I have an Ex4100 with a bunch of different sized drives inside. I want to make a BIG volume with the sum of all the drives, but not stripe the data between all drives. Why isn’t this possible?
In my eyes, WD’s implementation of Spanning doing stripping between the drives is no different than RAID0, and not a safe way to do it. Honestly it seems crazy to me that the only way to do a Spanning volume is putting at risk your customers data in the case of one drive failure. OTOH I’m OK with losing one drive’s worth of data if the other 3 disks are unaffected. There are other NAS solutions that have this system.
Is there a way to create such volume through the CLI?
I didn’t think spanning the drives implements striping. Only raid 0 does striping?
With both protocols, a single disk failure will wipe out ALL data on ALL the drives. (although, without striping, I imagine you could get data back from a disk recovery tool)
Both are consistent.
Spanning is like filling a single hard drive. . .and files can get fragmented across multiple physical drives because no consideration is given to not splitting a file across physical drives.
So if you lose a drive in a spanned array, at the very least you are looking at a corrupt file allocation table. . . .and getting any data off the drive will involve disk recovery tools.
Even if you have all the data. . . I would not bet on salvaging the folder hierarchy or necessarily the file names. . . . So even if you have the files. . . .good luck figuring out how they relate to each other.
Short answer: Don’t do it. Especially on a 4 drive system.
The WD EX4100 doesn’t natively support a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) configuration, where each drive stays independent but is combined into a large volume without striping data. Instead, WD’s “Spanning” mode functions like RAID 0, distributing data across all the drives. If one drive fails, the whole volume becomes inaccessible, which poses a significant risk to your data. For anyone wanting a more fault-tolerant setup, this approach isn’t ideal.
Other NAS solutions, such as Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) or Unraid, offer more flexibility with mixed drive sizes. These systems allow different-sized drives to be used together, while still ensuring that a drive failure doesn’t impact the entire volume. WD’s system doesn’t provide this kind of flexibility.
If you’re determined to work with the EX4100 and want a safer alternative, it’s possible to set up each drive independently using SSH and then combine them using a tool like MergerFS. This way, the drives won’t be striped, and a failure of one will only affect its own data. But keep in mind that this method requires technical knowledge and ongoing maintenance, and firmware updates from WD could break custom setups.
If you need a more reliable and flexible solution, moving to a system like Unraid or a Synology NAS with SHR would be a better option. These systems offer better data protection and more freedom in terms of combining different drive sizes.
t’s funny you mention Unraid. I actually have 120TB of mismatched drives in an Unraid server and it’s been amazing. I want to use the EX4100 as a backup for the most important files from that server (I don’t need to backup Jellyfin or the Linux ISOs), and that’s why I wanted to use a large Spanning Volume without stripping.
I’d be interested in setting up a MergerFS, since that’s exactly what I want. Is there an available resource explaining what to do? I logged in through SSH and it doesn’t have the mergerfs bins, naturally.