Acer Altos Easystore Software

hi all,
after many hours of searching i have found this site, where people seem to generally know what they are talking about... so perhaps u can help me out..( who said a little flattery gets you nowhere?)
First my situation. I have an Infrant/Netgear ReadyNas NV which i have been using without problems for over 3 years now. I have been able to gradually upgrade each disk as new hds become more affordable, and due to the raid 5 config i have not lost any data when the fourth and final upgraded disk is inserted, as it just expands the entire NAS's capacity.
About 2 years ago I bought an Acer Altos Easystore. At first it worked fine, but then suddenly for no apparent reason every time I tried to write to it from any pc on my network it seemed to freeze/hang/die a horrible death. Sometimes the pc would say that the network resource is no longer available, and I would still be able to access it, and other times i would have to pull the plug completely (yes, I know, very unwise - but last resort!).
After trying everything like updating firmware etc etc I got fed up and upgraded my ReadyNas with enough capacity to be able to store all of the Easystore's data, copied said data, then shelved the Easystore into the back of my closet, next to my leather whips.
Ok, now to the point. (finally). I have just purchased my thirds NAS drive, the Synology Diskstation DS410. This is by far the best drive yet, with insane read/write speeds and great built in applications. Problem is that it only came with 4x500gb. As I want to upgrade it to 4x2TB, I have decided to attempt to fix the Altos once and for all then sell it on to generate some cash for said hard drives. So I had a look for any new firmware out there, to find that the latest one on the acer-europe website is fs-ns04 - 1.4-b813.
which is the one I already flashed in my last attempt at repair. I did this anyway, and this time reconfigured the disks and set up a new Raid 5 array. As it was configuring the disks, i got an error via email from the NAS drive saying there has been a disk error and that the drive was running in Degraded mode. Lovely. So I suspected that one of the drives was faulty, and tested each one to find that the first slot's drive was in fact producing serious smart errors. Needless to say this drive is now back next to the whips. So I once again rebuilt the NAS, this time with only 3 500GB disks, running in Raid 5, and so far have had no problems. The only issue is, once I find another Harddrive to take up the 4th slot, according to the manual it says that adding an extra hard drive to a healthy raid-5 configuration will effectively change the config to Raid-5+Spare. Unless I am mistaken this is unlike my other NAS drives which seem to add them automatically to the array without needing to reconfigure the disks and thus keeping all the data. If this is the case I cannot even sell the drive with the three disks as noone will want to have to copy all the data off from the NAS before adding a new drive.
So my questions after all this are as follows:
1) Is there any way of adding a fourth disk and for the volume to expand to incorporate this new disk without wiping the data?
2) Is there any later firmware for this Altos Easystore out there (later than fs-ns04 - 1.4-b813)?
3) If the answer to question 1 is yes, and say i do manage to add this fourth hard disk without it simly become a spare, will I be able to replace one or more disks at a later stage with larger capacity disks without having to reconfigure and lose data?
4) Any ideas about what caused the original write problem in the first place?
5) Finally, where the heck is Acer's main webpage supporting this product? I cannot find the installation cds that had a bunch of cool software on it, and need to download a new copy. Any Ideas?
If you have read this far, then you are either an extremely helpful selfless person, or extremely bored. Either way your help would be greatly appreciated and will be reciprocated with great karma I am sure!
Thanks guys,
Warmest!!
phreaksta