I am looking at buying the nv+ and I was wondering do I have to use the raid or can I add all of my 4 hdd with info to it and away I go. I dont really feel like transfering 5gb of info and transfer it back. Also with using osx lion is it easy to get both of them to communicate with each other. Thanks
You cannot add disks with data into a NAS (ReadyNAS or any other vendor). Any disks that are added to the NAS will be formatted and partitioned for use with the NAS.
Regardless of which type of NAS you buy, you will need to copy the data over to it.
I would consider purchasing the Ultra 4 (newer model, faster processor, more on-going development). NV+ and Duo are getting a bit long in the tooth by computer standards.
Thanks for the quick reply. Yeah I ment to say 5tb I dont mind transferring data over if I have to, but I dont feel comfortable having all 4 drivers as a raid. is there anyway of setting up a raid for each individual drives so I am not loosing any data. my biggest is 2tb and my smallest is 500gb. so i guess in short, can I have 4 raid drives going?
Thanks for the quick reply. Yeah I ment to say 5tb I dont mind transferring data over if I have to, but I dont feel comfortable having all 4 drivers as a raid.
Enabling some sort of drive redundancy requires at least 2 drives of the same size. The data is mirrored across both disks and the RAID volume will just appear as a single data volume (even though there are 2 or more disks). In the event of a single disk failure, the NAS will continue to function normally and allow you to replace the disk.
The benefit of X-RAID is that the volume can be expanded by adding more disks, as well as replacing smaller disks with larger ones. So, you can start with 2 disks and add more as you need more space.
As mentioned above, the newer models (Ultra & Pro) have a new RAID engine (X-RAID2) as well as support for disks > 2 TB, faster CPU, more memory and more on-going development. X-RAID2 will expand the volume as soon as there is redundant space, where as the first version X-RAID requires all disks to be the same size. You cannot add smaller capacity disks to an array. NV+ and Duo do not support disks larger than 2 TB due to GPT limitations.
is there anyway of setting up a raid for each individual drives so I am not loosing any data. my biggest is 2tb and my smallest is 500gb. so i guess in short, can I have 4 raid drives going?
I'm not quite sure I understand what you want to do. If you're asking whether you can insert each disk into the NAS and have the data remain on it, then no, you can't. All data will be wiped.
If you're asking whether you can install 4 disks and have 4 separate volumes, then yes. Of course, there are all sorts of caveats as to whether the volume is "protected" or not, as you need to configure the NAS for one of the Flex-RAID modes.
My recommendation is to use X-RAID/X-RAID2 and have 1 expandable volume. You can create as many shares as desired and never have to worry about running out of space.
dajaga - as an example I have an NVX (32 bit predecessor of the 64 bit Ultra series) and I started with 4x1TB drives. That gave me a net volume of 2.7 TB. (You lose about 7% of each drive to overhead and 1 complete drive to redundancy). I later replaced 2 of the drives with 3TB drives which now gives me 4.6TB net volume space. If you have 5TB of data, you will need a minimum of 3x3TB drives to generate a 5.4TB redundant volume, 4x3TB would give you an 8.1TB redundant volume.
