Can two RAID Groups share a single drive?

[baqui63]

I'm new here. I searched a bit (before registering) and didn't find any answers to this question, so I've created this topic. If there is already an answer somewhere, please reply with a link to that topic.

I have a TS-853A with QTS 4.3.6.0993 and eight 1TB drives. RAID Group 1 is RAID5 and lives on all eight drives for 6.30TB. Storage Pool 1 is also 6.30TB and contains a single Thick volume (DataVol1) of 6.08TB with 4.91TB used and 1.17TB free (80.80% full). I've got a bunch of apps and stuff installed on the NAS but its primary service is SMB file shares for a Plex Media Server running under Windows. The data is backed up to a cloud service, but restoring that much data at once is a PITA and I'd rather not have to do so. I'm aware that I can run PMS on the NAS; this works, but not well enough for my purposes.

I recently used the Replace Disks One By One feature to replace three of the 1TB drives with 8TB drives, which worked as expected: the NAS sees three 8TB disks and five 1TB ones, with 1TB of space on each of the 8TB drives used by RAID Group 1.

However, I was expecting to be able to use the free space on the 8TB drives to create RAID Group 2 with 8-10TB and a second thick volume (DataVol2). Then I'd copy the data from DataVol1 to DataVol2, destroy the RAID Group 1 and pull the five 1TB drives. (Afterwards, I was going to add an SSD for caching, or maybe a pair of SSDs for Qteir, but doing that is a second project and doesn't look to be complicated, so not an issue at the moment.)

Now my question...

Is there a way to make the above happen without having to first destroy the existing RAID array? If not, it isn't a deal breaker for me but having to do so is not the way I was hoping for this to go.

(I have about a dozen of the 1TB drives (from an old EMC SAN at work) and an old USB3 RAID5 external drive array, so I can hang four 1TB drives off the NAS, fill them up, then swap four more 1TB drives into the USB3 array to copy the rest of the data. And if this doesn't go well, I can always restore from backups. But I'm hoping to avoid doing this.)

Any comments, questions or suggestions?

Thanks!

[Don]

Answered many times. You cannot use the additional space until all drives are replaced.Your only options are to replace all the drives or backup you data externally and rebuild the NAS from scratch with the 3 x 8TB drives. Also make sure the drives you use are on the QNAP compatibility list or are NAS certified.