What Raid should i switch to?

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX4
1

Hello. I currently have a 2x2TB volume and a 2x4TB volume. both in Raid 1. so 2TB and 4TB usable, respectively.

I have run out of space, and as i now have a good off-site backup solution, i’m not as concerned about a drive failure and don’t need to keep raid 1.

My first question: Can i change my Raid from Raid 1 to something else without losing data? Effectively doubling my capacity for each volume? also not sure which Raid i’d switch to. 0-(Striped)?

If not, what’s my best course of action? Full wipe and re-create two new volumes (4TB and 8TB), then re-load all my data off backups?

If so, Would it be better to do a single Volume with all the drives, or keep two volumes containing 2x Matching Drives? I’ve been using two volumes one as Media Storage, and one for File Storage.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

2

No, you can’t switch RAID modes without wiping, as the drive set up is different for each.

It depends what you want - RAID 0 will span across the disks (however many of them you include) to make one large virtual disk. However if one of the disks fails then there’s a good chance you’ll lose everything on all the disks as parts of the file can end up anywhere across any of them.

If you just need storage then JBOD (just a bunch of disks) might be worth considering. As its name suggests, it just uses each disk separately. You’ll end up with 4 different independent drives, but if one fails then all you lose is whatever you had on it. Of course you can then quite possibly fill up one drive with plenty of space on the others, but if you control well where you locate your shares that shouldn’t be an issue.