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Aspirant

Feb 04, 2016

Solved

RN204: 2x 4TB and 1x 2TB and 1x 3 TB - Not able to use full capacity

OS: 6.4.1 Hello, I spent a lot of hours till now to bring it together without success. The netgear RAID calculator says 8.16 TB in X-Raid and Flex-Raid 5 with my combination of HDDs but I'm n...

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-MeTRiX-
Feb 06, 2016
That's excactly what I expected how it's working when buying the RN204. But this device is now on it's way back to Amazon and my new QNAP 431+ is initializing the disks right now!

Thanks all for your help!

mdgm-ntgr

NETGEAR Employee Retired

Feb 04, 2016

With Flex-RAID RAID-5 the capacity of the smallest disk is used. If you replace the 2TB disk with a 4TB disk the volume should expand as the smallest disk would now be 3TB. Though I'm not sure whether expansion is possible with encrypted volumes.

RAID-5 protects against a single disk failure, however there are problems it doesn't protect against (e.g. multiple disk failures, fire, flood, theft etc.) so if the NAS is used for primary storage you do need to backup your data.

-MeTRiX-
Aspirant
Feb 04, 2016
Yes I know but i would like to work with the HDDs I have and the calculator says >8TB -> http://rdconfigurator.netgear.com/raid/index.html
Is the calculator working wrong?

I was not able to find in documentation that encryption impacts the way X-Raid / Flex-Raid is working. So Netgear please let me know if encryption is the problem, the calculator is wrong or what I have to do to get it running with 8 TB!

Thanks!
- mdgm-ntgr
  NETGEAR Employee Retired
  Feb 04, 2016
  That calculator is showing the wrong value for Flex-RAID for your selection of disks. The traditional RAID-5 is showing the correct volume capacity.
  - StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User
    Feb 04, 2016
    mdgm wrote:
    
    That calculator is showing the wrong value for Flex-RAID for your selection of disks. The traditional RAID-5 is showing the correct volume capacity.
    
    Yes.
    
    Also if you were to start over with xraid you would get a 9 TB volume (~8.18 TiB). But to do that you'd need to back all your data, do a factory reset, rebuild the NAS, and then restore the data from the backup.