X-Raid going from 8 to 6 drives and increase capacity.
When I first setup the NAS, I just used whatever drives I had laying around I have a total of 8 drives at the moment, 6x 2TB and 2x 3Tb
I realized that I'm not utilizing all the spaces this way and have almost 2Tb of wasted space, per the X-rad calculator, I can get away with 6 drives 2x each, 2tb, 3tb and 4tb, these are drives I have on hand now. This would increase my capacity by 2Tb and reduce the overall HDD which will reduce heat and electricity usage. It's minimal but why not.
Would X-raid automatically reallocate the space or do I need to factory reset and start over?
When I first setup the NAS, I just used whatever drives I had laying around I have a total of 8 drives at the moment, 6x 2TB and 2x 3Tb
I realized that I'm not utilizing all the spaces this way and have almost 2Tb of wasted space, per the X-raid calculator,
8 drives with XRAID will be using dual redundancy - to avoid wasting space you need the four largest drives to be the same size. You should have a 12 TB volume with protection against two disk failures. The NAS will show this as ~10.9 TiB.
Would X-raid automatically reallocate the space or do I need to factory reset and start over?
You'd need to start over - XRAID won't do this automatically. It is possible to get there via from the linux CLI, but the commands are a bit tricky, so it's probably not a good path.
You are giving up dual redundancy (protection from two disk failures) but gaining 2 TB more space. If you don't actually need the space, perhaps just leave well enough alone for now - the extra protection is worth something, and as you say the power savings are minimal.
If you do want a bit more space, you could also just upgrade two 2 TB drives to 4TB. You'll still waste 2 TB of space, but your capacity will go up to 14 TB (same as you'd get with (2x2+2x3+2x4 single redundancy). That would be automatic, and avoid the factory reset.
