I have a WD EX4 4bay NAS. It currently has 2x2tb WD reds. They’re in raid 1 with a single 2tb volume.
I just ordered 2x4tb WD reds for my remaining empty bays.
I have a few questions regarding adding the drives and the raid setup.
So what I want is for the 2tb drives to mirror each other in raid 1 (as they currently are), and for the 4tb drives to mirror each other in raid 1. I want it to show up as a single 6tb volume.
Do I simply pop in the new drives and it’ll configure this automatically based on how my 2tb drives are configured? If not, how do I go about making sure it configures this way?
I’ve never added drives to an established raid 1 before, and these drives are two sets of different capacities, so I want to be sure I do it correctly.
Also, would a raid 5 be a better option? If so, would I have to format my established 2tb drives? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
You can’t have them in dual raid 1 but in the same volume.
With mismatched drive sizes, I think you must have two volumes or JBOD (which would be four volumes) or spanning mode (which could do one volume but no redundancy at all.)
In any case, changing the mode will erase your data.
Is there a way I can configure it into a single volume? A different raid setup perhaps that still allows redundancy?
Now I’m not sure what I should do.
Should I just have two separate raid 1 volumes? That seems like the easiest way to go, even if it’s not my preferred outcome.
Yes, that’s what you’ll technically need to do. Two separate raid1s which make two separate volumes. But beware… this device does not like having two separate raids and you may (or if you are lucky, may not) get a lot of funky things starting to happen.
first do this. Pop up one of the hard drive say Disk 2 and insert the 4tb drive. it will then copy the files from disk 1. Now once raid is compiled then pop the Disk 1 and then insert the new 4tb . Now you have 4tb raid 1.
Then do what you can do with 2tb drives.
I created three SCSI drives 500GB and then i went into disk management and created a raid5 using the three virtual SCSI drives. Works like a charm!
