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Two drives installed, only one being used

Posted: 01 Jan 2024, 11:02
by Mahrime
I'm am learning the NAS concept but had to jump in because I was at the tail end of the life span of two external drives that were full of files I want to maintain.

My intention was to replace both aging drives with larger capacity ones, and maintaining the file structure I had already established on two larger capacity drives in the NAS. I put both drives in and initiated the system. I can see both drives - HDD1 and HDD2 (both 12tb) - in the Hard Drive and Storage Pool windows but only 10.9tb of one is showing as the Pool's (Volume1) capacity.

So how can I 'add' Volume2, the second drive to use it?

Thanks for putting up with a beginner's question.

Re: Two drives installed, only one being used

Posted: 01 Jan 2024, 15:15
by TMzethar
You may have set up RAID. For RAID, please refer to:
viewtopic.php?f=79&t=1723
viewtopic.php?f=87&t=3191
The reason for 12T and 10.9T is that the conversion method of hard disk capacity is different from that of computers.

Re: Two drives installed, only one being used

Posted: 05 Jan 2024, 13:58
by Mahrime
It is set up as a TRAID, which is fine since the two disks were bought for media storage. But my logic is stymied by the 'loss' of storage space. While 10.9 may be one 12TB disk's 'real' capacity, shouldn't my storage pool show as two disks of 10.9, thus 21.8?

Re: Two drives installed, only one being used

Posted: 06 Jan 2024, 08:33
by realdvk
TRAID over 2 drives of same capacity means that those drives assembled as RAID1 (mirroring) redundancy group. So the resulting capacity of storage pool equals capacity of single drive, not both drives.

Re: Two drives installed, only one being used

Posted: 06 Jan 2024, 09:42
by Mahrime
Well, that's counterproductive (he said, trying not to panic)... Is there anyway to go 'back' to a non-RAID set-up, to have the capacity of both drives, without losing everything already loaded onto the 423? My plan was to keep the 423's bays for primary storage and use hot swap drives for back-up.

Re: Two drives installed, only one being used

Posted: 06 Jan 2024, 10:51
by TMlinda
{L_BUTTON_AT}Mahrime

Converting an array requires deleting the original array. You can back up the original data, delete the current TRAID, and then recreate other arrays, such as Single Disk/JBOD.