with 4 TB models, leaving the rest as they are. 4x4TB+2x2TB would give you 16 TB (assuming you don't hit the 8 TiB limit). Price it out.

ruudpel wrote:
I knew about the 16TB limit; not about the 8TB limit. But I don't either of those limits will be a problem; I'd probably hit those numbers if I'd get six 4TB drives which is not happening.

If you installed all six 2TB drives at the same time, then your initial volume size was 10 TB - in which case you don't need to worry about the 8 TiB limit.

However, Netgear setup guides recommended installing 1 drive at a time (back when disks were small enough that the 8 TiB limit seemed impossible to reach). So if you began by installing a single 2 TB drive (adding the rest later), then your starting point was 2 TB, and you have already reached the 8 TiB limit. If you've never deleted your logs, it should be possible to tell where you started.

ruudpel wrote:
Also, about the backup, well, my NAS IS the backup..it's already in RAID config, so unless I get another NAS to function as a backup for my current NAS, I would have no idea how/where to backup 10TB of data..

If you are saying that the NAS is not used for primary storage, but only copies for backup then you shouldn't have any real issue with doing a factory reset, since you can simply make fresh backups.

On the other hand, if you are thinking that RAID is all you need to protect your data, then you are very wrong. If you read through posts here you will will find many people have learned this the hard way. You can back up to another NAS, to a group of USB drives, or to a group of desktop internal drives. Personally I back up my NAS to some older, smaller NAS - and also make a separate backup to dedicated drives in two desktop PCs. Now that 6 TB drives are available, you can back up a 10 TB volume with only 2 drives.