ReadyNAS Ultra 6 expansion

ruudpel wrote:
thank you for your very thorough reply. However, I'm a bit confused as to the complexity of all this. Let's remove the data that's currently stored at my NAS for clarity's sake. It's my problem as to how and where I backup that data.

Maintaining your existing data w/o a backup is possible (though not ideal). The step-by-step shows how to do that.

I don't think its quite as complicated in practice as the post makes it look, though it is similar to those river crossing puzzles where you are trying to get across the river without being eaten by the cannibals.

ruudpel wrote:
So let's say I remove all six drives at once and replace them, all at once, with five 4TB drives. Then I do factory reset/default. My volume will be 4 x 4TB = 16TB, with the 5th drive functioning as redundant correct?

Actually if you do replace them all at once ,there is no need for the reset, since the NAS is doing a fresh install on the new drives. Apart from that nuance, the answer is yes.

ruudpel wrote:
Then I can always later add a 6th 4TB drive.

You can add the sixth drive for dual-redundancy (getting more protection, but no more space). But you will not be able to expand the 16 TB volume unless you do a second reset.

The whole purpose of xraid is to allow you to expand the array, and if you are starting out at 16 TB you can't do that anyway. Given that, you could potentially use flexraid to set up 4x5TB RAID-5. That gives you the option of adding a 6th disk as a second volume (not RAID protected). That could be useful for PC backups or non-critical files. Switching to flexraid would require a reset though, there's no migration path possible for that which preserves your existing array.