Suitability of legacy 12-bay rack-mount ReadyNAS units for home use

OK, after some more experimenting, it seems you are not completely wihtout XRAID expandability, at least on OS6.x.  I have two volumes and ran the following experiment on both:

Powered off.  Removed drives that made up the other array.  Powered on.  Toggled on XRAID.  Expanded RAID with another drive.  Toggled off XRAID.  Powered off.  Returned other drives.  Powered on.

I got different results depending on the array expanded.

When I expanded the main "data" array from 4 to 5 drives, everything just worked when I put the other drives back in.

When I expanded my second array (which I call "test") from 1 drive JBOD to 2 drive RAID1, it warned me of "dirty disks" in RAIDar and wouldn't boot when all drives were back in.  I did a lot of experiments, and ultimately got it booted with both arrays intact, but I'm not sure which thing I did made the difference.  I think it might have been booting without the second array, then adding those drives "hot".  At that point, it recognized the array, but there was a red dot by it on the Volumes tab instead of the normal green one, which I think meant "offline".  After I did that and re-booted, everything was recognized and online.  But I also booted the system once with each array individually (to see that they were still intact after the hot add) before putting it all back together again.  So that may have had a effect as well.  I plan on doing this again and see if I can figure out what made it work.

Now, taking a volume offline to expand it kinda defeats the purpose of XRAID.  And I have no idea just how safe this is.  Using BTRFS tools to expand arrays via SSH is probably a better plan.  But I've only begun to learn about that.

I don't see how this would work on RAIDiator 4.2.x, because you can't toggle XRAID off and on.