How do I add a 4th disk on my RN214 that I originally set up with only three?
How do I add a 4th disk on my RN214 that I originally set up with only three?
I removed all the files (except one hidden file that the box insists is "open" and can't be deleted,) and then did a factory reset. It still insists the size is 8.75 Terabytes. Nowhere near the 13 that are there. Now I may be jumping the gun as it is still syncing though it still says 8+T. Maybe it will eventually see the other disk. But it says over nine hours to sync. Is that normal?
There are few ways to add disks/Expand volume to your RN214. Please see Expanding ReadyNAS
One way is the method you used wherein you factory reset the NAS after backing up the data, this will create a fresh set of RAID configuration consists of now 4 disks on your NAS. The other option is to hot swap the 4th disk, this will do the same resync you are getting but it is only for the additional disk. the RAID is adding the 4th disk to the configuration.
Regarding the size, do you have 3TB drives? If you have 4 3TB drives and factory defaulted the NAS, it will be setup as X-RAID RAID 5 where it will have 8.16TiB Data and 2.73TiB allocated for protection. RAID 5 has a 1 disk failure protection. Are you trying to get all the disks to be your data volume? in this case you need to set it up as RAID 0 or JBOD. You will also have to use Flex-RAID. See Flex-RAID.
JBOD - This most basic RAID level does not protect your data from loss if one of your drives fails. JBOD is available only on volumes consisting of a single hard disk.
RAID 0 - Distributes data across multiple disks, resulting in improved disk performance compared to systems that do not use RAID formatting. The total capacity of your storage system equals the capacity of the smallest of your disk drives times the number of disks. RAID 0 is available on volumes consisting of two or more hard disks.
Though this setup does not have any protection so any failure from the disks will have your data lost and possibly unrecoverable.
That step wasn't necessary. All you needed to do was hot-insert the new disk. If it was already formatted, you'd also have needed to format it on the NAS volume screen.
Re: How do I add a 4th disk on my RN214 that I originally set up with only three?
I originally put the additional 3T disk in and it synced up and I patiently waited a week and it didn't change from the 8.17T from the original two 3T & one 4T disks I started with.
So, it took three days of work to remove the 8T of data so I could wipe out the disks with a Factory Reset because it sure looked like the implementation of whatever the disk format was did not allow for addition like I thought it should.
Now the sync guess is up to 18 hours and 40 minutes. And it still says the disk is 8.17T. But in another place it says it is 8.98T, so whatever.
I originally put the additional 3T disk in and it synced up and I patiently waited a week and it didn't change from the 8.17T from the original two 3T & one 4T disks I started with.
2x3TB+4TB would have given you a 6 TB XRAID-volume (5.45 TiB). 3x3TB+4TB would give you 9 TB (~8.18 TiB).
So it looks like the volume actually did expand the first time (and that you are seeing the correct capacity now).
Again: the capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest". The extra space is used for the parity blocks that protect from routine disk failures and also allow the volume to be expanded. The reported volume size doesn't include this "extra" space.
Note you would have gotten an additional TB of space if you'd gone with a 4 TB drive. Right now you are wasting 1 TB of the 4 TB drive.
