It looks like the EDA500 is just an eSATA expansion bay, that plugs into an RN516/etc. If so, it has no brains of its own, just a JBOD to an existing supported ReadyNAS unit. So limits on RAID/Shares would come from that original unit.
The EDA500 expands off the RN516 so essentially you can only have one of the two following setups
Either RN516
--or--
RN516 with EDA500
To answer your questions:
(1) CAN THE EDA500 BE CONFIGURED AS A STANDALONE STORAGE VOLUME WITH A SPECIFIC RAID LEVEL (5 OR 6) XRAID2 will pick best raid for you and let you expand. with alot of disks (more than 4) you can chose to convert to raid 6 from a raid5. If starting with alot of disks you have the option to do xraid 5 or xraid 6. I RECOMMEND WITH ALOT OF DISKS ONLY TO USE RAID 6. Currently with how big drives are getting and how often disk errors happen - even in enterprise drives - its best to have RAID 6. There are many articles online that state the same.
(2) CAN THE EDA500 BE CONFIGURED TO STORE SPECIFIC SHARES (I.E. MOVIES OR RECORDED TV) The EDA500 will just be an extension of the RN516 so together with it, they will be considered as a single VOLUME. You can have one share on the whole XRAID volume spanning all the disks of the RN516 and the EDA500. Disk 1 thru 6 of RN516 and the remaining disks of the EDA500 will be raided together and then they will volumed together into a giant pool using btrfs filesystem. You can however in FLEXRAID mode make different volumes with different disks. So you can say disk 1 thru 6 on RN516 is Volume1 that is RAID5(or any raid) and EDA500 disks can be Volume 2 with RAID6 (or any raid). By any raid I mean one of the possible Raids, raid0,1,5,6, and 10. What raids are possible depends on how many disks are in that volume. Now - I just recommend using XRAID instead of FLEXRAID because it allows for expansion of the volume etc. For example with XRAID you can start with 2 disks 3 TB each and keep adding 3 TB disks once a month and your volume will simply get bigger. You will notice that expansion issues that were once a problem with the old readynas are no longer an issue because of the new filesystem. The issues im talking about were an issue with EXT4 on the old readynas 4.2.x firmware
(3) WILL THE EDA500 APPEAR AS A SEPERATE NAS DRIVE IN WIN 7 NETWORK, OR WILL IT APPEAR AS A SHARE UNDER THE MAIN READYNAS? It depends on how you have it setup. With XRAID you will have one giant volume which you can make shares with (directories on the NAS) the shares can be mapped to a Windows box and look like a drive. With FLEX RAID the volumes can be split up any way with the disks, however the volumes cant be expanded - newly added drives in FLEXRAID mode need to become new volumes. Think of volumes as an actual giant drive on the nas, and shares are directories on that drive. Now if you share a directory, that share can become a mapped drive letter on windows connecting the new looking drive on windows to the "share on the nas"/"directory on the nas". Remember all a share is just a directory that has the ability to be shared across the network. Now how the share is percieved on the opposite side depends on the opposite side, you can have it show up as a "mapped drive letter" or just a "folder across the network"
With FLEX RAID the volumes can be split up any way with the disks, however the volumes cant be expanded - newly added drives in FLEXRAID mode need to become new volumes.
So did the 4.2.16+ feature for expanding Flex-RAID volumes not get added to 6.0? If so, any plans to add it? People expect some level of public roadmaps communicated.
