NAS Expansion Question

[Odys]

I have a Synology DS916+ with 4x4TB drives. It was close to full, so rather than swap out with larger drives, I decided to get the DX513 5-bay expansion unit. I started with 2x8TB drives, basically doubling my storage. When I added it I chose to add as a disk group, rather than to the existing volume. From what I read, this seemed like the better option. Now that it’s done initializing, only the original volume shows up in Storage Manager under Volume, with the the original limited space available. The two new disks show up under Disk Group with the added storage, but under the name DX 513-1. I can’t figure out how to actually access these drives. Only the original volume shows up on my Mac. I’m no expert, but I can usually figure things out by poking around, but this one has me stumped. Should I not have used Disk Group? It seemed like I was getting more available storage with this option, but I may have been wrong about that. Again, I’m no expert. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[LuvMyQuad]

I cant say for the mac, but in Windows why cant you just assign logical drive ID's (ie :E, :F, :X etc.) to the disk group?

Also, are you running any of this as a RAID group? If not, you should. It will reduce the available storage space but its good insurance against a crashed drive.

 

[Odys]

The DX513 doesn’t even show up on my Mac, the original volume does. The DX513 only shows up in Synology Disk Station Manager, but it does show there with the available disk space. RAID has been set up.

 

[HomerJAU]

You have to create a new Shared Volumes (any size and quantity).

 

[Odys]

You have to create a new Shared Volumes (any size and quantity).

That’s what I thought I was doing. Are you familiar with Synology Disk Station Manager? I’ll poke around, but some guidance would be greatly appreciated. Like I said earlier, I’m no expert, but the single volume worked flawlessly before I added the expansion unit.

 

[HomerJAU]

Yes I’m on my second Synology NAS. I had DS413 + 513 expansion previously. Now as DS2416+ 12 bay.

Initialising a Disk Group only binds the disks to work together if RAID and/or formatted. You then add one or more Volumes to be able to use. You could make a single 8TB volume (assuming your new drives are in RAID) or two 4TB etc.

When I bought a new NAS and whacked in 3 x 10TB drives (20TB useable after RAID) I added 4 x 5TB volumes since I was replacing 5TB drives and I could use those old 5TB drives to backup each volume. Much easier to manage than having a single 20TB volume and trying to copy the correct data to the 4 backup drives.

 

[Odys]

I created a second volume for the new disks and then created a new shared folder. Problem solved. Thanks for the input.