Thank you for the feedback that you've shared here in the community. We are glad and happy that everything turned out really well in all your ReadyNAS systems. We also hope that you will be an active contributor to the community.
Do you do the upgrade via the built-in updates? Or do I need to grab the latest R4toR6 6.5.0 update? I'm currently running 6.4.2 on my ReadyNas Pro 6.
The R4toR6 image is an OS6 firmware image with the header overwritten so that RAIDiator will accept. Once you are running OS6 you need to use the standard OS6 images to update the firmware. If you want to go back to 4.2.28 then you need to use a downgrade image (RAIDiator-x86 image but with the header overwritten so that OS6 will accept it). Note that like upgrading from RAIDiator-x86 to OS6, downgrading from OS6 to RAIDiator-x86 requires a factory reset.
Yes, the image you can download now would take you straight to 6.5.0 but it is only used for upgrading from RAIDiator-x86 to OS6. Once you are running OS6 you need to use the standard x86_64 OS6 images.
I now have 2TB more storage as I added 2.7TB drives in the first 4 slots. This is the max the board will handle according to Netgear.
I did have 12 1.8TB in all 12 slots. When I added the 2.7, 4.2.28 was always finding more space for expansion but could never do it.
Does it now with 6.4.2 or higher.
Slots 1-4 probably would work with higher capacity disks than 3TB ones, but YMMV. We tend not to test new higher disk capacities on legacy systems. Bays 5-12 in the 4200v1 and 3200 will still be limited to 2TB disks on OS6. But with a 12-bay do note you must only use enterprise disks. Desktop disks are not designed for the vibrations etc. that you would get in such a system.
RAIDiator-x86 4.2.x has two expansion limitations that OS6 does not have:
1. You can't expand a volume by more than 8TiB over the life of the volume. So on 4.2.x if your volume was 1.8TiB when it was created it can't be expanded past 9.8TiB
2. You cannot expand a volume past 16TiB (but you can create a larger one e.g. by doing a factory default - wipes all data, settings, everything - it just won't be expandable. Note if you have mixed disks capacities it will create a layer using the capacity of the smallest disk and then try to expand to add redundant space using X-RAID2 and fail if the expansion would take the volume past 16TiB)
As OS6 has neither of those two expansion limitations it was able to expand the volume fine.
