ASK NC

Good Morning

I have a Synology DS420+ with a 3 drive SHR comprised of 3 - 8TB WD Red Plus drives. I would like to have a hot spare since we are on the road for weeks at a time and not around to handle a drive failure. If I use a low hours WD100EZAZ 10 TB drive that I have on hand will it use just 8TB of the 10TB spare or will I be locked in to 10TB or larger for future drives. I would like to stick with 8TB drives in the future.

Thanks.

With Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR), the hot spare disk needs to be equal or greater in size to the largest data disk in your array. This means that if your largest data disk is 8TB, the hot spare also needs to be at least 8TB or larger.

In your case, if you add a 10TB hot spare to your 3-drive SHR array, the extra 2TB on the hot spare disk will not be utilized. The hot spare will function as an 8TB drive and provide redundancy in case of a drive failure.