add more drives later

[neil1454]

Hi,

I'm looking at building a large storage NAS but I wish to start off with a few drives and around 4tb.
What my question is. With the Asustor can I add more drives and include this in the overall size at a later stage?
JBOD for example?

Or will I have to build separate arrays that will show up as separate drives ?

I'm not that familiar with these kinds of NAS drives and I see it says hot swappable.
But I can't see what it means by that?

Thanks for any help offered in advance...

[Kerry]

You can add drives at later stage. For example, if you have AS-608T, which is a 8 bay NAS, you can install 3 drives with raid 5 first and then later, you can add one by one or at one time to 8 drives.

http://download.asustor.com/college/en/ ... ansion.pdf

And hot swappable means that you can add the drive or remove the drive when the NAS is still under operation and there is no need to shut down the NAS for it.

[neil1454]

Hi,

Q1: So with raid 5 this is the only way to set up an array and then being able to add more drives?

Q2: Is there no way to set up the drives without backup and been able to add drives as a single large array?

[Auberon2k]

I believe ASUSTOR firmware allows migrations and expansions but you must start with a specific RAID level. I thought I read you could convert RAID1 (2 drives, mirrored) to RAID5 (3 drives) and then keep expanding to additional drives. I'm running 3 * 3TB drives in RAID5 on my 608T and plan to expand that as I need more storage (and finances permit)

As to Q2, I don't believe there is a method in place to expand a non-RAID drive array

[neil1454]

so... i will have a 6 x 4tb (24tb) . i realise i will loose one drive for parity volumes.

so of i wanted to add an extra 2 drives. can i just add them in there and it will rebuild the volume?
How does that work?

thanks

[Auberon2k]

I haven't tested it myself, but it essentially folds those new drives in and rebuilds the parity in the background. I believe the documentation states that performance will drop during the rebuild a bit and redundancy during the process is also down until it completes. I would recommend checking out the college links on the Asustor site to read more about it, it explains things in more depth for sure.

[Allen@AST]

Hi neil1454,

I think this document from ASUSTOR College should answer all your questions.

NAS 352: Online RAID Level Migration and Capacity Expansion -
download.asustor.com/college/en/NAS_352_Online_RAID_Level_Migration_and_Capacity_Expansion.pdf

Basically, the only volume types you cannot expand capacity from are JBOD and RAID 0. The document lists all the expansion scenarios that are possible.

When you want to add hard drives to an existing volume you will have to insert them into the NAS and then do some configurations from our Storage Manager App. This is also explained step by step in the document provided above. I hope this answers your questions. Please let me know if anything is unclear.

Thanks,

Allen

[neil1454]

Hi,

I finished up adding quite a few 4tb WD red NAS HDDs.
My question is, it is taking ages to initialize the drives. And has been doing it over night.
Is this normal?

[sys]

this is quite normal and you can already use the NAS without waiting the sync to be finished. You can see the sync speed by moving your mouse cursor over the Status in the Storage Manager. If you are having in the mean time a lot of jobs for the NAS, the sync speed will be slower though but if no job underway, then you will see the sync speed pick up after some time.