I started out with a diskless EX4 and added disks one-by-one (trying to simulate the general use case where people buy drives only when they want to expand capacity):
With one disk, I could initialize a JBOD volume. After adding a second disk - I could change to RAID-1 without loss of existing data. I added a third disk - migrated to RAID-5 without data loss. Now, after adding the 4th disk – I found that
I was given an option to change to RAID-5 (I was already in RAID-5 with 3 disks) – but this required all disks to be formatted again. I couldn’t find a way to expand from 3 disks to 4 while remaining in RAID-5 and keeping existing data intact.
Is this feature (online RAID capacity expansion) available in the firmware? If so, where do I find that option in the UI? If not, I find it really strange that there are a number of advanced features (for example, Thecus doesn’t allow single disk JBOD to RAID-1 migration in their NAS units, but WD allows that in the EX4), but this seemingly straightforward (and often taken for granted) feature is missing.
Other minor complaints I have are:
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Fan speed seems to top out at 1035 rpm. During RAID-1 to RAID-5 migration with WD RE drives, I found HDD temperatures reaching 58 - 60 C. Any reasons not to go in for a better fan, given that we have variable fan speed control? (I have to say the fan is pretty quiet)
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There is no option to view detailed logs. For example, I want to know when disk rebuild starts (I see that the Notification list gives some basic info like when a new disk gets inserted or when volume rebuilding completes, but information like when volume resizing started and finished is not available). I also checked under /var/log , but couldn’t find the necessary information in any of the files.
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The NAS seems to be running some sort of scraper in the background which might affect NAS performance (I see it does take up a lot of CPU cycles). I have to see the difference in performance with the media server enabled and disabled to see how bad the effect is.