Question Need more space on my NAS - what are my upgrade options?

[Randy_baton]

I have a Synology DS418J 4 Bay (https://global.download.synology.co...DS418j/enu/Synology_DS418j_Data_Sheet_enu.pdf)

Its currently set up with 2 x 9tb drives in raid 1 housing my media and 2 x 4tb drives backing up my C drive.

Ideally I just replace all the drives with 12tb but can't afford that at the moment.

What i was thinking is replacing the 2 x 4TB drives with 2 x 12tb drives and splitting my media - Films on one Raid and TV on the other and fitting my C drive backup onto which ever has the most amount of space left over.

If i was to stick all drives into raid 10 rather then 2 x raid 1, I believe I'd be getting 2 x the smallest drive, so 18tb rather than 21tb i'd get in 2 x raid 1. Is the lost space accessible in any way I.e. not in raid or is it just lost?

If in the future I want to buy 2x more 12TB to replace the 9tb, how would i do the upgrade? I have enough spare drives lying around to copy the 9 TB onto a couple of drives if I have to, but would I have to also do that with the 12tb drives or can I go from 2 drive Raid 1 to 4 drive raid 10 without losing data?

If I set up raid 10 with 2x 9th and 2 x12 tb could i just swap out the 2 x 9 tb with 2 x 12tb and increase the capacity or would I have to rebuild the whole raid and move my data elsewhere temporarily

 

[jeremyj_83]

I have a Synology DS418J 4 Bay (https://global.download.synology.co...DS418j/enu/Synology_DS418j_Data_Sheet_enu.pdf)

Its currently set up with 2 x 9tb drives in raid 1 housing my media and 2 x 4tb drives backing up my C drive.

Ideally I just replace all the drives with 12tb but can't afford that at the moment.

What i was thinking is replacing the 2 x 4TB drives with 2 x 12tb drives and splitting my media - Films on one Raid and TV on the other and fitting my C drive backup onto which ever has the most amount of space left over.

If i was to stick all drives into raid 10 rather then 2 x raid 1, I believe I'd be getting 2 x the smallest drive, so 18tb rather than 21tb i'd get in 2 x raid 1. Is the lost space accessible in any way I.e. not in raid or is it just lost?

If in the future I want to buy 2x more 12TB to replace the 9tb, how would i do the upgrade? I have enough spare drives lying around to copy the 9 TB onto a couple of drives if I have to, but would I have to also do that with the 12tb drives or can I go from 2 drive Raid 1 to 4 drive raid 10 without losing data?

If I set up raid 10 with 2x 9th and 2 x12 tb could i just swap out the 2 x 9 tb with 2 x 12tb and increase the capacity or would I have to rebuild the whole raid and move my data elsewhere temporarily

The easiest thing would be to keep the current 2x Raid 1 and change out the 2x 4TB drives for the 12TB drives. Later on you can change the 9TB drives out and without losing anything on the 12TB Raid 1 make it a Raid 10. Overall it gets to be a sticky operation when you have mixed drive sizes in a Raid. If you did a Raid 5 instead of 10 you would get the storage of 3 disks (1 disk of 4 is used for parity) instead of 2. I'm not sure if you can eventually swap out the 9TB drives for 12's and then extend the size of the array.