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Forum Discussion
anserk
Nov 06, 2017Aspirant
RN102 mixed drives
I'm trying to use two drives with different sizes (1TB and 5TB) and get some level of protection. According to https://kb.netgear.com/21387/What-is-the-volume-capacity-when-installing-disks-of-different-sizes, I was under impression I can create 1TB RAID 1 volume and use the rest 4TB from the larger drive as a separate unprotected volume. However, I don't see any option in WebUI allowing me to do that once I created a RAID 1 volume.
Is this not supported on RN102?
I'm running 6.9.0.
That article is accurate for Sparc ReadyNAS, the last of which was discontinued about 6 years ago now.
6 Replies
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- SandsharkSensei - Experienced User
" In Flex-RAID mode, you can utilize the leftover space on the 3 750GB disks by creating another data volume (3 x 500GB)." certainly does seem to indicate that to be possible, but I've always believed that not to be the case. Maybe it's new? If you disable XRAID on the Volume menu and then select the 5TB drive, can you select "New Volume"?
- anserkAspirant
I did try both X-RAID and Flex-RAID. It doesn't give ability even to select to drives - nothing happens when I click on the 5TB one (buttons to the right remain unclickable).
I'm starting to suspect that article applies only to 4-drive models, although it's not clear. From Linux perspective it should be possible to partition the larger drive and use that partition along with the smaller drive for RAID, and then use the other partition as a standalone volume. I was hoping ReadyNAS OS would allow something like that.
- SandsharkSensei - Experienced User
The whole article appears to be false. In XRAID, so long as you start with all 4 drives in their example, or at least include the smallest at the begining, you can use all of the capacity except when there are just two drives. With all four, there would be one 4x250GB layer and one 3x500GB layer, all as one volume. It is in FlexRAID that the smallest drive limits the size.
Maybe this was true for the legacy OSes? I never had a mix of drive sizes in mine.
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