ReadyNAS Pro 6 and WD Red 6TB drives questions

[applesandsynths]

Good evening,

I'm currently running a ReadyNAS Pro 6 NAS on OS 6 6.2.3-T1672 and just bought 2 new WD Red 6TB (WD60EFRX) drives. Asides from these two new Red 6tb drives, I have a remaining 4x WD Green 3TB (WD30EZRX) drives.

I'm wondering how this would work if I wanted dual redundancy? How much storage would show up? Also, would I be able to expand past whatever this amount of storage would be whenever I decide to purchase more of the 6TB Reds? I'm fine with factory resetting the NAS right now to in order to get all 6 drives working together.

Thanks in advance!

[StephenB]

Single redundancy would give you 22 TB (and use all the space on the W60EFRX drives).

Dual redundancy would give you only 16 TB (using only 4 TB of space on the W60EFRX drives).

To use all the capacity, dual redundancy needs the 4 largest drives to be the same size. 4x6TB+2x4TB would give you 20 TB.

[applesandsynths]

Hey Stephen,

Thanks for the quick reply. That's good to know. Do you have any idea if the 6tb drives will actually work in this model NAS seeing as though they're not on the compatibility list? and if I only get 16tb right now, will it expand fine to 22tb once I get 2 more 6tb drives and swap out two of the 3's? You also mention having 2x 4tb drives which I don't currently have. I was hoping to add 6tb drives one by one whenever I am able to, though I'm guessing dual redundancy will be a bit of an issue then. What would be the best upgrade path if I'm sticking with 6tb drives and the existing 3s?

I've come across a lot of posts stating that you can't expand past 16tb and need to factory reset with all the same drives (6tb in this case) in order to go beyond 16. I'm wondering if that was only a readynas os 4 issue?

[mdgm-ntgr]

The 16TB expansion limit is for OS4. OS6 on x86 hardware such as your Pro 6 is not affected by this expansion limit.

[StephenB]

StephenB wrote:
Single redundancy would give you 22 TB (and use all the space on the W60EFRX drives). Dual redundancy would give you only 16 TB (using only 4 TB of space on the W60EFRX drives). To use all the capacity, dual redundancy needs the 4 largest drives to be the same size. 4x6TB+2x4TB would give you 20 TB.

I misread your initial post, and thought you were running 4 TB now. So my space numbers are high. With 2x6TB+4x3TB:

Single redundancy gives you 18 TB (4*3+6)
Dual redundancy gives you 12 TB(4*3TB)
With 6x4TB + 2x3TB you'd get 18 TB in dual redundancy mode(2*6+2*3)

I have a WD60EFRX (with a second on order), but I don't have it in my Pro-6. They should work though.

applesandsynths wrote:
I was hoping to add 6tb drives one by one whenever I am able to, though I'm guessing dual redundancy will be a bit of an issue then. What would be the best upgrade path if I'm sticking with 6tb drives and the existing 3s?

Since all your slots are already full, you'd need to destroy your existing volume to switch to dual redundancy. So you'd need to restore the data from backup. You could do that at any point, but of course the more data you have the longer it will take.

One way to handle it would be to buy the next two 6TB drives together (perhaps waiting longer), and convert when you get them. Then you'd retain the 18 TB capacity you'll get when you install the first two.

Buying the last two together also preserves capacity (that is, 4x6TB+2x3TB single gives you 24 TB, 6x6TB dual also gives you 24 TB).

As you likely already know, the NAS reports space in TiB units - so the capacity in frontview will be about 10% smaller than the values above.

[Bigbearf]

Any problems running the Western Digital Red drives 4 terabyte to 6 TB? I have a Pro 6 running 6.2.2 and am very happy. I am thinking about going to 6 TB reds gradually over the next year. Any thoughts or concerns?
Bigbearf