NAS326: External Drive for RAID?

Emerald Dragon

QUESTION: I am currently upgrading my drive from Basic to RAID 1, and I was wondering if I can use the connection for External USB Drive as RAID. Can it be done?

REASON: The reason being I want to have more redundancy to support RAID 1, just in case the drive failed. I had bad experiences with losing data in the past (That when I lost the first 2 years of my 1st kid pictures) And my wife got very pissy when that happens. This time, when my old simple NAS crashed. It already took me two weeks and $$$ trying to recover Family Photos. And I don't want to go through that dilemma again.

FUTURE UPGRADES: OK, this is for the futures upgrade for the hard drive expansion. When it's time, Do, I just get a new bigger hard drive and swapped it with the old ones? I currently have 2 (1TB) and I would like to upgrade them both to 2 (12TB) in the future. Of course, one at a time. I can't afford to buy both at the same time. The darn thing is way too expensive, I just checked.

Thanks in advance.

Emerald Dragon

ENDLESS

When you are going to replace all the disks, better to backup all of your data to the external drive.
And you don't need to worry about the fail during the replacement on your disks.

If you want to replace the disk one by one on your NAS, it may take days to run the progress.
I will recommend you to copy the data to another drive, and delete your current Volume, and install the new disks, then create a bigger volume on your NAS.

Kim

As I know, you can't use internal and external drive to create RAID 1.
I think maybe you can use Backup Planner to backup photos to external drive periodically to avoid losing photos or files.
Also, I think if possible you can change two drives at the same time because if one drive is 1TB and another one is 12TB, the storage size is still 1TB.

Emerald Dragon

Can someone confirm that, if I can replace both drives without losing data? Having 1TB, I am already 25% capacity full, and I am just starting (a week ago) putting pictures, videos, and music on the drive. I am pretty sure it will filled up son enough.

ENDLESS

When you are going to replace all the disks, better to backup all of your data to the external drive.
And you don't need to worry about the fail during the replacement on your disks.

If you want to replace the disk one by one on your NAS, it may take days to run the progress.
I will recommend you to copy the data to another drive, and delete your current Volume, and install the new disks, then create a bigger volume on your NAS.

Emerald Dragon

@ENDLESS, Thanks I think I will do that. But it will take some time to get both drives. 12TB cost so much especially the Seagate Ironwolf NAS one.