replacing hard drive in rn214

Why are you posting in the Nighthawk router forum? Can't you read? Post here: https://community.netgear.com/t5/New-ReadyNAS-Users-General/bd-p/readynas-general

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10.9gavstar1979 wrote:
hi there i was just wondering what is the largest hard drive u can put in a rn214?

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There is no known upper limit.  The biggest drive on the HCL is 16 TB.  But the 18 TB SATA drives released last year would likely work too.

But I wouldn't go with 4x16TB or 4x18TB on an RN214 myself.  How big are your current drives?

BTW - you should get NAS-purposed drives (WD Red Plus, Red Pro, Seagate Ironwolf, Ironwolf Pro) or perhaps Enterprise class (WD Gold, Seagate Exos, etc).  Don't use desktop drives or ordinary WD Reds.  Some of those drives are SMR, and they aren't suitable for RAID.

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gavstar1979 wrote:
do u have to do 22 drives 

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If you are using the default X-RAID you will need to upgrade two drives to see the capacity increase.  The overall capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest".  So if you upgrade from 4x2TB to 2x8TB+2x2TB you'd end up with a 12 TB volume   The NAS reports that in TiB (1024*1024*1024*1024 bytes), so it will say 10.9.  Google will convert these units for you - try typing 12 TB in TiB in the search bar.

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gavstar1979 wrote:
how do u replace the drives with new ones

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Do a backup of the NAS first - the array is unprotected during expansion, so there is more risk of data loss than usual.

I test the disks first using vendor tools in a Windows PC - Lifeguard for Western Digital; and Seatools for Seagate.  I run the full non-destructive read test, and then follow that up with the full write-zeros ("erase") test.  I have had new disks fail out-of-the-box, and sometimes had have disks that pass the read test but fail the write test (and vice versa).  You can connect the disks either with SATA or using a USB adapter/dock.

Then I hot-swap them in the NAS - removing one disk with the NAS running, and then inserting the new one.  Wait for the resync to complete, and then hot-swap the second one.  The NAS should resync the second drive in two steps - and the second resync is when the capacity will go up.