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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...
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!
I maintain that calc.
With 4,4,3,2 t drives (t meaning TB, 1000 based; tib meaning TiB, 1024 based- which is what we show in gui). you should have 9t worth of raid space. with all of the overhead that should be about ~8.1tb if useable capacity.
If your getting ~5.44 tib that sounds like its not fully expanding to the bigger drives. its just making a raid out of your 2tb portions (the same as having 2,2,2,2 t drives, or the same as having 4,4,3,2t drives in a traditional raid 5 where the extra size is ignored)
Flexraid should NOT ignore the extra size, it should intelligently (just like xraid) use up the extra space from the bigger drives
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So I think expansion is not happening like it should, could you please provide us the logs. Flexraid should expand up to the higher drive sizes just like Xraid does. Flexraid just doesnt auto change raids, and flexraid also shouldnt horizonatally autoexpand, whereas xraid auto changes raid type (raid1,raid5,raid6 with more drives) and xraid autoexpands horizontally.
kossboss wrote:
So I think expansion is not happening like it should, could you please provide us the logs. Flexraid should expand up to the higher drive sizes just like Xraid does.
Hi kossboss
I think the explanation is actually posted here: https://community.netgear.com/t5/Using-your-ReadyNAS/X-RAID-expansion-on-Pro4-with-OS6/td-p/904490
Skywalker wrote:
Expanding encrypted volumes is a little more restrictive -- we can't do multi-level (mixed disk size) encrypted volumes.
An old post, but I don't recall any release notes saying the restriction has been lifted.
I apologize, I guess I had a misunderstanding on that part of FlexRAID. It doesn't use the extra size of bigger drives. FlexRAID is like Traditional Raid in that manner in my calculator, it uses the smallest drive to base the volume. I will update the rdconfigurator calculator to match that. In the meantime if you want to get the correct FlexRAID size use Traditional Raid in the calculator.
What the original poster is looking for is XRAID.
So what are we doing to make this better? I have submitted a feature request to engineering to add features to FlexRAID to give it more features.
Here is my list To add the following features. Currently the OS6 FlexRAID features 1,2,3 from list below. I feature requestsed 4 & 5.
NOTE: im not listing encrypted volumes (im not sure if they will be an obstacle for it)
1. "Add parity": adds another drive but converts from R5 to R6 (this adds a drive and converts raid from R5 to R6)
2. "Expand": this makes a new raid and does brtfs device add, so you can make things like R50 and R60.. We should rename this to “Expand Filesystem”. This is similar to adding a vdev with readydata/zfs.
3. "Create new volume": creates new btrfs volume (not really and expansion option), it can be encrypted
4. We should add a fourth option: "Raid Expand": this will just do a mdadm -add making the current raid bigger.
5. We should add ability to use the higher partition sizes (just like XRAID can), so that maximum volume space is utilized (just like in XRAID) when varying drive sizes are used. Currently FlexRAID will use the smallest drive as the basis for raid creation if there are varying drive sizes.
I don't think that Netgear should try to turn flexraid into xraid myself.
What I'd like to see is the ability to create volumes using the unused space.
For instance with 2x4TB+1x2TB+1x3TB, I should be able to create a
4x2TB RAID-5 volume +
2x1TB RAID-1 volume +
1x1TB jbod volume
And all of them should support encryption.
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