NAS540 upgrade options -

Skywatch

I have a NAS540 with 2x 6TB drives in a raid 1 configuration. I have 2 more 6TB drives which I have added.

I can't change to raid 5 as it is 16.37TB (according to the menu screen). Is there a trick to get this to work somehow?

If not, what are my options?

If I add the new drives to expand the raid 1 array, what will I get? Will the same problem arise?

I could use only 3 drives to create the raid 5. Will I be able to add a second volume to this and then add in the 4th 6TB hdd andget around the volume threshold that way?

I definitely *don't* want to loose any data from the current volume.

Any help, thoughts, ideas welcome.

#NAS_Nov_2018

Ijnrsi

If you are not using as disk group, then you will get some capacity waste with over 16TB size disk capacity, because it is litmition on volume of page side 4K. But disk group can let you create over 16TB capacity, then allocate to create two volume of 16TB and another with remaining capacity.

RAID 1 add 3th disk, then the maximum capacity is still 6tb, then if you change RAID 1 to RAID 5 with 3 disks, then you can be able to add 4th disk to create it as single volume.

If you don't want to do RAID type change, expand and prevent any unexpect problem, then the best way is creating RAID 5 with 4 HDDs, and copy old data from old HDD to new RAID 5 volume.

Skywatch

Thank you for the reply - it is helping me but I still am a bit confused.

1. If I add a 3rd HDD I can convert to raid 5 with 10.5TB storage.

2. Then I add a 4th HDD to this will it be able to expand to 16TB volume with a little wasted space? Or will it refuse to do this as it does now when I try to add 2 HDD at once? Can raid 5 expand to maximum volume size with 4th hdd even if there is still excess capacity?

3. Different option - Can I simply make the 2 new HDD into another raid 1 volume? So then I have the existing volume on 2x HDD and a new raid 1 volume on the new HDD? This will give less capacity than I had hoped for, but might be the simplest appraoch as data on existing drives will remain untouched.

Thanks!

Ijnrsi

For item 2, yes, RAID 5 can expand to maximum volume size 16TB with 4TB, but If you add a 4th HDD to expan to 16TB volume, then you will get little wasted, but I could not know the mechanism how the NAS to allocate the remaining capacity to reduce to 16TB, so it is not recommand, but if would like to do it, then you should backup the data first to prevent any unexpectation.

For item 3, yes, you can create 2ed volume for RAID 1 and store data to the volume.