Disks in Softnas®

Softnas® allows you to add or combine multiple storage types on the same instance. SoftNAS provides a similar experience across its platforms. This means that a great deal of its functionality, user experience, requirements, and features are common to each platform.

The only differences between adding disk devices on AWS and Azure are the actual cloud platform credentials needed and the specific disk device types they offer for use. If planning on using RAID, you need to remember to allocate the appropriate number of disk devices required for a specific RAID type planned to be used. for more information, please refer to Planning your Instances - Software RAID Considerations.

This includes physical disks from your on-premise environment, or Softnas® storage. Our simple to use interface allows you to select and add this storage quickly and easily, and to manage tasks such as partitioning with simple point and click operations.

The following articles help you to add the storage required, whether physical disks, block storage, in order to provision your pools and volumes.

All Platforms Information

Add Disk Devices

In SoftNAS StorageCenter, choose Disk Devices from the main menu.

Select "Step 5 - Add Storage Devices" from the Getting Started Checklist.

Partitioning Disks

Log on to SoftNAS StorageCenter.
In the Left Navigation Pane, select the Disk Devices option under the Storage section. The Disk Devices panel will be displayed.
Disk devices must be partitioned prior to use. The available devices are listed in the Available Devices grid.
Device Usage - indicates the current status of the device, which can be one of the following:

- Device needs partition - the initial state for a new device that has no partition
- Available to assign - the device is partitioned and ready for use in a storage pool
- Used in pool <poolname> - the device is in use by the indicated storage pool name

Use the buttons on the toolbar to partition the devices for initial use.

Use Partition All to partition all disk devices.
Alternatively, select each disk device, then use Create Partition to partition a device individually.
Remove Partition can be used to remove an existing partition that is no longer needed.

AWS Specific Information

Azure Specific Information

VMware/RHEL Specific Information

Pricing Information	Supported?
EBS General SSD (gp3)¹	Y
EBS General SSD (gp2)	Y
EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1)	Y
EBS Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)	Y
EBS Cold HDD (sc1)	Y
Any Object Storage Devices	N

¹ Must be created using the EC2 Console, not supported by the StorageCenter Administrative Interface

Adding Amazon EBS Disks
Creating a gp3 Volume

Pricing Information	Supported?
Premium SSD	Y
Standard SSD	Y
Standard HDD	Y
Ultra Disk	Y
Any Object Storage Devices	N

Adding Block Storage via the Storage UI

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