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Obviously this severly impacts my storage capacity, and afftects what size drives I am about to purchase.
Where can I find out difinitively what the maximum drive size my RN214 can support?
First of all, your RN214 will accept 12 TB drives. If you use single redundancy XRAID or RAID-5, then a 4x12TB configuration would give you a volume size of 36 TB (~32.7 TiB). Other RAID modes would of course give you different volume sizes.
When Netgear releases a product, the data sheet uses the largest drives on the market at the time. They rarely go back and change the datasheet later on. In this case, they do say "Max Capacity (based on 6TB drives)" You can see the largest size drives that Netgear has tested with your NAS on the published hardware compatibility list here: https://kb.netgear.com/20641/ReadyNAS-Hard-Disk-Compatibility-List
OS-6 systems like the RN214 have no known limit on maximum disk sizes they support. So when 16 TB drives come on the market, it is likely that they will work with your NAS. Although some operations (particularly RAID sync and scrubs) scale with the total disk size, so they would take 4x longer with (hypothetical)16 TB drives than they would take with 4 TB drives.
Generally XRAID is the best RAID configuration for most users, and it is expandable. The capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest". I generally suggesting leaving at least one empty slot if you can at the beginning, becausing adding another disk is the most cost effective way to expand the array. Getting fewer larger disks is cheaper in the long run.
For example, a 3x10TB array would give you a 20 TB volume for about $900-$1200 depending on whether you go with NAS-purposed drives or enterprise class. Adding a 4th 10TB drive later would increase the volume size to 30 TB, for $300-$400. Total disk cost would be $1200-$1600.
If you went with 4x6TB disks, you'd have a similar volume size (18 TB), and would spend a bit less initially ($850-$1000). But expanding to ~30TB would require you to upgrade three drives to 12 TB - which would cost $900-$1200 more at current pricing. Total disk cost ends up $1750-$2200.
Also, you need to keep a healthy amount of free space on the NAS with the BTRFS file system. I suggest about 20%.
Obviously this severly impacts my storage capacity, and afftects what size drives I am about to purchase.
Where can I find out difinitively what the maximum drive size my RN214 can support?
First of all, your RN214 will accept 12 TB drives. If you use single redundancy XRAID or RAID-5, then a 4x12TB configuration would give you a volume size of 36 TB (~32.7 TiB). Other RAID modes would of course give you different volume sizes.
When Netgear releases a product, the data sheet uses the largest drives on the market at the time. They rarely go back and change the datasheet later on. In this case, they do say "Max Capacity (based on 6TB drives)" You can see the largest size drives that Netgear has tested with your NAS on the published hardware compatibility list here: https://kb.netgear.com/20641/ReadyNAS-Hard-Disk-Compatibility-List
OS-6 systems like the RN214 have no known limit on maximum disk sizes they support. So when 16 TB drives come on the market, it is likely that they will work with your NAS. Although some operations (particularly RAID sync and scrubs) scale with the total disk size, so they would take 4x longer with (hypothetical)16 TB drives than they would take with 4 TB drives.
Generally XRAID is the best RAID configuration for most users, and it is expandable. The capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest". I generally suggesting leaving at least one empty slot if you can at the beginning, becausing adding another disk is the most cost effective way to expand the array. Getting fewer larger disks is cheaper in the long run.
For example, a 3x10TB array would give you a 20 TB volume for about $900-$1200 depending on whether you go with NAS-purposed drives or enterprise class. Adding a 4th 10TB drive later would increase the volume size to 30 TB, for $300-$400. Total disk cost would be $1200-$1600.
If you went with 4x6TB disks, you'd have a similar volume size (18 TB), and would spend a bit less initially ($850-$1000). But expanding to ~30TB would require you to upgrade three drives to 12 TB - which would cost $900-$1200 more at current pricing. Total disk cost ends up $1750-$2200.
Also, you need to keep a healthy amount of free space on the NAS with the BTRFS file system. I suggest about 20%.
