Can I mix both 4TB and 5TB drives in an Readynas Pro Pioneer Edition PNDP600E
Hello.
I have an Readynas Pro Pioneer Edition PNDP600E and I'm wondering if I can mix both 4TB and 5TB drives?
If so, would I use traditional raid5 or some kind of the XRAID2 technology?
Would each drive be treated as the smallest drive(in this case a 4TB) or can the larger 5TB be used as well?
I do have other readynas but have always used the identical drive in each macine and never had different drive sizes. Most of my other readynas are older ones that have a 2TB limit. This is my more advanced one but I have never used it before.
Re: Can I mix both 4TB and 5TB drives in an Readynas Pro Pioneer Edition PNDP600E
You can mix drive sizes in XRAID.
There are some constraints:
With single redundancy you'd need two of the largest size to utilize all the space on the drives.
When you replace a drive, it either needs to match the size of the the failed drive, or be >= the largest drive installed.
When you add a new drive to an empty slot, it needs to be >= the largest drive installed.
There are also some expansion limits with OS 4.2
you can't expand over a 16 TiB volume size
a volume cannot expand more than 8 TiB from it's initial size.
It's possible to convert your Pro Pioneer to OS 6, which avoids the two expansion limits. That is destructive (you'll need to restore data from backup). Also, Netgear won't provide support for a legacy NAS running OS 6.
Re: Can I mix both 4TB and 5TB drives in an Readynas Pro Pioneer Edition PNDP600E
I have 3 X 5TB and 3X4TB.. So 27GB total. If I upgrade to that newer software, can I still add new hard drive as they came in? I remember something a long time ago about needing to build the entire array at once time when you went over a certain amount. Is that limitation lifted with the newer software upgrade?
Is there any disadvantages of the newer software besides the fact that netgear won't support it on Legacy devices?
Re: Can I mix both 4TB and 5TB drives in an Readynas Pro Pioneer Edition PNDP600E
wrote:
I have 3 X 5TB and 3X4TB.. So 27GB total.
27TB raw storage, but a 22 TB (~20 TiB) volume size.
That's too big for OS 4.2, you'd need to convert to OS 6.
wrote:
If I upgrade to that newer software, can I still add new hard drive as they came in?
Yes. OS-6 has no known expansion limits, and the HCL for OS 6 NAS includes 12 TB drives.
wrote:
Is there any disadvantages of the newer software besides the fact that netgear won't support it on Legacy devices?
OS 6 x86 NAS all have 2 GB of RAM or more, so you might consider expanding the RAM on the pro as part of the project.
Almost all of the OS 4.2 features are carried over. One small exception is that OS 4.2 lets you send a WoL packet in a backup job, OS 6 dropped that for some reason. Apps of course are different.
