This topic has been marked solved and closed to new posts due to inactivity. We hope you'll join the conversation by posting to an open topic or starting a new one.
unable to horizontally expand Raid5 (X-Raid) - identical hard drives
Firmware version 6.9.4 hot fix 1. readynas 314.
I did an OS reinstall recently just to start fresh after recovering from some data loss. I have 3×3 TB Western Digital discs that I am using in the unit. Before installing these discs I mounted them on my laptop and physically deleted any partitions that existed on all of the discs. Once completed I installed all three discs at the same time and the readynas 314 automatically set up the discs in a RAID five configuration (X-raid), synchronized in the discs, and was done. It's been working great ever since.
Yesterday I added another completely blank fresh out of the box identical hard drive as the other three discs. The disc synchronized successfully but I'm left with approximately 6 TB of storage space. I was expecting it to increase to 9 TB… At least that's what the manual tells me will happen. Did I miss something? Otherwise I'm going to have to backup everything, destroyed the RAID volume, rebuild it manually to get it to behave properly. At least that's what I think I've got to do. Am I missing something?
Yesterday I added another completely blank fresh out of the box identical hard drive as the other three discs. The disc synchronized successfully but I'm left with approximately 6 TB of storage space. I was expecting it to increase to 9 TB…
Yes, it should have expanded.
Try rebooting the NAS. If that doesn't trigger it, please download the log zip file and copy mdstat.log in a reply here.
Yesterday I added another completely blank fresh out of the box identical hard drive as the other three discs. The disc synchronized successfully but I'm left with approximately 6 TB of storage space. I was expecting it to increase to 9 TB…
Yes, it should have expanded.
Try rebooting the NAS. If that doesn't trigger it, please download the log zip file and copy mdstat.log in a reply here.
Re: unable to horizontally expand Raid5 (X-Raid) - identical hard drives
For this issue, that's typically safe. But for others, you can end up with the dreaded "remove unused volumes" error. So the first step is actually "update your backup".
So the first step is actually "update your backup".
Yes. RAID isn't enough to keep your data safe, having a backup on a different device is the only way to do that.
Investing in a backup plan is better than hoping for a successful data recovery when things go wrong (and of course they will go wrong at some point). USB drives are a popular (and cost effective) way to back up the NAS, though personally I like the convenience of doing backups up to another NAS.
That said, in this particular case the reboot didn't carry much (if any) risk.
