DS-7716NI-M4 Missing RAID Option?

[richardjgreen]

I've finally gotten around to purchasing the drives to go in my new DS-7716NI-M4. The NVR is running V4.63.005 build 230512 and I've installed 4x WD Purple 8TB drives, all showing normal status and correct capacities.

When I go to Storage > Advanced Configuration > Other, the Enable RAID option is absent, it's just completely missing even though the Help page states I am in the correct place to find the option.

I've seen threads about the minimum 4TB drive size requirement but that's obviously not an issue as these are 8TB drives. Anyone got any thoughts or advice as to why the option is missing?

 

[JB1970]

I've finally gotten around to purchasing the drives to go in my new DS-7716NI-M4. The NVR is running V4.63.005 build 230512 and I've installed 4x WD Purple 8TB drives, all showing normal status and correct capacities.

When I go to Storage > Advanced Configuration > Other, the Enable RAID option is absent, it's just completely missing even though the Help page states I am in the correct place to find the option.

I've seen threads about the minimum 4TB drive size requirement but that's obviously not an issue as these are 8TB drives. Anyone got any thoughts or advice as to why the option is missing?

Looking at the data sheet that model does not support RAID. The screenshot below is from the data sheet. The Help pages are not necessarily model specific; they sometimes show features that aren't applicable to the model you have and often fail to show features/options that have been introduced in more recent firmware updates. I think it's the 9000 series that have a RAID controller - the 9632NI-M8 for instance supports 4 RAID arrays and RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 10.

 

[richardjgreen]

Most bizarre as I'm sure that the datasheet for the 7716NI-I4 and M4 used to say RAID supported as that was led me to picking it but ho-hum.

Follow-up question then. Without RAID, how will the NVR use the drives? Will it fill one drive and then move on to the next or does it balance the writes across all four drives?

 

[Dan]

Hi @richardjgreen

Without RAID the NVR will just record to the HDDs sequentially (e.g. start with HDD1, fill it, and then move to HDD2) until all the HDDs are full, if you have overwrite enabled it will fill all the HDDs and then erase/overwrite the oldest recordings.

 

[JB1970]

Yes as @Dan says, 3 of the 4 drives will be idle at any time. You can if you wish create hard drive groups and assign specific cameras to each group if desired.