Been a minute since I have been on. I have had my NAS now for a little over a year now. It has been running great but I am quickly filling it up. I am a Commercial Photographer here in San Antonio.
Anyways, I am trying to decide if I should add the expansion drive or upgrade to larger hard drives.
A little about my configuration.
I have 8 16 TB drives
Configured in SHR
1 Storage Pool, with Volume 1 giving me about 67.1TB of useable space, and I have 16.7TB space available currently but receiving the warning on space.
My SSD Cache Group 1 is a RAID 0, with 1.8TB allocated
I think my best option, performance wise is to replace 4 of my 16TB drives with 4 new 24TB drives, this would be about $1800 purchase (looking to purchase on BH Photo, not sure if they can be purchased anywhere else for cheaper).
Other option is the expansion drive, about $500 plus the cost of new HDs…but I heard one trade off is access to the drive is a lot slower.
Anyone have any thoughts?
How easy or should I say what are the steps to replace the hard drives…any tips or tricks would be greatly appreciated.
Using the RAID calculator, it looks like replacing 4 drives with the 24TB would give me an additional 48 TB of space…
I think you idea to replace the drives with a higher capacity makes sense instead of a DX expansion box with disks. Or you could do both.
When you start with 2x 24TB disk and a DX517, and add the 2x 16TB in the DX517. When you need more space, add another 24TB replacing a 16TB and add that 16TB to the DX box.
Create a separate storage pool in the DX box.
By the way, having a single fault tolerance on a 8 disk pool is tricky in my opinion. From 6 disks in a pool I prefer SHR2 or RAID6. I hope you have a good backup before you start swapping disks.
Greetings, - sounds similar to my story and I can give you a few pointers based on my experience. Basically I had 8x 8TB drives in a DS1821+ and decided to go to 8 * 16TB, but before we go there you might want to disable the warnings:
Open Storage Manager
Click on Volume 1 (under Storage Pool 1)
Click the 3 dots … on the right and select Settings
Scroll down to Low Capacity Notification and change vale to 10%
Click Save
Now for the upgrade. Yes you can replace 1 drive at a time and when rebuild had finished do the next one. This will take you about 1 week or more PER DRIVE!!! You can still use the NAS but performace will be impacted.
The quickest solution is to buy the expansion box and put 24TB drives in it in SHA and create a brand new Volume 2 on that. Performance of the expansion drive is just fine especially as you have SSD cache.
Aleternatly you could also buy a 2nd identical NAS fill that with 24TB drives and use the one NAS to backup to the other. I would strongly recommend using SHA2 as a drive rebuild can take up to 10 days or more and you are totally exposed during that time as you have no redundancy left because you are replacing 1 drive. Hopefully you are running 10Gig LAN, by the way!
If you get the expansion unit, don’t be tempted to expand your volume across both units - create a second volume instead. Not that I would get one, I’d get a second NAS for not much more. You can tell the first NAS to mount a share on the second NAS to access it all via that if you want to (or just mount them directly on your PC). It also allows easy snapshot replication of any critical data.
16TB - 20TB drives seem about the best $/TB now and the larger ones are a bit of a premium. I tend to use a read/write cache and pin the metadata which I found beneficial. You would lose that for volume 2 with an expansion, plus be limited by the eSATA interface.
Swapping to 4x 24TB drives would give you 3x 8TB extra capacity. For $1800 you could buy an 8 bay NAS and add 2x 16TB drives for now, adding 32TB with room for more expansion later. That also allows you to keep one big volume and you don’t need to buy a second lot of SSD cache sticks. I think that’s the route I would take.