It doesn't work as an expansion on the DS218+, hence the "2" in the "218" part of the model name. It can be used as an additonal volume of 5 drives, but will not expand the main volume to 7 drives like you can do on a DS718+, nor 9 drive as you can do on a DS918+... etc.
thanks for the information. this is getting beyond my level of comfort.
I'll probably just leave things alone. I don't want to mess up Channel Plus.
as I said before, I just used the standard setup when I installed the unit. the documentation is really not much help. it would have been nice if it said something up front.
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It's not hard to do from storage manager, but you would lose all data and need to start over with a new install of Channels. If you are just starting out with Channels, better to do it now than a year from now when you need the extra storage. But, whether RAID0 or JBOD, there is no redundancy. Even with JBOD, if you have recordings spanned across both drives and one of the drives fails, then your database is going to be inaccurate and you pretty much will need to wipe everything and start over anyway.... or at least go through every single recording to see what doesn't work and then delete each one from the UI.
I originally started with a DS216+. I thought it was good, but ended up selling it and getting a DS916+. I since have expanded it with a DX513, making 9 drives total in a RAID6 array. It has been running perfectly for years now... even with one drive failing at about the 3 year mark. I sent it back to WD and they replaced it immediately under warranty. While the new drive was coming in the mail, all my server tools plus Channels just kept on running flawlessly even with the array in a degraded state.
If you are doing a lot of recordings, especially OTA recordings which are significantly higher bitrate than stuff like cable or TVE, I would eventually do 1 of 3 things if I had a 218+:
- get two really big drives, like 10TB and keep the RAID1/SHR
- get a DX517 to use as a separate array. Change the channels DVR directory to this volume, since it supports more drives... then you can add more drives to the volume as you need them.
- sell the 218+ and get a 918+ or 1019+ and do RAID5 or RAID6, depending on how much space/redundancy you want to have.
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thanks. I'm not planning to keep much in the way of recordings on Channels Plus so I may bite the bullet and do a full restart one day. I do have a backlog of movies that I thought I might want to see, but mostly the programs I record get deleted after I watch them.
I just got the DS218+ to run Channels Plus so I just got the one drive when I set it up. the only reason I started to look into add a second drive is that I have another single drive NAS and had thought of adding the drive to the DS218+ using one only for Channels Plus and the other for what I have on the second NAS then mothballing that NAS.
I'm not really looking at storing large amounts of data. it really just home use and convenience I really don't have any critical data.
You can put a second drive in there and use the drives as two separate volumes.
I'm confused and I feel like this has gone around in a circle or I missed something or I asked the wrong question. below is a screen shot of my one drive. my original question was if I could add another drive to be used as a separate drive not linked to the first and I thought the answer was only if I restart everything to RAID0 or JBOD. the reason I didn't want linked drives is because I thought if the drives were linked without data protection, if one drive failed all was lost on both drives.
You need to restart everything if you are going from SHR to RAID0 or JBOD... these are array types for combining drives. But you can keep your 1 drive and add a 2nd as a new volume.