Synology JBOD or Standard

[mrbadss]

I got a DS409 and love it. It occurred to me before I fill it up too far that I should do some more research. I made it a JBOD (of the 4 bays, I filled 3 with 1.5 tb drives). few questions for the experts here:

1. Can I add another drive to the 4th bay later without losing data or do I need to repartition?
2. Is it better to NOT be JBOD and go standard?
3. If I go away from JBOD, do I essentially get 4 drives that I have to manage the data between? What about the UPNP media server directory locations?

I also bought a WDTV live to along with this (yesterday) and I LOVE IT... great combination of devices!

btw: I bought that NAS because of the articles on SNB so thanks!

mrbadss

 

[thiggins]

I don't think you can expand a JBOD array. If you go to the Storage > Volume menu and the Expand icon is greyed out, you can't. Note that if a drive fails in a JBOD volume, the data on the other drives will be gone unless you manually recover it using a Linux OS or Windows utility that can mount an EXT3 formatted drive.

The Synology "Standard" volume gives you each volume as a separate drive. So if a drive fails, only the data on that drive is lost.

Folders can exist only on a specific volume, so the size of the UPnP folders would be limited to a single drive.

In your case, it would be better to use a RAID5 volume. That will give you the largest volume, you can start with three drives and add a third later and your data should survive a single drive failure.

However, remember RAID IS NOT BACKUP. Never trust data you can't afford to lose to a single device.

 

[mrbadss]

Can I add a 4th drive that will be a separate volume that IS readable on windows since I still have an un used bay. I realize I will have to manage that drive and what is on it, but it will still expand my total storage.

Thanks,

RH

 

[thiggins]

Can I add a 4th drive that will be a separate volume that IS readable on windows since I still have an un used bay. I realize I will have to manage that drive and what is on it, but it will still expand my total storage.

Yes. You can set up a fourth drive as a separate volume. It will appear as a separate network share, readable by all major OSes since it is shared via SMB/CIFS.