A good use for a second volume?

[akahan]

OK, so I'm a bonehead.
I have a DS414 that I use solely as a backup destination for other Diskstations, using Hyperbackup.
It had 4 3TB drives arranged on ext4 in a single SHR volume, and was running short on space. (DS414 doesn't support BTRFS.)

So I replaced the drives with 6TB drives (one by one, so as to migrate), without noticing that the maximum volume size on the DS414 is 16TB. Oops.

I found this out when inserting the last of the four 6TB drives; a message popped up and told me that maximum volume size is 16TB, and asked if I'd like to convert to multivolume. Of course I said yes, as that was my only option at that point.

So I guess what I'm going to end up with is a 16TB volume with my original data (and room for more...), and around 2TB left over that I can presumably create a second (or several) volume(s) out of. (The "missing" 6TB is of course unavailable, used by SHR for redundancy.)

I understand the availability of the new volume(s). What I lack is imagination as to how best to utilize it.

So what might be a good use to put that available 2TB of space to that specifically takes advantage of its being a separate volume? Have there been times when you've said, "I wish I had created a second volume, so I could...."

Thanks!

 

[Rusty]

first comes to mind running a separate volume for a specific task including a different set of drives for example a fast ssd volume. in your case maybe something like a dedicated surveillance station volume? Or something like that?

 

[Deleted member 673]

For what it's worth... I ran into a similar situation setting up a remotely located DS419slim (also limited to a 16TB Storage pool), while attempting to configure four 5TB HDDs RAID 0. I wound up creating a primary pool/volume with three HDDs; and a second pool/volume with a single HDD in the fourth slot. Ultimately, we used the fourth slot for swapping several HDDs and SSDs in-and-out. That is now used to import/export data and perform partial backups, as needed.

Unfortunately, I think this approach would require that you rebuild your existing pools and restore the data from a backup.

And, of course, relative to my example, it must be said... RAID 0 does not provide protection against an HDD failure. In my case, the primary volume can be restored easily - except for a small active dataset that is now backed up to the second DS419slim volume vs. an external USB drive. Caveat emptor, please.

Ron

 

[akahan]

Keeping a "spare slot" is not a bad idea at all...thanks! In the long run, I think I'll be getting 4 4TB drives for the 414, and moving the 6TB drives into something that will be able to make full use of their size.