Mixing Drive Sizes

Can I put different size drives in the 4 bays of the PR4100? For example, can I put a 4T drive in bay 1, a 6T drive in bay 2, and two 8T drives in bays 3 and 4?

Depends… If you’re doing JBOD, then you might get away with it. If you’re doing RAID, then you most likely won’t. You could end up with drop offs, which would cause you to lose your data. Also, you need to make sure that they’re all WD Red drives. I think those are the only ones supported on the Pro series.

Thanks, Bill. My plan is to do JBOD. My desktop has three drives, one 1.5T and two 5T. The 5T’s are used for video and music. The 1.5T is used for the OS and work related apps and files. My plan was to get a 4 bay PR4100 and move the videos to a drive, the music to another drive, the work-related stuff to a third drive, and to back up to a fourth drive. This way I could access everything in one place using my desktop, laptop, and tablet. The 32T PR4100 is not available so I thought I could get a 24T PR4100 and upgrade the drives as I needed them.

As long as your are using JBOD only than yes you can mix and match drive sizes

Thank you.

What aaplfan said… :grinning:

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I know this is old thread… but hoping with 2018 this might have changed…
Almost every NAS on the market can mix-match drives.
The penalty is you are wasting space…
So if you have 2TB + 3TB + 4TB + 2TB you can only use RAID-5 with 4 x 2TB (essentially wasting 1 TB of the 3 and 2 of the 4).
This should in no way cause “drops” or “data loss” as @Bill_S mention.

Then as you upgrade say the 2 x 2TB drives to 3TB drives you’d get 4 x 3TB (losing the 1TB from the 4)…