Upgrading disk capacity on ReadyNAS 314

One general piece of advice - you shouldn't assume that RAID is enough to keep your data safe.  You also need a backup on another device (I recommend 2 backups myself).

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rmurgz wrote:

 

1. What is the maximum storage I can put in the Readynas 314? Can I have 4x8TB drives, or am I restricted to smaller drives as I saw on a cheatsheet somewhere that there was a maximum of 24TB.

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You should be able to install 4x8 TB, which would give you 24 TB of storage with the default single redundancy XRAID.  The NAS would report that as ~21.8 TiB.  (just like it reports 5.4 TiB for 6 TB volume size).

If photography is your business, you might consider dual redundancy.  That would limit you to 16 TB storage.   If you want to use that, you'd need to destroy the existing array.  So you might want to do that in one operation...

-back up the data

-power down, replace all the drives with 8 TB

-power up, and change immediately to flex-raid.  Then choose RAID-6.  

-After the volume builds, you can restore the data from backup.

In terms of type of drives I was looking at WD Red and WDRed Pro in 6tb size - both are SATA III device running at 6GB/s but one has a 64mb cache, the other a 128mb. Will I feel the benefit of that?

 

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The key performance difference between the Red Pro and the Red is that the Red Pro has a faster rotation speed. The cache size doesn't matter that much, since the NAS is caching a lot more data in its own memory. You will see some performance improvement with the Red Pro when copying folders of photos.  There there is performance comparison (using 4 TB drives) here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8265/wd-red-pro-review-4-tb-drives-for-nas-systems-benchmarked  However, the specific drive models do matter in this kind of test.

Other considerations:  the WDC Red Pro has a longer warranty.  Since it rotates faster, it will use more power (and the system will run at a higher temperature).

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3. Thirdly if I were to stagger my investment and buy two drives now and two perhaps in a year's time would I get a storage benefit now and is there an easy way of calculating what additional space I would get with an X-Raid+Raid5 configuration

 

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Sum the raw drives, and then subtract the largest.  Convert from TB to TIB by multipying by 0.91.

For instance

4x2 TB -> 8-2 TB gives you 6 TB (or ~5.4 TiB)

3x2 TB + 1x8 TB  -> 14-8 TB gives you 6 TB (or ~5.4 TiB)

2x2 TB + 2x8 TB  -> 20-8 TB gives you 12 TB (or ~10.9 TiB)

1x2 TB + 3x8 TB  -> 24-8 TB gives you 16 TB (or ~14.5 TiB)

4x8 TB -> 32-8 TB gives you 24 TB (or ~21.8 TiB)

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rmurgz wrote:

 

4. Finally is there any particular order / methodology I need to follow to do the upgrade? I read that hotswapping was the way to go but can I swap from any bays or is there more to it than that

 

Hot swapping is fine, and there is no special ordering needed.  The main thing is to make sure you hot-swap the right drive :smileywink:

When you replace a disk, it either needs to match the size of the existing disk size in that slot, or match the size of the largest disk in the array.

The drive shouldn't be formatted, and generally it is a good idea to test it with WDC's lifeguard program (in a PC) before installing it.