RAID's configuration, migrations and setup doubts

Hello Community,

I’m about to invest in a NAS system and with the Ex4 as a most probable option so far i’d like to clear some doubts that I couldn’t clear so far, and I’d apretiate if you’d help me with that.

The questions are:

  1. If i establish a RAID5 with 5 disks and after decide to add a 4th disk will it be acknoledge by it and be setup default to JBOD or do i need to reconfigure everything again with the previous RAID5 defined disks needing to be formated ?

  2. If the system is holding a 2 disk RAID1 format, if I add 2 more disks do they go to the same format and i get another independent RAID1 protected disks or another thing may happen ? And again is the re-setup mandatory for it to be working with the added disks ?

  3. Let’s say i have only a single 4TB disk setup as JBOD and decide to transform it to a RAID5 3 disk. So for that i buy 3 more disks so that the first disk has the information in case something may go wrong. Does the Ex4 have the ability to copy the information existing in the 1st disk and distribute it to the others internaly without having to retrieve the 1st disk and needing to use other system other than the NAS itself.

  4. Once a RAID is setup (the RAID5 for ex) and in a 3x4TB disk setup i decide to use only 9TB total and leave 3 for other use, the other 3 are setup as JBOD, Spanning as 1 Volume, unused or I may choose how to configure it ? I’ve read in the manual that it may be created a spare disk or configure the remaining disk space as Spanning but doesn’t say anything about JBOD.

Thank you for your consideration and I’d apretiate a answer as soon as possible since I need to make a decision soon and wanted to make a right one knowing these topics :slight_smile:

Once again thank you,

Eduardo Almeida

Hello Welcome to the community. 

I do not have all of the answers but I might be able to answer a couple.

  1. You could be able to create a separate RAID one environment, however you will need to take the first 2 out of the enclosure for this.

  2. The EX 4 has a feature called internal backup, which after you have the RAID 5 Created you can copy the information from Drive 1 in JBOD to drives 2-4 in RAID 5, keep in mind that in this way drive 1 will not be part of the RAID.

Those are the answers I have, maybe another user that have had more time to play wit the EX 4 can share more information.

Thank you  lluna_polanco for the help so far.

I guess from what i’ve been reading since the post the point 4) isn’t really a doubt anymore, but one question if I may.

On your explanation for the point 2), If a disk is taken out of the enclosure It means to take out of the server right ? If so the other drives need to be in different slots for the setup to be done. But doesn’t that erase the configuration you had before on the previous disks in other slots ?

Sorry If that may be basic but never used this kind of systems and don’t really have an idea if it could be obvious or not.

And thanks again for the time taken answering.

Hi, 

Lets say that you put 2 drives into the enclosure, slot 1 and 2 respectively, at the moment you would like to create another RAID 1 you need to set the other 2 drives into slot 3 and 4 and take drives 1and 2 out while setting the RAID, I dont know if it makes sense to do all that, but that was the way I was able to set my EX 4.

Thank you very much for the help and the time to provide it :slight_smile: