If I am not mistaken, Volume Expansion will not work beyond 16TB. In order to support 16TB or greater, you will have to factory reset with that capacity in place. This is due to the limitation of the EXT4 filesystem tools that are used to expand the filesystem.
Also, it would be advisable to have your NAS on the latest FW v4.2.27.
I have 2 x 6-Bay Business Edition Nases, and I would like to know if there is way to check if they have a 16TB volume limit.
There are two expansion limits for your ReadyNAS.
One is that a volume growth is limited to 8 TiB over its lifetime. The second is that a volume cannot grow over 16 TiB.
You can create a larger volume size than 16 TiB if you use disks of the same size, and do a factory reset with them all in place. That volume can't be expanded though.
Note the above limits are on the actual volume size, not the raw disk capacity. For instance, 6x3TB single redundancy is under to 16 TiB limit, as is 6x4TB dual redundancy.
I just did a fresh install of a 4.2.27 Readynas Business Pro system with 4x4TB and 2x6TB. I get 18TB available, but in the logs an error :
Continuing with volume expansion or migration. Do not interrupt the system during this time. When complete, email notification will be sent to the alert contact list.
Then, a couple of minutes later Volume expansion failed
This is reported after every reboot.
We've had the same error when starting out with 4 x 4TB and then adding in the 6TB's one by one (error came after adding the last 6TB).
4x 4TB and 2x 6TB was the last test I did, but same error.
There is no data on this NAS so I can experiment all I want. We do have a similar NAS in the field we would like to upgrade, hence the testing we're doing.
Is there a way to create an additional volume on OS 4.2.X systems, as that would probably solve the issue.
You can create a larger volume size than 16 TiB if you use disks of the same size, and do a factory reset with them all in place. That volume can't be expanded though.
I am well aware that these are not on the list, but that is not the issue as we have some running (backup's) with 6TB in place and they run perfectly.
Having 18TB available but that ast disk not wanting to sync, is where I get puzzled. I'm not expanding anything, these disks are all put in at once during a factory reset.
It creates a 6x4TB RAID-5 layer then tries to expand to add a 2x2TB RAID-1 layer using the remaining 2TB on each of the 6TB disks. That fails.
You can do a factory default (wipes all data, settings, everything), open RAIDar, click setup during the 10 minute countdown, choose Flex-RAID and confirm your choice. Delete the volume created by default and create the ones you want.
Another alternative is to put OS6 on your Pro units (also requires a factory default). However this is unsupported.
...I'm not expanding anything, these disks are all put in at once during a factory reset.
As I said, all disks need to be the same size.
Ixa wrote:
...As per StephenB's earlier response on this forum:
StephenB wrote:
You can create a larger volume size than 16 TiB if you use disks of the same size, and do a factory reset with them all in place. That volume can't be expanded though.
As mdgm pointed out, if the disks are not the same size, then creating the XRAID array requires an expansion step - even if you are doing a factory default.
Flexraid with two volumes (4x4TB RAID5 and 2x6TB RAID1) will give you 18 TB (12 TB in the first and 6 TB in the second). 6x4TB xraid would have given you 20 TB.
If you were to install OS6 on the pro, then you could get 22 TB, and future expansion would be possible. Given where you are, that might be the best option for you.
