I just installed OS6 on my old Pro 4. I want to use it as a backup target using replicate. The installation went very smooth and the OS is up and running. Thanks to everyone who made this possible, you guys rock!
I put in 2x3TB drives and 2x500GB drives. I might replace the 500GB drives with larger ones at some point, but that's what I had. I destroyed the initial volume because I want to set up an encrypted volume. WIth X-RAID turned off, I selected all four drives in the "Volume" tab, clicked new volume, and created an encrypted RAID5 volume. Then switched X-RAID back on. After a lengthy resyncing/reshaping the NAS only reports the volume as having a size of 1.5 TB, so only 500GB of the 3TB drives seem to be used. After some looking around, I destroyed the volume again and pulled the two 3TB drives. Set up a new encrypted volume with the 500GB drives and allowed to build the volume (500GB in size). Then, with X-RAID enabled, I added the first 3TB drive. Allowed to re-sync again. Volume size now up to 1000GB. Same procedure for last drive, final volume size 1.5TB. So same result as adding all four volumes from the start (just much slower). My next attempt is now to set up the volume with just the 2x3TB volumes. Just started the process, volume size is reported as 3TB. It's still in the process or re-sycning. Once that is completed (~8 hours to go) I will switch to X-RAID mode and see what happens. Hopefully it adds the 2x500GB drives to the volume, ending up with a total of 4TB. Somehow I doubt it, though.
Has anyone seen the same happen? Is this an issue with OS6 in general (I have a new ReadyNAS 314, but it doesn't have mixed drives) or only a problem in the case of OS6 on legacy Pro 4? Or is this a case of user error and I am doing something wrong?
Expanding encrypted volumes is a little more restrictive -- we can't do multi-level (mixed disk size) encrypted volumes. If you swap the remaining 500GB drives for 3TBs, it should expand.
@mdgm: I had initially started out with the smaller disks, then added the larger capacity ones. That didn't work either.
@skywalker: OK, understood. I guess there have to be some limitations with encryption. That now renders the 500GB drives useless, but so be it. They were old after all, I just didn't have any other use to put them to. Out of curiosity: Is it possible to do vertical expansion of an encrypted volume? I.e. what would happen if I were to set up a volume with 3TB drives now and would later replace all of them, one at a time, with 4TB drives? Would the volume expand?
I replaced 6 of my 2TB drives with 6 4TB drives one at a time on an encrypted OS6 system and it expanded just fine. Just note the expansion did not happen until the last disk was synced. Then it expanded.
Once thing I noticed though with encryption is that it is really slow on oldr hardware without AES extensions in the chip. I am going to try reloading the system within the next few weeks to see if I get better performance. Now I only get about 25MB/s read and write on an Ultra 6 Plus.
@skywalker: OK, understood. I guess there have to be some limitations with encryption. That now renders the 500GB drives useless, but so be it. They were old after all, I just didn't have any other use to put them to. Out of curiosity: Is it possible to do vertical expansion of an encrypted volume? I.e. what would happen if I were to set up a volume with 3TB drives now and would later replace all of them, one at a time, with 4TB drives? Would the volume expand?
Once thing I noticed though with encryption is that it is really slow on oldr hardware without AES extensions in the chip. I am going to try reloading the system within the next few weeks to see if I get better performance. Now I only get about 25MB/s read and write on an Ultra 6 Plus.
That's interesting, because that's the exact same performance I got on an OS6-encrypted iSCSI container on my Ultra 4, which has a much slower processor. I wonder if there is a bottleneck here, and where it is?
