hi guys I'm looking at adding a 4 bay jbod usb enclosure to the 104 and i was wanting to know if anyone could explain how it will work will the odds just be extra storage or will it be covered under the raid 5 protection so if a drive goes down on the usb will it be recoverable when i replace the disk because my understanding is 4x 3tb drives will give me about 9 tb which is simply now enough
It will NOT be part of the RAID array, and it will be much slower than internal drives (even if you use USB 3.0). There might also be issues with recognizing the multiple drives.
Getting a second NAS to expand is a better option, and another RN104 is likely not much different in cost than a 4 bay enclosure.
thats true my other question is if i have a 3tb hdd formation to OS X journaled can i add it to the 104 using raid 5 without loosing the data on it and if not can i add a drive to an existing raid 5 system without formatting the drives on the 104
ok so i can't add an existing disk and keep the data on it thats good to know what if i had 2 x 3tb drives in the 104 and when to add a 3rd would the data on the 2 already installed be formatted or would only the drive I'm adding be formatted sorry to be a pain its just i have a massive library or movies and tv and i don't wanna loose any I'm looking into this as i have just lost a 3tb drive and i could have cried lol
If you have 2x3TB on the RN104 (using xraid), then if you insert a new blank drive the capacity grows from 3 TB to 6 TB with no data loss. If one disk fails, the data volume loses redundancy but no data is lost. When you insert a replacement disk, redundancy is restored.
RAID is a good thing, but you can still lose data. So you should put a back up strategy for your library in place. It is always risky to trust your data to one device. Personally I maintain 2 local copies of everything (in addition to the primary copy), and also use crashplan to back up my data to the cloud.
Also, I strongly recommend getting a UPS with a USB connector, and using that with your RN104. That eliminates issues due to unexpected loss of power.
