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i have had my nas for a while now it has one 4tb installed and i have almost filled it to capacity and would like to add a second 4tb. what i would like to know is, is it possible to just insert the new 4tb into the second drive with out losing any data on the 1st hard drive or do i have to do anything special?
is it possible to have xraid set up and all bays full and then later down the line turn off xraid and turn the backup drive into a storage drive?
Once again there is no "Backup drive" concept. RAID doesn't work that way. What you are calling "backup" is redundancy data that is spread evenly over all four drives. It is a bit tricky to understand how it actually works, even if you are a computer person.
Setting that misunderstanding aside - if you turn off XRAID later on, you'd have a flexraid volume in RAID-5 format. Nothing on the volume would change, and you would not gain any more space. You would still have protection from a single disk failure. The only way to change that is to actually destroy the volume and create new ones. Data is of course lost when you destroy the volume.
just to confirm this if i only buy one 4tb and put it in my nas if xraid is on it will turn that 4tb into a backup drive for if a hard drive fails i wont lose my data if i then put in a 3rd and 4th hard drive will they become storage drives or will one of them become another protective hard drive?
If you are using XRAID and you have 2x4TB installed, then you will have a 4 TB data volume. If a single hard drives fails, you will be alerted to replace it - and your data will remain intact/available. You'd simply replace the failed drive with a new one (hot insert with the NAS running), and the protection would be restored.
If you add a third 4 TB drive, the volume will expand to 8 TB, and you still have the same protection from a single drive failure. If you add a 4th drive, the volume expands again to 12 TB, with the same protection.
With the fourth drive, there is a way to add it for additional protection instead of storage (handling loss of two disks). This is called RAID-6, and it is not the default behavior.
Even with RAID, you can lose data if multiple drives fail (which actually does happen sometimes) or if the NAS hardware or software fails. So we always suggest a backup even if you use RAID.
If you want to increase capacity, you need to first turn off xraid. That's done from the volumes tab (xraid is off if there is no green stripe on the xraid control).
Then hot-insert the drive, and create a second 4 TB jbod volume. While it is possible to simply expand your current volume, that is not the best idea. If either disk fails, you would lose all your data. So it is generally better to create second volume if you aren't using RAID redundancy.
The other option of course is to purchase two 4 TB drives, and then hot-insert them (waiting for sync inbetween). That would give you 8 TBs of space, with protection from a single disk failure.
just to confirm this if i only buy one 4tb and put it in my nas if xraid is on it will turn that 4tb into a backup drive for if a hard drive fails i wont lose my data if i then put in a 3rd and 4th hard drive will they become storage drives or will one of them become another protective hard drive?
but if i turn off xraid i can use all 4 bays as storage drives but it means no protection from disc failure?
is it possible to have xraid set up and all bays full and then later down the line turn off xraid and turn the backup drive into a storage drive?
is it possible to have xraid set up and all bays full and then later down the line turn off xraid and turn the backup drive into a storage drive?
Once again there is no "Backup drive" concept. RAID doesn't work that way. What you are calling "backup" is redundancy data that is spread evenly over all four drives. It is a bit tricky to understand how it actually works, even if you are a computer person.
Setting that misunderstanding aside - if you turn off XRAID later on, you'd have a flexraid volume in RAID-5 format. Nothing on the volume would change, and you would not gain any more space. You would still have protection from a single disk failure. The only way to change that is to actually destroy the volume and create new ones. Data is of course lost when you destroy the volume.
just to confirm this if i only buy one 4tb and put it in my nas if xraid is on it will turn that 4tb into a backup drive for if a hard drive fails i wont lose my data if i then put in a 3rd and 4th hard drive will they become storage drives or will one of them become another protective hard drive?
If you are using XRAID and you have 2x4TB installed, then you will have a 4 TB data volume. If a single hard drives fails, you will be alerted to replace it - and your data will remain intact/available. You'd simply replace the failed drive with a new one (hot insert with the NAS running), and the protection would be restored.
If you add a third 4 TB drive, the volume will expand to 8 TB, and you still have the same protection from a single drive failure. If you add a 4th drive, the volume expands again to 12 TB, with the same protection.
With the fourth drive, there is a way to add it for additional protection instead of storage (handling loss of two disks). This is called RAID-6, and it is not the default behavior.
Even with RAID, you can lose data if multiple drives fail (which actually does happen sometimes) or if the NAS hardware or software fails. So we always suggest a backup even if you use RAID.
