Expanding the RAID 5 group beyond the 6 hard drives
I'm trying to expand my RAID 5 group beyond the 6 hard drives using an external hard drive cage connected by eSATA and all I can get is this message...
expand for raid 50 or raid 60 requires the selected disks to be divisible by the number of raid groups
I have a 316 ReadyNas that I expanded beyond the 6 hard drives to now 9 last year with ZERO problems.
Not something I'd recommend myself, as the eSATA port has poor performance, and any issues with cabling will result in either resync or volume failure.
Re: Expanding the RAID 5 group beyond the 6 hard drives
I think you are just getting the wrong error message. I've seen a lot of that in more recent ReadyNASOS versions. The real message should be telling you that's not allowed. It's also a very bad idea. Your eSATA box is using port replication and is limited to SATAII. So, it's sending data for multiple drives through an outdated port designed for one. In other eSATA configurations, you'd only be using one drive at a time, so it's not as noticeable. But in RAID, it slows things down a lot, most especially with large file transfers, RAID sync, Balance, and Scrub. Even one drive in a RAID that's in an eSATA enclosure would, at best, slow down the whole unit and at worst would result in a corrupt volume because the drives in the external chassis can't keep up.
Then there is the vulnerability of the connector, which is a poor choice IMHO (it needs positive latching). If it came loose, that could also corrupt the whole volume.
So the OS only lets you create a new volume in the external chassis, not expand into one. While documentation for XRAID usually says you can only have one volume in XRAID, that's not completely true. You can't have two in the same physical chassis. So you don't have to disable XRAID.
Note that the external volume can still be at risk if the eSATA plug comes loose (I lost a volume twice due to that), and that access to it is going to be significantly slower. So, choose wisely which data you move to the volume on the external chassis.
I think you are just getting the wrong error message.
@NathanWoodruff: Could be, but I am wondering if you selected the wrong option. What should have been done (in flexraid) was to create a RAID-5 group for the disks in the enclosure, and then concatenate it with the groups in the existing volume.
Re: Expanding the RAID 5 group beyond the 6 hard drives
"The real message should be telling you that's not allowed. "_ If it is not allow then why am I allowed to do it on the other Netgear box with the same software? Look at the pictures.
Re: Expanding the RAID 5 group beyond the 6 hard drives
Netgear may have eliminated that restriction, either intentionally or unintentionally. It's been quite a few versions back since I had an EDA500 in use Nonetheless, it's still a really bad idea.
What drive sizes do you currently have, and what size are you trying to add? Maybe it's a different message that you're supposed to be seeing.
Maybe it's a different message that you're supposed to be seeing.
@NathanWoodruff: First of all, I agree with @Sandshark that this is a really bad idea. Your data would be considerably safer if you created a second volume. If you are determined to do it, then it would be very wise to make sure you have a solid backup plan in place.
But I am thinking that you might have taken the wrong option when you tried to add the EDA500 RAID group to the main data volume. You should have chosen "Concatenate" then. I suspect that you chose "RAID-0/Stripe".
