DS1511+ Just Starting Out Question

[Detox]

Hi,

I am interested in purchasing a DS1511+ to store, photos, music, movies etc. My question is regarding hard drives and hard drive addition.

I would like to start with two or three bays filled with let's say 2TB each and add additional hard drives as my data collection grows.

1. Is this possible?

2. When I add a new additional drive to the DS1511+ will it automatically be reconfigure itself to be part of one big volume?

3. Am I going about this all wrong and is it actually necessary to add 5 drives at the very start?

Many thanks,
Detox

[LunchBB]

Yes it is all possible. I started mine with 3 drives. Now I have it grown to 5 drives.

When adding new drives, it won't be all automatic. You still have to click a few buttons to initiate the drive and so. Then just let it do all the parity check and expanding that takes from 1 day to 3 days. But it's all good.

One tip is, when start building your RAID, make sure you pick the full format harddrives. That will eliminates any harddrive bad sectors causing the RAID functionality downgraded. Yes it will take a long time for the full format, but saves you troubles in the future.

So you can actually start with only 2 drives. So the full format won't take as long.

[Detox]

Thanks for the response.

How will the redundancy work in this situation? What is my protection if one drive fails?

[LunchBB]

If you want to know how redundancy works, check synology wiki
http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index.php/Home

1511+ supports different kinds of RAID. I would suggest SHR for flexibility. You can have up to 2 drives failed.