Can I add a 5th Disk?

[alexofindy]

I asked this question once before, but didn't get an answer. Thought I'd try once more; I apologize for the duplicate posting.

I have a 6 bay Readynas Ultra 6 Plus, and I am wondering about expansion

My system is X-RAID-2, with single redundancy. I have four 3TB drives, which I installed one at a time (this is what the manuals suggest), and thus now have about 8.3TB of usable capacity. If I add another 3 TB disk, which has a "raw" capacity of 2.7 TB, I will hit the 8 TB expansion limit, since I initialized my system with only a single drive (2.7 TB usable capacity) in place. Thus, several questions
:
-if I add a 5th 3TB drive will any expansion take place? I should be able to add about 2.3 or 2.4 TB of capacity before I hit the 8 TB limit. Will I get this amount of expansion, or will I get none?
-after I do this expansion would I be able to add a 6th drive and get dual redundancy?

Thanks!

[PapaBear]

What is the volume of data you currently have on your machine?

[Leia]

If you've done factory default with 4 3TB drives, you can add the 5th and 6th either for volume expansion or the dual redundancy. Select this in Frontview Volume page.

[alexofindy]

Papabear - My volume size is 8326. I am using about 51% of this, so a touch over 4 GB is free. I do use an NV+ to backup the important data on my system, but I have a lot of unimportant stuff I'd rather not lose that I don't backup, because I have no easy way of doing so. In other words, about 3GB of my data is not "mission critical" but would be nice not to lose, and this data is not backup up. Thus, I'd rather not do a factory default.

Leia: When I set up my system a year and a half ago, I added the first three 3TB disks one at a time, followed by a 4th disk which I added recently. The first disk I added gave me redundancy, and the second two disks gave me more space. I have already used about 5500GB of my 8 GB allowed expansion. The 8 TB expansion limit was not well publicized, and the system documentation for the Readynas suggested that doing things one disk at a time was the way to go. Obvously, this was a mistake, but I didn't know any better at the time. I want to know if I can safely add another 3TB drive, and get 2400GB or 2500GB of expansion.

Thanks!

[Qinghong.he]

Can you sure your NAS is NV+??
NV+ is a 4 bay SPARC platform NAS, it did not support 3T disk.

Anyway, please PM NAS system log to me, I will help you check your issue.

[mdgm]

Qingong.he if you read the post carefully alexofindy is saying that he uses a NV+ as a backup NAS. The Ultra 6 Plus (mentioned in opening post of the thread) is the main NAS.

[Leia]

Leia: When I set up my system a year and a half ago, I added the first three 3TB disks one at a time, followed by a 4th disk which I added recently. The first disk I added gave me redundancy, and the second two disks gave me more space. I have already used about 5500GB of my 8 GB allowed expansion. The 8 TB expansion limit was not well publicized, and the system documentation for the Readynas suggested that doing things one disk at a time was the way to go. Obvously, this was a mistake, but I didn't know any better at the time. I want to know if I can safely add another 3TB drive, and get 2400GB or 2500GB of expansion.

Thanks!

Hi alexofindy,

Yes, you can hot-add another 2 drives, the 5th for expansion and the 6th for dual redandancy. After that, your volume will grow to 11105GB.
The 8TB limitation is ext4's limitation. ext4 only allows for online expansion of up to an additional 8TB with 64-bit filesystems.

Thanks,
-Leia