I have a Readynas 104 with latest firmware. I have two problems. (questions)
For some reason the DLNA seems to keep playing up or vanishing. While my TiVo was away being fixed I used my Sony smart TV to access the 104 via DLNA. It worked for a couple days then refused to read the directory list. Then after I brought a Fetch Mighty box, after setting it up it couldn't see the 104 either via DLNA. Rebooting the readynas bright the DLNA server back, but I've had to reboot the 104 a few times as it keeps vanishing from both the Sony and the Fetch. Not that I can still access the 104 on a pc (not via DLNA) as a pc and the created drives will read fine.
Question 2, I had 2 2tb drives installed in JBOD mode, made into one volume, contains 3 folders that appear on my PC's as a computer. I've added the new 2tb WD Red nas drive, and the older 1tb green drive. All were added successfully and the main volume increased. I'm seriously considering switching to XRAID so I don't have to keep doing manual backups, but after all my googling (and backing up all the data) hitting the XRAID button on the volumes page bring up an error saying it candidates be done as I have an expanded volume. So, I read here that your volume is only as big as your smallest drive in XRAID mode meaning I'd virtually end up with 4 x 1tb (minus one drive for redundantcy. Is this right. Firstly do I have to destroy my whole volume, remove the 1tb drive then turn on XRAID, and recreate my virtual drives so my PC's see my 3 drives (virtual drives). Do I have to waste my 1tb drive? I keep reading that XRAID will make all the drives the same size as the smallest drive. So if I have 4x2tb,remove one (this action scares me already, Ho does the readynas system back up 6tb into one drive of 2tb!?) then install say, a 6tb drive... Does that mean it will be seen as a 2tb drive until I replace all 4 drives with 6tb drives?
Is it really safe to just pull a drive out to upgrade the size without loosing your data?
Once I manage to switch to XRAID will the backups automatically start, or do I have to set that up differently? I've seen the LUN page, but all greyed out while I'm on JBOD mode. Is this going to change automatically once I set up XRAID mode?
Note I don't mind destroying my volume if I REALLYhave to and recreate the shares (virtual drives) again, but I REALLY none want to reset the whole machine back to default as I spent lots of time setting it up and suspect if I clear it, I'll have trouble finding the DLNA settings again and other things I "accidentally" managed to get working.
X-RAID is just something that creates RAID arrays automatically. Depending on the number of drives you have in the chassis, X-RAID will choose what level of RAID to choose for the creation of the volume.
-> In your case, if you have 3 or 4 disks, it will create a RAID5 array.
RAID5 is good for performance and for redundancy, but the parity will cost the capacity of one disk - one member of the RAID array).
-> In your case, if you have 3 disks of 2TB, X-RAID will create a RAID5 array on 3 disks, which will give you a 4TB volume (unformatted capacity). If you have 4 disks of 2TB, then it will create a 6TB volume (unformatted capacity) on a 4 disks RAID5 array.
If there are disks of different capacities, to explain it simply, X-RAID will try to create sub RAID arrays on unused parts of disks, but will need at least 2 disks with bigger capacity than the others.
-> In your case, you have all the same capacity, so don't worry about it.
Now, AT NO TIME, you need to "remove" a disk. The explanations you found are only for the calculation of the capacity. YOU DO NOT NEED TO ACTUALLY REMOVE A DISK FROM THE NAS, just to "remove" the capacity of the disk to calculate the volume capacity.
Though, I don't like very much the way this says it, there is a "rule" that's often quoted here: "To calculate the capacity of your volume, you need to add up the capacity of all the disks and remove the capacity of the biggest disk".
So as I currently have 4 disks in there already added to the volume, will I have to destroy the lot before being able to press the xraid?
I don't completely understand "Now, AT NO TIME, you need to "remove" a disk. The explanations you found are only for the calculation of the capacity. YOU DO NOT NEED TO ACTUALLY REMOVE A DISK FROM THE NAS, just to "remove" the capacity of the disk to calculate the volume capacity" I'm getting confused between "physical removal" and "software removal"?. From memory at the moment there are no options to" software remove a drive" I guess that's because the nas sees the 4 drives a one single volume, if I click the box on the left there IS a "destroy" option, I expect that is for ALL the volume, or all 4 drives.
What happens if I destroy the four dives (one volume)the try xraid? That being 3x2tb and 1tb drives? Or would it be better to leave the 1tb out after I destroy it?
