X-Raid Activation Precautions(RN3220)

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eustress wrote:

And I want to know the other precautions.

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General advice from Netgear is to make sure you have an up to date backup before you begin. Disk failures during the expansion process can result in data loss.  Although the risk of something going wrong is less likely with RAID-6.

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eustress wrote:

I wonder if there is no loss of data when X-Raid is activated.

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There is no data loss. X-RAID (and FlexRAID) are just management layers built on top of the same standard RAID software (mdadm).  That said, there are some scenarios where the system won't let you switch to X-RAID.

Since you are upgrading all the disks, you could do this expansion with FlexRAID instead. The tradeoffs are:

• X-RAID supports unequal size disk drives, and will begin expanding the volume when the fourth disk is upgraded.  So if you don't need all 80 TB now, you can upgrade some of the disks later on.
• Because X-RAID will be expanding as it goes, the upgrade process will take longer, and will require more disk I/O. FlexRAID resyncs the current RAID group with every disk upgrade, and only builds the second RAID group once at the end. X-RAID rebuilds the second RAID group 8 times (starting with the fourth disk upgrade).

However, if you stay with FlexRAID, the system likely won't let you switch to X-RAID later on.