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It was extremely satisfying to see the following dialog about the volume expansion when logging into my Infrant ReadyNAS:

The overall process of expansion took about four days, converting from four 320 GB drives to four 1 TB drives. (For reference, I selected the Hitachi 7K1000.B 0A38016 drive from ZipZoomFly, and did so almost entirely on price — despite my longstanding misgivings about IBM/Hitachi drives.)

The capacity expansion took longer than strictly necessary, because I wrote zeros across each of the drives before installing them, one at a time, in the ReadyNAS. (I ended up writing zeros to each drive twice, switching from the Disk Utility to the command line equivalent.)

Near the end of the process, I found out that the automatic X-RAID™ expansion doesn’t happen until you reboot the ReadyNAS after upgrading the last drive. I had also enabled a snapshot on the ReadyNAS, which also prevented the automatic volume capacity expansion, so I had to delete that.

I’m keenly interested in the CalDigit RAID card for the Mac Pro. It looks like a much better solution than the Apple RAID card to the storage problem — a First World problem if ever there was one — facing certain Mac Pro owners.

I’ve asked myself, “Now that you have this beast, how do you fill up its drive bays?”

The answer is somewhat difficult. You can put four drives in the bays, but in order to get a single volume, you’d minimally need software RAID. For example, you could configure a RAID 1+0 volume with Disk Utility. You could get the expensive Apple RAID card. You might populate a Drobo and connect it via FireWire. Or, you could get a CalDigit RAID card — which is the only bootable, fully-internal RAID controller I’m aware of that competes with Apple’s card.

One advantage of a solution that fits completely inside the Mac Pro case is that you have one less power cord to deal with. In this sense, the CalDigit RAID Card seems preferable to a Drobo. The CalDigit card interfaces directly with the Mac Pro’s own SATA ports, so you can use the existing internal drive bays and slide drives into the normal SATA/power connectors.

I just need to find one on sale …