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Hi folks. I've inherited a ReadyNAS NV+ (v1) from my son who was given it by a friend. No drives, just the NAS. I've purchased 4 x 2TB Seagate Barracuda's over the past week and have tried syncing them. Three are fully sync'ed, but the fourth refuses to sync. Cannot raise the total volume above 5533GB although it should be around 7400 (4 X 1859GB). Fourth drive (second drive purchased and installed) has not synced from the start, but all the others have synced although the fourth drive has formatted correctly and is visble in volumes. Took it out of its original slot #2 yesterday and erased it in a dock connected to my MacBook Pro, then reinserted it as a fresh drive in slot #4 after shifting original drives in slots #3 and #4 down. Went through sync process again, but still not adding additional volume to total storage. Any suggestions?
Cannot raise the total volume above 5533GB although it should be around 7400 (4 X 1859GB).
Let's start here. A 4x2TB RAID-5 array has a raw size 8 TB (~7.27 TiB or ~7400 GiB). But that includes 2 TB of RAID parity blocks that protect the data. The volume capacity is actually 6 TB (~5.45 TiB). So the volume size you are reporting is in fact correct. If you are seeing a volume capacity around 4 TB (~3.63 TiB), then there is a problem. Please let us know if that's the case.
Took it out of its original slot #2 yesterday and erased it in a dock connected to my MacBook Pro, then reinserted it as a fresh drive in slot #4 after shifting original drives in slots #3 and #4 down. Went through sync process again, but still not adding additional volume to total storage.
This is expected behavior in a healthy RAID volume. With all disks in place, the array status is "redundant" - meaning that the data is protected from a single disk failure (or removal of a disk).
Then when you remove a disk, the volume becomes degraded, but the capacity doesn't change. The degraded volume is no longer protected and if a disk were to fail (or another disk is removed), the volume will fail and all data on it is lost.
When you reinsert the disk, it resyncs and the volume becomes redundant again (with no capacity change). The resync process reconstructs the disk content from the remaining three disks, so it will end up with the same content as you had before you removed it.
Are you seeing the "redundant" status in Frontview (or in RAIDar)?
BTW, I generally don't recommend shuffling the disks around. While the NAS will work if you do that, in your system one of the disks is quite different from the rest. Newer ReadyNAS distribute the parity blocks in a regular pattern across all the drives. However, your ReadyNAS has a dedicated parity disk instead, and that disk is formatted differently. When things go wrong it is sometimes useful to know which disk is the parity disk. Normally that is disk 4, but if you shuffle you won't know which one it is. You probably shouldn't try to re-order them at this point. But if you do a factory reset in the future, I suggest preserving the slot order. Personally I put a label on each disk tray, identifying it's slot.
Your total Capacity for your 4x2TB drives is just right. This is because of the protection RAID 5 has allocated to your system. (Which uses the 4th disk)
Since you setup the device using X-RAID, it automatically set the RAID to RAID 5 which is the case for a 4 disk setup.
RAID 5 makes the total capacity of your storage system equals the capacity of all your disks minus the capacity of one disk.
If you plan to use all of your disks as a volume you will have to destroy the volume, set it to FLEX-RAID and create a JBOD for each disk.
I own an NV+ myself, though I use it as a backup NAS now - my primary NAS is a RN526. Mine has been very reliable, but of course technology does advance, and it doesn't have the speed or the capacity of newer models.
A couple of things you might consider:
RAID is helpful, but it's not enough to protect your data from loss. There are plenty of folks here who assumed it was, and learned the hard way that RAID arrays and storage devices can fail. The best way to protect your data is to have backups on other devices. So if you are using your NAS as primary storage, you should put a backup plan in place. USB drives are an inexpensive approach.
Also, unexpected power failures can destroy your RAID volume - either because a power surge does damage, or simply because the NAS has queued up disk writes that are lost when the power fails. Many of the data loss stories we see here begin with an unexpected power loss. Protecting your NAS with a UPS is a good solution. You want one that has a USB interface that you can connect to the NAS - that tells the NAS when the UPS battery is running out, so it can shut down cleanly. There are lots of compatible UPS - APC and CyberPower are popular. You can of course ask here for advice on a specific model.
