RN3200 XRAID Expansion - Sanity Check.

onestopit wrote:

Folks, We have an existing 6TB (6 x 1TB Factory Stock Drives) in a XRAID2 array which we are looking to expand with the addition of 3 x 2Tb drives from the approved drive list. Ideally I would like to perform an online expansion but also looking for speed of expansion across the additional drives. Would I be better doing this drive by drive online, or shutting down - inserting the new drives and restarting so all drives are included at same time?

Optional - First I would schedule some downtime for several hours and run the "Disk Test" boot option: http://www.readynas.com/kb/faq/boot/how_do_i_use_the_boot_menu

This will help flag if one of your disks already in the NAS is failing/dead. The long offline SMART tests are very thorough. The short online daily SMART tests are relatively fast involve some randomness and are more likely to miss a failing disk. Whilst this should be fine in day to day usage, when adding a disk to your volume you put heavy stress on all disks, so it's best to remove dead/failing disks before adding additional ones.

I would add one drive at a time online, wait for resync to complete then add next disk.
Under Volume > Volume Settings, does your volume show as X-RAID2 dual-redundancy or just X-RAID2? I would expect it would probably show as X-RAID2 dual-redundancy

onestopit wrote:
Also, if we insert the additional 3 x 2Tb drives do we just get 3Tb additional space or 4Tb? ie: Do they get viewed as 1Tb drives along with the other existing 1Tb drives or do they get viewed as 2Tb drives and therefore once 2nd/3rd drive is inserted this then becomes 4/6Tb additional space depending on how drives are striped into existing array?

Assuming you are using the default X-RAID2 dual-redundancy they will be seen as 1TB disks. If you added a fourth 2TB disk you would have the horizontal expansion of an additional 1TB and then the vertical expansion to use additional redundant space.

Take a look at 6-bay dual-redundancy example expansion paths

Whilst written for 6-bay units the principles are the same with 12 bay units.