goingoing from 6x6tb to 4x12tb hdd's in qnap TVS-h874

[Enquiries]

Hi Robbie,
i have a TVS-h874 with 6x6tb Ironwolf drives installed (2 spare bays, unused). I've just bought 2x12tb ironwolf drives, not installed yet.
I intend to get another 4 ironwolfs (ironwolves??) but would i need to?
Can i get another two, totalling 48tb and somehow have the raid rebuild using less drives than the original 6x6tb?
I'm currently using raid 5 and have about 13tb of data over these drives.
Any advice or solutions would be greatly appreciated.
Love the Youtube videos!!
Colin

[ed]

RAID configurations can be a bit tricky when it comes to managing and expanding storage. Here’s a bit of clarity on how things work with your setup:

Adding vs. Removing Drives
RAID arrays, like RAID 5, generally allow you to add more drives to expand capacity, but they don’t support removing drives directly from an existing array. If you want to remove drives, you’d have to completely delete the existing RAID setup and rebuild it from scratch, which involves backing up all your data, reconfiguring the RAID, and restoring your data.

Mixing Drive Sizes
When you mix larger and smaller drives in the same RAID array, the RAID configuration will only use the smallest drive size across all drives. So if you have 6TB and 12TB drives in the same RAID array, the 12TB drives will be limited to the capacity of the 6TB drives in that RAID setup. This is because RAID arrays operate at the size of the smallest drive to maintain uniformity.

Creating Separate RAID Arrays
One effective solution is to create separate RAID arrays for the different drive sizes. For instance, you can set up one RAID array with the 6TB drives and another with the 12TB drives. This way, you can fully utilize the capacity of the larger drives without being limited by the size of the smaller ones.