I've got a 516 with 6x6TB drives setup in raid 6. I'm running out of storage.
My understanding is that I would need to swap out 3 drives with 8TB before I would get any storage increase available. Is that accurate?
Could I use the eSATA ports to expand my existing array with external drives? I get that the drive is external and so could perhaps get unplugged, but I'm not to concerned about that being in raid 6 and having two spares.
My understanding is that I would need to swap out 3 drives with 8TB before I would get any storage increase available. Is that accurate?
No, it's actually worse than that. You need to upgrade 4 drives before you see any storage increase. Note you'd need to switch to XRAID (if you aren't in XRAID now).
If you go forward, I'd go with bigger drives than 8 TB - I don't think you get enough expansion to make it worth the cost.
Given the cost of replacing 4 perfectly good disks, perhaps get a second NAS, and put some of your data on it.
A variation (though expensive) is get a new NAS and repurpose the current one as a backup NAS. Get new (larger) drives. Then spread the drives across both NAS to balance the capacity. You could use single redundancy in both NAS, which would reduce downstream expansion costs. This gives you a solid backup plan, and lets you use all of your existing drives.
Could I use the eSATA ports to expand my existing array with external drives?
No. You can create shares on an external drive, but you can't add it to your existing array. So it wouldn't be protected by RAID.
You could look into getting an expansion chassis, and create a separate volume on it. The EDA500 is no longer in production, but there are some similar units that work. Though I think getting a second NAS is a better solution - the expansion chassis concept didn't seem to work out that well in practice.
The eSATA port, at least when used with a port expander like is in the the EDA500, is quite slow. If you were to expand your volume to include that (whih you can only do in FlexRAID mode, thus limiting future expansion capability), you are going to slow down the whole volume.
I have two 5-bay eSATA chasses (one an EDA500, the other a SanDisk) on a 516, but both are separate volumes. One contains rarely-accessed archival data and the other is for PC backups. I would never use eSATA for anything that I acccessed often or where transfer speed is important (like streaming).
