Additional drive for extra capacity

[squeakeasy]

Hi folks

I know this is probably a really stupid question, but....

My 2TB drive is running low on disk space so I was thinking of adding another 2tb drive to my 602T.

Is it as easy as plugging it in (whilst nas is off), and then use the storage manager to 'increase capacity' - or is life not that straightforward?

Not interested in RAID, I use it as a media server rather than for critical backups.

Any help appreciated.
Squeaks

[MikeG.6.5]

I'll give you 2 scenarios, either of which should work for you.

First, leaving the power on, take out the drive tray that doesn't have a drive in it yet, and mount your new drive to the tray. With the power still on, insert the drive into the NAS completely and wait a couple of minutes. Open Storage Manager and you should see the new drive is there, but not initialized yet. You can extend a raid, or make a new volume, either option should be available. Select the one you want and wait it out. For a new volume it should happen pretty quickly. You do NOT need to power off the NAS at all, as long as the drive you are putting into the system has been made in the last few years. If it's an older drive that might create some problems, though...

Did I say there were two scenarios? (I lied...)

BTW, Raid is NOT a backup. It's allowing you to have a bit of fault tolerance in drives, should one fail, or allowing faster access for those modes of raid that don't have fail tolerance. For a media server, access speed is more critical than fail tolerance, so the faster the data can be accessed the smoother the streaming will be.

Once you have this second drive installed, you can still add drive capacity to your NAS with external drive enclosures. I have a 5 bay Raid 5 enclosure that I hung on both the 202T I had and on the 7004T I currently use. From the aspect of accessing the data it's pretty seamless....

[squeakeasy]

Mike, that is fantastic! Understandable instructions AND options

Many thanks for taking the time to respond. My current drive is a WD Red, so I was intending to throw in another one of those, and I'd guess that classes as a newer drive.

Much appreciated
Les

[squeakeasy]

Ok, part way there - new drive installed, and appearing as an inactive disk in storage manager 'disk' tab

However, when I click Management under 'Volume' tab I only get a RAID 1 option, and other options greyed out. I was hoping for possibly RAID 0 ? Since getting the second drive was all about additional storage space RAID 1 is a no-go. If I can't do RAID 0, then a new volume only?

[squeakeasy]

I've continued on and now created a second 'single' volume, hoping that once done I could convert both to RAID, but now management is greyed out

[MikeG.6.5]

Your NAS has 2 bays, and you have them configured as no Raid with Volume 1 and Volume 2, giving you the added space you wanted to get via the second drive.

Once it's configured as a volume, that's it without deleting the volume and making it a Raid 1. Bit shocked you couldn't make it Raid 0 though... Probably couldn't do it since Volume 1 had data on it already.

This does what you wanted to do, though... Turned 2 drives into two separate volumes to have your data on. Now you just need to keep track of what's on which drive....

[orion]

I think asustor does not support migration from single volume to RAID-0 volume. Here is the document:
http://download.asustor.com/college/en/ ... ansion.pdf

[squeakeasy]

Thanks chaps

Yeah, works fine, I can do without RAID - one volume for media, one volume for my PC backup..which is actually a backup of my internal PC backup drive - hence why RAID isn't so vital.

Thanks for the help