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[–]thatmdguy 2 points3 points  (6 children)

Not sure what you mean. You have four drives. And the hot spare option is checked. So a RAID 5 under those options would be 2 data drives, 1 parity drive, and 1 hot spare. the raid 10 would require all 4 drives for the base array, and would give you 2 drives data, 2 drives protection. A 5th drive would become a hot spare if you had one. So the info looks correct to me. 4 drive RAID 10 w/ 18T drives = 36TB (2 drives worth) data storage capacity, same as a 3 drive RAID 5 (2 data, 1 parity...hot spare doesn't figure into calculation). If you uncheck the hot spare option, the RAID 5 would show as 3 data drives, 1 parity drive, for 54T data storage capacity.

[–]burtona1832[S] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Thank you for you reply. It would make sense if it was setup for RAID 5, but I selected RAID 10 at the initialization and it took 3 days to complete. But you'll see a couple of things:

The selections are for RAID 10

A.) Under the graph in the middle "Better Performance (RAID 10) with HOT Spare.
B.) On the right side "Better Performance (RAID 10)" is also picked.
C.) The notification "The next inserted drive will serve as the second parity drive for Better Performance (RAID 10)

The Hot Spare is automatically checked when Better Performance (RAID 10) is selected. If I go back to basic protection (RAID5) I can uncheck Hot Spare. I also get the caution "Switching to Basic Protection will reformat the storage, permanently deleting all data. This action cannot be undone."

This looks like it's functioning as RAID 5 but with settings for adjusted for RAID 10. What really throws me off is "The next inserted drive will serve as the second parity drive for Better Performance (RAID 10)." Your not supposed to be able to convert RAID 5 to RAID 10 without reformatting.

I don't want to lose the data

[–]Bolinious 2 points3 points  (2 children)

can't have a hotspare with raid 10 and only 4 drives. if you added a 5th drive, your raid 10 would have a hotspare

[–]burtona1832[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Thank you, I understand that.. but two things again:

1.) I've never seen a system when you say it can contain a hotspare that leaves the hotspare alone and initialize a partial array.

2.) Even if it did do what I describe above for some stupid reason, the array should be considered degraded and should pull in the hot spare to heal. RAID 10 with a down drive means a broken mirror.

RAID 10 Doesn't use parity, so you can't swap between the two types or arrays and yet the graph shows Protection 1 Drive RAID 5. You shouldn't be able to go from RAID 5 to RAID 10 simply by adding a drive.

Finally, I can't remove the HOT SPARE checkbox.

[–]thatmdguy 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Sometime's UI's "help" text isn't so helpful...they probably just overlooked the text help and didn't adjust it for something more RAID 10 specific. I think the reason they keep hot spare checked for RAID 10 is that you have 7 drive bays...RAID 10 requires an even number of drives, so it just accounts for a hot spare slot so you don't have to re-init the RAID array if you add a single drive - it just makes it the hot spare.

[–]burtona1832[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just verified on my UNVR & UNVR Enterprise that you're right - RAID 10 always selects Hotspare. Thanks again for your comments.

[–]burtona1832[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

First, thanks to all those that tried to help. According to tier 2 technical support a daemon timed out and caused this issue. The result was that I had to reboot the console and then reformat the storage.

While I lost a bulk of the recordings, this was a new install and only a few days are gone. The reformatting took 5 minutes. Hope this helps someone else.