Combination of 6TB and 4TB disks inserted to RN104

[HH93]

Hello,

I need a small piece of info confirming;

I have a four bay system Ready NAS 104. bays 1 & 2 have 6TB HHD and are set up as X-Raid. I have added two more HDD to bays 3 & 4 butthey are only 4TB capacity. Is the smaller size the reason thay arn't being added to the set up ? I formatted them (3 & 4) and rebooted but still they wont add themselves !

Thanks in advance

H

[vandermerwe]

Yes, you can only add disks with the same or greater capacity to an array.

You should be able to create a new volume on the 2 new disks though. but this will be inefficient use of the disks you have. 

[StephenB]

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@vandermerwe wrote:

You should be able to create a new volume on the 2 new disks though. but this will be inefficient use of the disks you have. 

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Well that depends.  You could add 2 jbod volumes, which would give you 8 TB of non-redundant storage.  Certainly not inefficient.

Adding 1 RAID-1 volume would give you 4 TB.

[HH93]

Thanks very much for your replies.

They confirm my suspicions about disk size stopping what I was hoping to achieve.

H

[StephenB]

This is a case where the ordering matters. If you had started with 2x4TB and added 2x6TB you'd have 14 TB of total storage with single drive redundancy.

So one option is to do a factory reset with all disks in place, rebuild the NAS (reconfigure, reinstall any apps) and restore the data from backup.

[meverz]

Wouldn't you have to do a factory reset with the 2x4TB drives i nplace first, and then add the 6TB drives and expand the volume? I was under the impression a factory reset with different sized drives effectively treats the larger drives as smaller drives? Or have I got that wrong?

[StephenB]

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@meverz wrote:

Wouldn't you have to do a factory reset with the 2x4TB drives i nplace first, and then add the 6TB drives and expand the volume? I was under the impression a factory reset with different sized drives effectively treats the larger drives as smaller drives? Or have I got that wrong?

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You can do the reset with all the drives in place.  XRAID ends up layered.  You have a "base" layer of 4x4TB RAID-5 (12 TB capacity), and an "upper" layer of 2x2TB Raid-1 (2 TB capacity) - using the extra space on the 6 TB drives.  This is transparent to you - you just see a 14 TB volume.  The system will likely want to reboot before it builds the upper layer.

Installing 2x4TB and adding the 6 TB drives one at a time has the same effect, but ends up rebuilding the base layer 3 times.

[HH93]

Thanks very much for the info.

thats what I'll do then, backup everything, rearrange the disks then reboot and copy everything back on.

[HH93]

Hello again,

seems my problems isnt so simple to solve after all !

I'm home from my vacation and checked the machine to see about backing up and moving the disks agound.

So Bay 1 & 2 are 6TB WD Green HDD which can be seen and the data read ok. Bays 3 & 4 are WD Red 4TB so there shoudlnt be a problem but that disks wont integrate into the X-Raid as was my origional problem.

So that issue needs solving

Another issue is that now i cant access the NAS at all now !

[StephenB]

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@HH93 wrote:

Another issue is that now i cant access the NAS at all now !

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Obviously the main problem.  As I asked on the other thread - what firmware are you running?  6.4 or something older?

[HH93]

Firmware is 6.4 - the other issue cover on that thread is sorted out now Thanks.

So the question now is - once I have backed up the Data do I just perform a system reset using the button called "Perform Factory Default" from the Settings Tab of the System Page to make all four HDD into one big X-Raid ???

Regards

Howie

[StephenB]

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@HH93 wrote:

So the question now is - once I have backed up the Data do I just perform a system reset using the button called "Perform Factory Default" from the Settings Tab of the System Page to make all four HDD into one big X-Raid ???

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Yes

[HH93]

Thanks - I'll let you know how it goes once I've finished backing up - be a long process though with 4TB of data to copy.

[HH93]

Ok that worked but only after i updated the firmware to the Beta of 6.4.1 as the USB kept loosing connection and coming back as read only.

Anyway after a few weeks of waiting for the unit to do itss thing over the network.

So after all that copying, backing up and a factory reset which also took quite a while I have a setup with 6Tb, 6Tb, 4Tb, 4Tb as RAID5 & X-Raid giving me 12.75Tb which is ample.

thanks very much

H