TS264 2-bay NAS with 6TB and 10TB drives: can I use the extra 4TB?

English Storage
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I have RAID1 setup in my TS264 with two 6TB drives.

I’d like to expand this to be a 6TB (ok, really that’s just 3.6TB) RAID with some EXTRA non-raid space on one drive.

I bought a 10TB drive… but I’m unclear if I’m “stuck” with QNAP limiting available storage to the size of the SMALLEST drive. I was hoping/assuming I could:

  1. Add the 10TB, let RAID1 rebuild and only use up 6TB of the space.
  2. then create a new storage volume (non-RAID) with the remaining 4TB.

is this possible?

(i’m wrestling with ChatGPT on the subject… gpt4 said this was possible, but now GPT5 is telling me it’s not.)

the only documentation I’ve found is this (and it seems inconclusive?): How can I expand the Storage Pool/Static Volume by replacing the disks with larger capacity drives? | QNAP

2

Same as this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/qnap/comments/1mmwkis/2bay_nas_6tb_and_10tb_drives_can_i_use_the_extra/

QNAP uses standard RAID, so that wil not work. Shows CrapGPT in a bad light doesn’t it?

Also as such a big Microsoft fan…not using Microsoft AI for answers?

:sweat_smile:

3

Shows there’s nothing really intelligent about Chat GPT and “AI.” This stuff is nothing more than a super fast database query engine that uses statistical models to build sentence structures.

4

Still, it’s better than Bing. :wink:

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1 Like
6

Please refer to this article: QTS RAID type comparison | QNAP

As it states, “If disks with different capacities are combined in one RAID group with disk failure tolerance, all disks function according to the capacity of the smallest disk.”

7

You would need to resize the LV/MD whatever manually in SSH and then format the left over space yourself.

Then pray your next reboot or firmware update doesn’t try to reset things or assume something has broken because of the weird disk layout.

Basically don’t do it.