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I have a 4TB in my slot1 for now, but would like to expand with some HDDs i found recently, the problem is, all of them are not equal. So i have a 2TB, 3TB, 4TB (Currently in slot1) and a fourth one i would like to buy either a 2 or 3TB depending on the recommendations here. My question is, what is the best order to have maximum storeage like, 2 TB in slot 1, 2 in Slot 2 then 3TB in 3rd and 4TB in 4th? That any good or should i start with the biggest one on the slot 1? I want to go with XRaid default option so please advice me accordingly.
The capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest". So your current 2TB+3TB+4TB should give you 5 TB - shown as ~4.5 TiB on the web admin ui. You aren't able to use 1 TB of space on the 4 TB drive. The way to maximize space is to get another 4 TB drive. That would give you 9 TB (shown as ~8.18 TiB in the web ui).
Note that you don't have RAID protection when you are adding a disk - so Netgear recommends a full backup before you do that. I agree with that advice (and would add that everyone should have a backup plan in place, since RAID isn't enough to keep your data safe).
The capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest". So your current 2TB+3TB+4TB should give you 5 TB - shown as ~4.5 TiB on the web admin ui. You aren't able to use 1 TB of space on the 4 TB drive. The way to maximize space is to get another 4 TB drive. That would give you 9 TB (shown as ~8.18 TiB in the web ui).
Note that you don't have RAID protection when you are adding a disk - so Netgear recommends a full backup before you do that. I agree with that advice (and would add that everyone should have a backup plan in place, since RAID isn't enough to keep your data safe).
Note that if you are planning on expanding the current array (keeping the data you already have on the NAS), you cannot add any drives smaller than the current one and have them all in RAID. To use that combination of drives, you'll need to save off the data and either destroy and re-create the volume, or do a whole Factory Default with all drives in place. If you just destroy the volume, you'll also need to un-install any apps and re-install after the new volume is created. If you go with the factory default, you can save your configuration file, too. But make sure you re-install any apps before you restore the configuration.
The capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest". So your current 2TB+3TB+4TB should give you 5 TB - shown as ~4.5 TiB on the web admin ui. You aren't able to use 1 TB of space on the 4 TB drive. The way to maximize space is to get another 4 TB drive. That would give you 9 TB (shown as ~8.18 TiB in the web ui).
Note that you don't have RAID protection when you are adding a disk - so Netgear recommends a full backup before you do that. I agree with that advice (and would add that everyone should have a backup plan in place, since RAID isn't enough to keep your data safe).
The slot order does matter it looks like. As suggested, I bought a new 4TB added it and the synchronisation completed this morning, however when i added my 2TB in the slot 3, The expansion failed with a message saying i can only expand with equal or more capacity. So what do you suggest?
The slot order does matter it looks like. As suggested, I bought a new 4TB added it and the synchronisation completed this morning, however when i added my 2TB in the slot 3, The expansion failed with a message saying i can only expand with equal or more capacity. So what do you suggest?
The slot order doesn't matter. But the order you add the disks does matter (no matter what slots you put them in). I was assuming that the two smaller disks were already in the NAS - obviously a mistake on my part.
You needed to start the array with the smallest disk (2 TB in your case). So the system wouldn't have accepted the 2 TB even if you had added it before the new 4 TB drive - because you already had a 4 TB volume.
So the options are to
(a) switch to flexraid, and add the 2 and 3 TB drives as jbod volumes. Then you'd move some shares to each volume (approximately balancing the free space).
(b) back up your data, and your configuration. Do a factory default with all disks in place, Then reinstall any apps, restore the configuration, and restore the data (in that order). This gives you a single volume with RAID protection.
The benefit of the first approach is that you don't have to start over. You give up RAID protection on the smaller jbod volumes, and you also lose the ability to expand those jbod volumes in the future. Plus you will sometimes need to move shares around in order to keep reasonable free space on all the volumes. Both approaches would give you the same amount of space.