When I finally manage to activate x raid will it set up the backups automatically?
If I leave the 3x2tb drives in there, add a 4tb later, will the nas see it as 4tb or 2tb drive, or as said above will the nas use it all for backup? Wouldn't that then mean I end up with 4tb of usable space, an 6tb of backup. I'll explain myself, 3 drives of 2tb,4tb usable one drive as backup. But as you said it will use the biggest drive for backup (or did I read that on google?) I doubt the nas is going to transfer the backup data from the old 2tb drive to the new 4tb, the make it available for use by me afterwards?
Ok, first off, per your description, you are not in JBOD configuration. With JBOD, each drive is a separate volume, and you can easily remove one. It sounds like you are in RAID0 mode, where all drives are combined into a single volume with no redundancy. That is the most vulnerable configuration, because the loss of any drive loses everything.
Second, you said you want XRAID so you don't have to make backups. RAID is not a backup system. It is more fault tolerant than not having it, but there are plenty of bad things that can destroy the whole volume. You'll find lots of examples here in the forum.
While BTRFS does have the capability to shrink a RAID volume, Netgear has not implemented that in ReadyNAS OS6. You could SSH in and try it manually, but you really will need to have a full backup before you try just in case it fails. Then you could still do a factory default, choose XRAID, and restore the backup -- which is the supported way to make that change.
Hi thanks, I've read someone else with the same setup have the problem where the guy ended up posting a photo to prove he really was in JBOD mode. As I can't see any option here to post a photo, The new drives were black, formatted, I expanded them both, now all four drives are blue. They cannot be selected individually, but if you hover the mouse over a drive a window you get the stat's, and no options. The only button I can press is "xraid" that is Not lit at present, and when I do press it I get a waning that it can't continue because I have an expanded volume. The box on the left shows the full volume size of all four drives. Under the for blue drive picture it says. (jbod). Definitely!
If the redundancy is no good as a backup I'll just leave it the way it is and keep backing it up manually. Kinda makes me wonder what the point of RAID if it doesn't "completely" protect my data.
@Sandshark wrote: With JBOD, each drive is a separate volume
Nope. You can have a single JBOD per disk, but you can also have a single JBOD on several disks. Already had that discussion here and already proved it.
While BTRFS does have the capability to shrink a RAID volume, Netgear has not implemented that in ReadyNAS OS6
Because the RAID array uses mdadm, not BTRFS. On top of the RAID array is built a BTRFS volume, but BTRFS doesn't take care of the RAID. Which is a good thing as BTRFS RAID5/6 is currently considered as "badly broken".
OP's need is simple, backup the data, go back to an X-RAID compatible volume configuration, insert the all drives, activate X-RAID and leave the NAS do the rest.
RAID is not useless, it's just imperfect. And while a completely separate backup is also imperfect, at least a single event short of fire, flood, tornado, theft, or massive power surge is unlikely to take out both. Hopefully, RAID (except RAID0, which isn't really RAID since the "R" stands for "Redundant" and RAID0 isn't) keeps you from having your NAS down while you replace a bad drive and restore all your data, as would be necessary without redundancy. But to count on that always being the case is putting too many eggs in one basket
What can go wrong? Well, it happened to me and I never really found out. I did a factory default and restored my backup and all was fine. That was on an NVX with OS4.2.x. Loss of a second drive, which is more likely during a resync when one is replaced, is certainly one of the more common ones. But I've seen others where I think a drive was so bad that it affected the NAS's ability to access the others. And then either something it did on it's own, or something the user did without all the right information, killed the whole array. Accidently removng the wrong drive from an array with one bad one is one of the more common operator-induced reasons.
Having never used JBOD or RAID0 except when just running with a single disk for testing, I can't say if Netgear uses the right terms for JBOB and RAID0. Maybe they don't call it RAID0 because that gives some a false sense of security that they have "real" RAID. Or maybe expanding from one to more drives just fails to properly indicate the change.
@Sandshark wrote: With JBOD, each drive is a separate volume
Nope. You can have a single JBOD per disk, but you can also have a single JBOD on several disks. Already had that discussion here and already proved it.
Not by everybody else's definitiion of "JBOD", so I guess Netgear is re-purposing terminology. But I can see not wanting to use "RAID0" since it's not redundant while "RAID" implies it is. And RAID0 also implies striping, and I think they are not doing that, either. Most use "spanned" as the term for that. It's still just as vulnerable -- lose one drive and you lose the entire volume.
