My good old RN 600 is still working with 4x250GB HDs in a 3 HD RAID 5 plus 1 hot spare. The resulting 455GB of storage are filling up quickly lately so I wondered if there's a way to add the hot-spare HD to the regular RAID 5, giving me a few GB more before I have to change the drives. The box is used for backup from a Duo these days so I feel I don't really need the extra safety from the hot spare.
Any hints on which steps to perform are highly appreciated.
You may have to perform a factory default. This will of course wipe the data. But don't do it unless your are secure with all the data needed is on the Duo. A member more experienced with Flex-Raid may have a better idea. If you factory default, you may want to use X-Raid rather than Flex-Raid.
You can't expand Flex-RAID volumes on Sparc ReadyNAS (e.g. 600). You can add additional volumes (you can have up to four in total, two including any given disk).
As you probably last factory reset on ancient firmware, I would recommend:
1. Backup your data 2. Verify backup is good 3. Power down 4. Remove old disks (label order) 5. Insert new disks 6. Do a factory reset. A few checks will be run and then you will have a 10 minute window to choose RAID mode by clicking setup in RAIDar (http://www.readynas.com/downloads 7. Restore data from backup
If you wish to stick with Flex-RAID you may wish to do a System > Config Backup before powering down to remove your old disks and restore it before restoring your data from backup.
I would suggest you choose drives from the HCL. There is no compatibility list for the Infrant 600, however you can choose disks from the compatibility list for another Sparc ReadyNAS (e.g. NV+).
