Upgrading from 2TB to 3TB drives

ruudpel wrote:

Hello everybody, great to see such an active community has formed around the ReadyNAS! I've been a proud and satisfied user of a Ultra 6 for a few months. I'm currently having three Samsung 2TB drives installed and I'm kinda ashamed to admit that I'm already close to using maximum capacity. So, I'm looking at expansion. Since the 3TB drives cost approx the same much as the 2TB drives (per megabyte of course), I kinda want to install a 3TB drive. First for expansion, and later I'll want to replace my 2TB drives with 3TBs.

You'll need to make sure you've updated at least to 4.2.16 before adding the 3TB disks. You can update the firmware via System > Update > Remote.

ruudpel wrote:
1. In the new situation, I'll have 3 x 2TB and 1 x 3TB. If I have understood correctly, the new drive will be limited to 2TB.

Yes. X-RAID2 will only expand when redundant space can be added. Add a second 3TB disk and then the full 3TB will be used.

ruudpel wrote:
That is fine for now, but it does raise the first question. If I install the new 3TB drive and the ReadyNAS will only allocate/use/see 2TB, what will happen once I replaced all the 2TB drives with 3TBs? Will the first 3TB drive then be recognized as 3TB automatically?

Once you've added a second 3TB drive (assuming you stick with single-redundancy) the full 3TB will be able to be used. Of course one of the 3TB disks will be the redundancy overhead. Take a look at X-RAID2 in Action

ruudpel wrote:
2a. My plan is to add the 3TB drive, but another option would be to remove one of the three 2TB drives and replace it with the new 3TB. Does this have any advantage or disadvantage compared to plan A? I have X-RAID2 which means I could just remove one of the three drives and replace it with another, without losing any data, right?

Replacing a 2TB drive would give you less volume capacity but would mean more drive bays were free.

ruudpel wrote:
2b. If the second option (replacing iso adding) is better, would it matter to replace the first or the third drive? Or doesn't that matter at all?

Doesn't matter except that if a disk is failing or dead you should obviously replace that one.

ruudpel wrote:
2c. Again, if the second option is best, should I

Your ReadyNAS supports hot-swap so you can remove the disk while the NAS is on and add the replacement also while the NAS is on.

Personally though I'd add the disk to the empty drive bay.

I'd suggest considering converting to dual-redundancy (http://support.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/19044/~/converting-and-xraid2-system-to-dual-redundancy), but that would mean you'd need 4x3TB disks before you could utilise the full capacity of those disks.