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Adding more drives


shcsbaker

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I currently have 5 3TB WD Red Drives and have the space for 3 more drives and I'm using the Synology Hybird RAID. Then the time comes and I need to add the additional 3 drives (which would also be 3TB), can I just expand the volume by adding the hard drives?

Yes.

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I currently have 5 3TB WD Red Drives and have the space for 3 more drives and I'm using the Synology Hybird RAID. Then the time comes and I need to add the additional 3 drives (which would also be 3TB), can I just expand the volume by adding the hard drives?

 

Be prepared for a lengthy process

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You may already be aware of this, but you don't need to stick with 3TB drives. SHR will allow you to use the additional capacity of larger drives once you add more than 1. For example, adding 3x 5TB drives would give you an additional 4TB of capacity over 3x 3TB drives.

 

You can play with the options here: https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator

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  • 4 weeks later...

The RAID calculator lets you add drive sizes in any order without a caveat explaining the downside of that process. Also not too sure about the accuracy of the RAID calculator on the synology site. (the disclaimers at bottom of their web page are not clear either)

My system:- Bare Metal system running DSM 5.1-5022 Update 5 using SHR1

Started life with 2x4TB, added a 5TB drive without issue. It took 60hrs to add the drive and expand FS.

Added another 5TB drive expecting to see 13TB of usable(according to RAID Calc). Adding the second 5TB drive took about the same time to check drive but at time of expansion the process started and stopped almost immediately. Rebooted and tried again but no change in result

To correct, I followed the same process I have used a few times. Boot to Ubuntu and manually expand VG. This worked but after booting back to DSM I see only 11.63TB of usable capacity.

I understand FS and formatting etc overhead but the RAID calculator does not explain this nor does it say after adding a drive of a given size you attempt to add a smaller drive to the same volume it will not be added to the volume, it will build a new volume.

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