Hi all, I've just installed a second WD Green 3TB drive in my 104 and it has started syncing in X-Raid. I wanted to use the second disk for capacity as it is for a media server so no real need for back up.
My question is how do I change the drive back over for extra capacity. Do I wait for the sync to finish. In Volume it is saying Volume is degraded. Do I destroy that or will that lose all the data on the first drive? Will I just be able to create a new volume once sync has completed?
You should have converted to flexraid before you added the drive.
You can try to convert to flexraid after the resync - not sure if it will let you or not (that depends on whether the new disk is viewed by the software as "expanding").
However, at that point you don't have an easy way to get back to jbod. You could remove the new drive, unformat it on a PC, and try reinstalling it in slot 3. Then you should be able to create a new volume. But the existing volume will be identified as "Degraded", and slot 2 will need to kept empty.
You might try support, and see if there is something they can do.
If not, you may be better off by (a) doing a factory reset, and rebuilding from scratch or (b) buy another drive, and take the redundancy. If you do get another drive, I suggest WDC Red instead of the green. The warranty is longer, and the drives are just as "green".
The first post answers that. You should copy all the data to a backup first no matter what you do.
Then you could try converting the volume to flexraid. If the system lets you, then you could then remove the second drive, unformat it, and then reinsert it in slot 3. At that point you could create a new volume on that drive and get more space.
The existing volume would be shown as "degraded" forever, and you wouldn't ever be able to use slot 2.
So personally I wouldn't do this. I'd probably just buy a third drive, and keep the raid protection. Even if you aren't worried about losing the data, it is still an inconvenience. And you might find it harder to replace than you think.
Or I'd copy the data to backup (perhaps using the new drive in an enclosure temporarily), reset the NAS, convert to flexraid right away, and restore the data from the backup. Then add the second drive as a second volume (jbod).
