Can I add more drives as they are needed? Will all raid options work with that?
1678777
if you mean that you are working with less than 8 drives, yes, you can add other drives, one at a time (the system will do a rebuild of the array when you effectively add the new drive). Beyond 8 drives, you can only add other drives with the expansion unit. That means the USB and esata interfaces cannot be used for drives that are meant to be part of a RAID array. External drives (through usb and esata) can only be shared on their own, as individual volumes. And yes, all raid options are supposed to work with any number of drives. I started my array with 6 and soon went to add a 7th drive.
1678778
Yes. You can eventually fill up to a maximum of 8 drive bays but no more after filling all 8 bays. After that, if you want, you can buy another Synology NAS of equal or larger capacity than the DS1812+ and you can back-up your original eight bay DS1812+ to your new DS1812+ .This is common practice in IT, because even awesome multi-bay servers can FRY just like all other electronic devices.
32233
You can use it with one drive but you will not be able to use a RAID configuration.
512635
It will Operate just fine with 2 drives with default setting, 3 or more drives the the System of raid can be change.
606995
It depends on the type of raid setup you use. There is a hybrid setup that makes use of all the drives and maximizes the space available. This way you can have different size drives. I accepted this as the default. I can't verify how it works though as all my drives are the same size. It's a bit slower than I would have liked also, but hey, it does the job.
1379043
Yes. That's exactly what I bought it for - extra ports. There is a message that pops up on booting about RAID but extra ports work as intended.
663099
Please click on the following link that will describe how to add additional drives to a diskstation. http://www.synology.com/en-us/support/tutorials/559
2250250
The one I bought has hardware raid. I have 4 * 1tb drives installed configured as RAID 5.
506902
Yes. It will allow a single drive. When you add the second one, hopefully identical in size, you can choose to add it as more capacity or as a RAID. If a RAID, then the DS will create a second copy of the first and significantly increased the system reliability.
140744
you would have 18 bays, * 4TB drives for a potential of 72TB of space.... HOWEVER - actual space will depend on the RAID mode you choose and the security and peformance you desire. Also a formatted 4TB doesnt really give you 4TB so you will probably have 3.2-3.6 TB from each drive. The real issue IMHO is the quality of 4TB drives and the performance. Unless you dont care about your data I wouldnt create a single volume that big.
1302606
Minimum RAID 5 configuration is 3 equal disks, I think you can add or replace one and regenerate RAID configuration again, but don't risk your data, since my data is more costly that the 4th disk value, I would prefer to buy max configuration to avoid surprises
104429
Yeah, most likely. I've used a variety of drives since I've owned it, some listed as "supported" and others not. All have worked fine. The only thing I'd recommend doing is checking the Synology Raid Calc to make sure you get it set up with the specific RAID you want to maximize space: https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator
1235416
I put 5 each 3tb WD Red drives in my Thecus and set up a RAID 6. I think you can use any number of drives of any size. Just keep in mind that if you use RAID it will only be a percentage of the smallest drive in the array.
327896
Nope, add what you want. Don't know about inserting already used (data on board) drives. I've always placed 'new' / clean drives in. There isn't a requirement to fill all slots. I have (3) 1TB drives in my 5N.
1745370
The maximum amount of drives that I was able to hook up without any other cards is 3... An SSD for the OS, 2 HDD for storage. I'm not too familiar with RAID setups, but I think you may need a separate RAID controller.
399560
yes you can. I am currently running two of the 4 TB NAS drives from Seagate and I left the others empty. The device is scalable in that way however you will need to backup data on your current drive if you later want the added performance or redundancy of adding it to a RAID array.
1032198
I added five drives and I had no problem. I did make sure that the drives I added were the same size as the existing drives in the NAS
1476795
Not really. You would have to format the existing drives when you added the new ones. What you're describing *might* be possible if you used the JBOD (just a bunch of disks) configuration, but not for any RAID. For all their RAID configs, you have to choose the number and size of disks at creation, and you can't change it without reformatting.