X-Raid vertical expanding

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Leventh wrote:
So what I need to ask is if I backup data and reset the nas (via reset button) and reformat with X-Raid can I have 12.7TiB without wasting space?

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Yes.

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Leventh wrote:

I have 2x6TB + 2x2TB on RN214 X-Raid formatted, yesterday i replaced 2x2TB drives with 2x4TB to expand vertically one by one and wait for resync, after completing the process i have 10.9TiB instead of 12.7TiB according to raid calculator.

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If you want to avoid this from happening in the future, make sure that when you expand you are upgrading to a drive that is at least as large as the biggest drive already installed.  In this specific case, upgrading to 3x6 TB + 2 TB would have expanded to 12.7 TiB.

Before you upgraded the drives, your data volume had two RAID groups

• 4x2 TB RAID-5
• 2x4 TB RAID-1 to use the "extra" space on the 6 TB drives

Note that this means there are two data partitions on the 6 TB drives - a 2 TB one for the RAID-5 group and a 4 TB one for the RAID-1 group.  (FWIW, there are smaller partitions for the OS and swap).

These groups are concatenated into one data volume.

After you upgraded you ended up with 3 RAID groups

• 4x2 TB RAID-5
• 2x4 TB RAID-1 to use the "extra" space on the 6 TB drives
• 2x2 TB RAID-1 to use the "extra" space on the 4 TB drives.

This allowed the NAS to expand somewhat without needing to reformat the 6 TB drives.

Netgear didn't do this in the past - instead they would just not expand at all if the new drives weren't at least as large as the largest drives already installed.  

Anyway, after the reset you will have

• 4x4 TB RAID-5
• 2x2 TB RAID-1