Upgrade to Ultra 4 Plus, Max storage capacity

Steve 46 wrote:
Thank you for the informational replies. Stephen B, If I am understanding you correctly (regarding max expansion capacity to 14TB) if I load up all four 2TB drives now and do a drive wipe I will get 6TB capacity with the ability to remove those four 2TB drives and replace them with a combination of larger drives totaling 14TB (without having to do another factory default/wipe). Is that correct?

That's correct. Of course you'd remove one drive at a time then add a higher capacity disk, wait for resync etc. to complete before replacing next disk.

Steve 46 wrote:
Regarding X-RAID, I understand that is the default single drive failure protection configuration. So if I have four drives loaded and one fails I would still retain all my data? I also understand that one drive is for parity information but not really understanding how one drive can protect the information on the three other drives. What if the parity drive fails?

X-RAID uses a dedicated parity disk (with four disks this is effectively RAID-4). However you have X-RAID2 which has distributed parity. X-RAID2 with four equally sized disks is like RAID-5.

Think of it like this:

A = 1/3 B + 1/3 C + 1/3 D
B = 1/3 A + 1/3 C + 1/3 D
C = 1/3 A + 1/3 B + 1/3 D
D = 1/3 A + 1/3 B + 1/3 C

If any one disk fails data remains intact because the data on the failed disk is spread amongst the other disks. Now the same principles apply as you start to add higher capacity disks.

With say 2x2TB + 2x3TB

You would have an additional RAID-1 layer of 2x1TB on the 3TB disks. Remember an X-RAID2 array can only expand when redundant space can be added so if all drive bays are full with disks of equal size you need two higher capacity disks.

Have a look at X-RAID2 in Action (though this animation is for the 6-bay models the same principles apply on the four-bay models and the 2-bay models).

Steve 46 wrote:
I may have been asking about the wrong feature though. I was wondering why the Ultra 2/4 Plus units have two ethernet ports.

Very similar to the Pro Series devices hardware wise. Ultra 2 Plus and Pro 2 have same hardware, Ultra 4 Plus and Pro 4 have same hardware. You can use the two NICs to connect to two networks or for manual failover. You can even make two connections to the same network.