I do want to use the volume feature of the nas at all, I would like to use something like mhddfs to present the drives, but it looks like by default the system doesnt allow me to do that
has any one got any idea ?
Model: RN10400|ReadyNAS 100 Series 4-Bay (Diskless)
You need to use the volume feature, but you don't need to use RAID. You can switch to flexraid, destroy your existing volume, and then create a new one using JBOD.
Generally I don't recommend spanning multiple disks with a single RAID-0 or JBOD volume, since if any disk fails then all data is lost. When I use JBOD myself, it's always with one volume for each disk.
I dont want to use JBOD with four different volumes,
I didn't say you couldn't use JBOD to create a single volume. I said I didn't recommend it. I wouldn't recommend mhddfs either.
You can select all four disks, and create a single JBOD volume that spans all of them. There will be no RAID redundancy, so the volume size is the sum of the disks (the NAS reports size in TiB, not TB btw). You can get the same result by choosing RAID-0 (which organizes the virtual disk a differently).
@StephenB wrote: You can select all four disks, and create a single JBOD volume that spans all of them. There will be no RAID redundancy, so the volume size is the sum of the disks (the NAS reports size in TiB, not TB btw). You can get the same result by choosing RAID-0 (which organizes the virtual disk a differently).
One advantage of JBOD over RAID0 here is its ability to fully use the capacity of each drive in case of mixed capacity.
I didnt want to use JBOD because if one of the disks died, the whole volume is unusable right ? where as mhddfs I still have the data on the working drives.
Thanks for all the inputs, I have given up on mhddfs, it sort of worked but very flaky, I have settled for JBOD, I didnt want raid because I feel that in a raid setup all the HDDs are being used at once if there is any activity whereas in single drive mode, only the drive that being read/written to is being used so each disk might last longer.
I didnt want to use JBOD because if one of the disks died, the whole volume is unusable right ? where as mhddfs I still have the data on the working drives. ... I have given up on mhddfs, it sort of worked but very flaky,
The safest answer would have been one disk per volume. Users still see all the shares, the only downside is that you sometimes need to balance storage (shifting shares between disks or dividing a share). With large drives (6 TB and up) that balancing hasn't been a problem for me.
I didnt want raid because I feel that in a raid setup all the HDDs are being used at once if there is any activity whereas in single drive mode, only the drive that being read/written to is being used so each disk might last longer.
Total I/O for reads is the same with RAID as without, so the average load per drive on reads is identical. Writes do expand, because parity blocks need to be recomputed.
Personally, I'd have chosen the benefits of RAID redundancy in a heartbeat. While I've never seen any real data comparing drive life with/without RAID, most of my NAS drives have been in place for years. My NV+ was set up 6 years ago, and is still using it's original drives.
When I've used JBOD, it's been because I wanted max capacity on that device. I've done that with backup NAS, but the main NAS has always been RAID with single redundancy. Though many here favor dual redundancy, I maintain good backups, and would rather take the extra capacity I get with single redundancy.
