When I type this address into a browser 192.168.1.140 I see the Home tab of my PR4100 NAS. It shows 14.1 TB Free. I have been operating with 3 out of 4 hard drives in my NAS all 10 TB. Using Acronis I have a backup chain going. I installed a 4th drive of 12 TB. A process that took several hours took place. Finally the NAS was complete. Disk Status shows my 4 healthy drives all Good. My Raid Volume is 17.91 TB. But the home tab continues to show 14.1 TB Free. How can I make the PR4100 NAS include my new drive in usable space?
What was the Raid level when using 3 drives? What the raid level now?
Vol 1 … Raid 5 … 17.91 TB … Good. That is what it says now. I do not remember what it said before
For 3 years I have been using 2 Red plus and one Red pro drive all Ten TB inn my PR4100. I have backed up numerous times. It was running 24/7 for three years just fine. What I now understand is that according to WD advice I should never have been able to do that. A plus drive and a pro drive cannot cooperate, their staff seems to believe. I am trying to find out if I am able to add a fourth drive, a new Twelve TB Red Pro. What seems to be required is that I wipe out all my stored files completely and reformat all my drives in the NAS and start over from scratch in order to get the fourth drive to be seen. It seems necessary to abolish my shares and destroy the name of my NAS as it is known by my Plex server. I will have to rebuild my shares and reteach Plex and Acronis to see them. All the reformatting will take a number of days. I have written my question to the WD staff and received an evasive answer. What I seem to be learning from them is that they do not respect my mixing of Pro and Plus drives. They seem to be saying that I should not expect to insert a new 12 TB drive and see one single megabyte of increased storage space unless I buy more new drives and start over.
I my experience with the EX4 and the PR4100, as long as the drives match the RPM, cache and capacity, they cooperate.
I’ve had to mix Seagate with HSGT and WD at one time or another, but as long as they were technically close, they worked fine.
I have yet to try to use a larger drive as a replacement for a failed smaller drive.
In your description, you started with a RAID5 3-drive array using 10TB disks with 17.91TB (the equivalent capacity of 2 disks for data and the equivalent capacity of 1 disk for parity).
They will lose a few percent of capacity due to the file system, but I would expect something in the neighborhood of 16TB useable.
Then you inserted a 12TB into the previously empty 4th drive slot.
I would say the 4th drive didn’t join the original RAID group. That 12TB drive might be marked as a “Spare” in case one of the other 3 drives fails.
As far as I know, there is no option to expand or add a drive to an existing RAID group on the WD NAS. You would have to delete it and then create a new one.
But if you go that route, use 4 drives of similar technology.
I have a PR4100 with a 4-drive RAID5 using 10TB disks, and the RAID size is 29.86. This is about what you’d expect with a RAID5 group use 4 10TB disks (the equivalent capacity of 3 disks and the equivalent capacity of 1 disk for parity).
I use them on Windows systems, and the “Properties” on the SMB mounted drive shows “Capacity: 27.1 TB”.
If you started over with four 10TB disks, that’s about what you should end up with.
Here’s what’s happening with your PR4100 NAS. You’ve installed the new 12TB drive successfully and it shows as healthy, but the additional storage space needs to be manually added to your usable space. To make use of this new drive space, log into your NAS web interface through 192.168.1.140, navigate to the Storage or Settings section, and look for options to expand or extend your RAID volume. This is separate from the initial drive installation and synchronization you’ve already completed. When you expand the volume, it will incorporate the new drive’s capacity, increasing it beyond the current 14.1TB free space. Keep your NAS powered on during this process, as it will take several hours to complete. Since you have Acronis backups in place, you’re prepared for this maintenance task, but double-check that your backups are current before making any storage changes.
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If it’s safe to assume you have a PR4100, you may want to validate those options exist on your admin GUI for your PR4100 and then edit your reply.
The “drive installation” and everything after that is not done in the GUI. And the options to expand the existing RAID5 through the Admin GUI does not exist in OS5 (and not on OS3 either), is not present or does not show up in the Admin GUI.
I have two EX4 (OS3) and two EX4100 (OS5).
You could change the RAID mode, but that erases the data in the process.
The WD NAS use md for software-based RAID.
Their BusyBox v1.30.1 has “mdadm” installed
But there is no “lsblk” command to look for the block (disks) devices.
There are some commands that could be used to list the disk’s names for the existing RAID groups configured.
The easiest is “cat /proc/mdstat”. That will list the /dev names of the 3 drives assigned to each RAID group.
Note that the last line in my config shows no unused devices.
It’s possible the 4th drive on the OP’s post would be listed here. In that case, it might be possible to run through the standard mdadm commands to get an unused device added to the md pool and then added to the existing RAID5 and RAID1 devices.
That does not mean the filesystem would see and use the newly expanded RAID5 array. That’s a whole different thing.
But…
IMHO: It’s just a whole lot easier to back everything up, log into the Admin GUI, delete the old RAID5 and start with a new RAID5 that uses all 4 disks and restore the data.
