TS-453 Volume Management

[leschew]

I just purchased a TS-453 Pro with 8 GB memory and 4 6TB drives.

I've installed all 4 drives and powered up the TS-453 for the first time. I selected RAID 6.

After the formatting, I checked for firmware upgrade and there was a newer firmware available and did the update.

As I look at the storage manager under Volumes, I have one volume called DataVol1 and the Capacity is 10.90 TB, far less that 20 TB max. There are some existing shared folders: Download, Multimedia, Public, QNAPDrive, Recordings, Web, and homes.

Do I create a new share for each of the computers I want to back up or do I somehow create a new Volume. One of the computer has over a total of 10+ TB (5 physical drives), so I would need a volume of at least 15 TB because I would want to maintain some type of versioning.

I tried to increase the capacity using Manage/Expand Capacity and it shows 'Replace Hard Drive One by One. Well I don't want to replace and further down it says:
Source Disk RAID Group: Group 1 (RAID 6 Disk Group)
Disks <NAS Host: 1 2 3 4>
You can expand the RAID group capacity to approximately: 10.90 TB which it is already at.

I've looked at different resource, and manual and don't quit understand why I cannot expand the current volume to some size larger?

This is my end goal. I want to create either a share or a separate volume to back up 3-4 laptop/computers. So what is the best approach? Create a new share and set permission or create a new volume? When I go to Storage Manager, There is no New Storage Pool and when I tried to create one, the Enclosure Unit [Total: 1 Unit(s)]: NAS Host [available disk(s): 0/4] so it appears I cannot create a Storage Pool.

If I go to Volumes and click on New Volume, and select the default of Thick Multiple Volume, with Create a New Storage Pool, when I click on 'Next', I see NAS Host (available disk(s): 0/4 and no disk selected. I suspect it's because all drives are set to RAID 6?

So is there a way to create a new volume or do I need to start over and set the TS-453 Pro differently. Since there is nothing on the NAS except the default folder, I can wipe it and start over. From what I read, I would like to utilize all 4 drives without the need of a spare drive that RAID 5 requires.

As to backing up all my computers, what is the software that I should use to maintain versioning. I don't just want the 0 and -1 version, I want to maintain all the different versions of a document that has been updated over a period of time. My plan is to set a back up time and do it then, not to use QSYNC which only keeps one version (unless I misread the material).

Thanks for reading this and helping out a newbie.

[schumaku]

With RAID6, you have two HDD redundancy ... (4 -2) * 6 TB == 12 TB .. with 1 TB decimal (1 * 10^12 Bytes) what is used for about a decade by the storage makers, and not 2^40 Bytes = 1099511627776 Bytes what old hats used to have in binary, this makes a difference of about 9.5% from 12 TB or about ~10.9 TB.

If you need more storage capacity - lower the redundancy (risky game at these HDD sizes, or consider to swapo the NAS by a unit permitting more HDD installed.

Nothing the community can do here.

Regards,
-Kurt.