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[dlach]

My DNS-343 just arrived along with a pair of Seagate 1TB drives.  I have a few feature questions and would like to know if the 343 supports these features and if not, are there any plans to support them in the future.

1) RAID migration - I would like to start out with two drives in RAID 1 and later on add a third or third and fourth drive and move the whole lot to RAID 5.  I'd like to be able to so leaving the first two drives in place and would of course like to not lose any data.  I'd also like to not have to copy the data off, reformat and then copy back, which as far as I can tell is the only way to do this today.

2) Auto expansion of RAID 5 array - is it possible to start with three drives in RAID 5 and then add a fourth and have it automatically expand the array?

3) Hot swap standby - Some people might like to have the fourth drive be a hot swap drive in standby in case one of the other 3 fails.  The bad drive would be automatically removed from the array and the array would automatically be rebuilt using it.

All of these feature are available in competing products.   I have listed these features in order of their importance to me.  If others want to chime in please do.  I would like to know ASAP If there are plans to support any of them.

thanks

[ECF]

1) RAID1 can only be used with 2 drives. If you add another drive it will have to be formatted in standard, or you can format all 3 into RAID5. If you have 4 disks and format in RAID1 it will create 2 RAID1 Volumes.
RAID1 cannot be changed to RAID5 without formatting drives. So. If you add another drive and want RAID5 you will have to format.

2)  If you are using RAID5 with 3 Drives you will have to format to add another drive and use RAID5

3) I am sorry but hot swap is not supported on this device. You are to power down the unit, insert the drive, then power it back up.

[dlach]

Thank you for the response.  Can you comment about any future plans to these features?

In particular it would be very nice to not lose data when migrating from RAID 1 to RAID 5 or at the very least when adding a fourth disk to a RAID 5 array.

[ECF]

It cannot be done due to the way data is stored on the disks in the different RAID configurations.

[dlach]

Well OK.

It must something specific to dlink though since I know it is possible with competing products e.g. Qnap.
Admittedly the Qnap 409 costs a couple hundred dollars more, though so I guess that is why.
That is too bad, I really think it limits the product's usefulness. 

[orleff]

Hi guys!
Today I received my DNS-343.... but:
I'm in a hard situation, since nowhere was mentioned that I won't be able to migrate from 3 to 4 disk RAID5 set. I have 2x1TB drives + 2x250GB drives. If I start 4-disk RAID5 with them would I be able to replace later the small drives with bigger?
And just out of curiosity: What about diffrent drives in a RAID? Would I be able to mix... let's say 80GB + 250 + 500 + 750 in a single RAID5 set? 

[ECF]

You will be able to remove a drive (the small drive in your case) and add a replacement and resync as if you are replacing it after a failed drive. Keep in mind that the size of you RAID5 will remain the same and the left over space will be a separate volume. You will most likely want to back you data up and recreate your RAID5 configuration to have a larger RAID5 volume.

Yes you can use use a 80GB + 250 + 500 + 750 hard drive in a RAID5 configuration however the size of your RAID5 volume would be as if you were using all 80GB drives and will be labeled as Volume_1 the remaining space will create a JBOD volume_2 of all the remaining space on the other 3 drives.

[orleff]

Thanx!
Anyway, I decided to buy two more 1TB HDDs and to create RAID5 by 4x1TB