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Ultra 2 - RAID 0 volume not expanding
Hi all, Apologies in advance if this is covered elsewhere, but I did not find it. I have an Ultra 2 with Frontview 4.2.26 (I think that's correct, it's not in front of me now, but it is the l...
Hi ssands,
Welcome to the community!
If the RAID volume is set to 0 and you started with just single (1) drive and planning to add a new one, there's no other way but to back up the data and reset the system with both drives installed.
Kind regards,
BrianL
NETGEAR Community Team
Thanks for the response.
Probably too much of a hassle to backup somewhere (I use the cloud backup for emergencies). So, I guess I'll just go with two distinct volumes.
Was this somewhere in the manuals and I missed it, or it is just a limitation learned by hard knocks?
Thanks again.
Stu
Page 38 of the user manual ( http://documentation.netgear.com/ultra/enu/202-10654-01/usermanual_1.pdf ) implies that you can add a disk to an existing RAID-0 volume.
Though I don't recommend doing that, because the resulting RAID-0 volume is quite fragile. If either disk fails, you lose everything.
StephenB wrote:Though I don't recommend doing that, because the resulting RAID-0 volume is quite fragile. If either disk fails, you lose everything.
not if u have external backup or another nas as backup.
been using raid 0 many years with backup. at most the volume collapse and u destroy the faulty volume, swap the bad drive with good one and then recreate the volume then restore from backup.
cpu8088 wrote:
not if u have external backup or another nas as backup.
Of course you should have backups anyway.
If someone is aware of the consequences of disk failure, and is ok with them, then it's perfectly fine to use spanning raid-0. Many users aren't.
I've used the mode myself (because I had shares that were bigger than the max disk size my duo v1 would hold). But as disks have gotten larger, I've found that it is no longer necessary, so I have switched to jbod.
StephenB wrote:Page 38 of the user manual ( http://documentation.netgear.com/ultra/enu/202-10654-01/usermanual_1.pdf ) implies that you can add a disk to an existing RAID-0 volume.
Though I don't recommend doing that, because the resulting RAID-0 volume is quite fragile. If either disk fails, you lose everything.
Yes, that is the page I've poured over, and can't understand why I can't add a disc and expand my logical volume. Quite perplexing. It seems that the manual is in fact, stating that I can do that.
I do understand that raid 0 offers nothing in the way of resiliance and am ok with that. It holds my media, which is backed up to the cloud, and is recoverable, even it if takes a bit of time to get it all back.
So, I am confused by the earlier comment that you can't do what I want to do when you start with a single disc as Raid 0 when the manual does seem to imply otherwise.
It sure seems like a feature of the software.
I believe only RAID-5 and RAID-6 are supported for Flex-RAID expansion on the Ultra. The screenshot in the manual shows it for RAID-5.
mdgm wrote:
I believe only RAID-5 and RAID-6 are supported for Flex-RAID expansion on the Ultra. The screenshot in the manual shows it for RAID-5.
I'm sure you are correct on the limitations, but the documentation unfortunately doesn't say that.
Flex-RAID advantages include:
• The default volume can be deleted and re-created, with or without snapshot reserved space.
• Hot spare disk is supported.
• Volume expansion without data loss is supported.
• Full volume management is available. You can create RAID level 0, 1, 5, or 6 volumes, specify the volume size, delete a disk from a volume, assign a hot spare, and so on.
• Multiple volumes are supported, each with a different RAID level, snapshot schedule, and disk quota definition.
• Each disk can be replaced, one by one, then rebuilt; after the last disk is replaced, another data volume using the newly added capacity can be configured.
The fact that some of these features are limited to specific RAID modes isn't stated anywhere, and it isn't reasonable to expect users to infer those limitations from a screenshot.
Though of course the product is EoL, there wasn't enough explanation on flexraid.
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