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adding disc to rn204 unit
Thinking ahead so I can get some idea of what I am doing.
I am probably going to start off with a 2 disc system in an rn204 unit. It is probable that in the future I will want to add a 3rd disc.
is this easy? some reports I have read say that the disc has to be formatted before it can be used, but the manuals say that when formatting a disc, ALL the drives will be formatted - thus clearing out all data.
Can a 3rd drive be inserted ( newly bought ) and will the system incorporate it while still having the system usable?
OK thanks for those responses. I am now in the process of purchasing a rn204 system with 3 discs to start with, so shouldnt need to add another disc for some time.
the only minor problem I am having getting my head round is that data should be backed up before doing things. yes I can see the sense in that, and I do back up my PC stuff on regular basis, but where do I back up say 4gb of data on my NAS to - other than getting another NAS system !
anyway - thanks for response.
8 Replies
When you do a factory default (wipes all data, settings, everything) all the disks are wiped.
When you add a disk to the system whilst the NAS is running if the disk is blank it will be wiped.
If you want to add a used disk you should connect the disk to a PC and delete the partitions off it first, but not format it. The NAS needs to partition the disk etc.
Yes you can add the disk while the NAS is running, but the performance will be reduced until the array has finished rebuilding.
I would advise you to update your backup before adding the 3rd drive and check to see if there are any alerts about SMART errors with the existing disks in the NAS.
mdgm wrote:
Yes you can add the disk while the NAS is running, but the performance will be reduced until the array has finished rebuilding.
Just to clarify - if you add the disk while the NAS is powered down, the array is rebuilt when you power it up. So no matter how you add the disk, performance is reduced until the array is rebuild/expanded. On the RN200 series the NAS should certainly be useable.
I always suggest hot-inserting the new disk with the NAS running - the NAS firmware then detects the insertion (and if you are replacing, the removal). If you do it with the NAS powered down the NAS has to figure out that the disk was added (or changed).
I would advise you to update your backup before adding the 3rd drive and check to see if there are any alerts about SMART errors with the existing disks in the NAS.Too many people think that RAID redundancy is enough to protect your data. If you care about it, you should always have more than one copy on different devices. Otherwise at some point you will lose it. The NAS has backup capabilities built into it for a reason :smileyhappy:
The data on the NAS is more vulnerable when you are adding drives, so it is particularly important to update the backup before manipulating disks. It's also good practice to update backups before upgrading firmware. While these are usually safe operations, they still occasionally fail (and backups are much less expensive than data recovery services).
OK thanks for those responses. I am now in the process of purchasing a rn204 system with 3 discs to start with, so shouldnt need to add another disc for some time.
the only minor problem I am having getting my head round is that data should be backed up before doing things. yes I can see the sense in that, and I do back up my PC stuff on regular basis, but where do I back up say 4gb of data on my NAS to - other than getting another NAS system !
anyway - thanks for response.
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