Can I upgrade my drives to 2 or 3 TB?

There are two models of duo - v1 and v2. If you purchased in 2008, than you have a duo v1. There's a guide here: http://www.rnasguide.com/2012/01/09/how ... -or-nv-v2/

The duo v1 supports 2 TB drives (but not 3 TB). You will need at least 4.1.7 firmware to use 2 TB drives - of course current firmware is better.

For best performance you want 4K sector alignment of the partitions. If you don't have that already (and you likely don't) you should do a factory reset, and rebuild the RAID array from scratch. You might as well do that with the new drives in place. That is.
(a) update firmware
(b) make a backup and save config
(c) shut down NAS, remove drives
(d) install both new drives and power up (this will do a factory install)
(e) reinstall addons (order of this step matters!)
(f) restore configuration
(g) reload data from backup.

You can check to see if you have 4K alignment using this guide: http://www.rnasguide.com/2011/06/22/why ... -readynas/

If you already have 4K sector alignment and are running 4.1.7 or later, then hot-installing the drives (as you outline) will work.

Thank you!

I have verified that I have ReadNAS Duo v1 with firmware at current level, 4.1.13. So I could move to 2TB but not 3TB.

The partition log looks to be like 4 k sector partitions as I see "sectors of 1*512 bytes" in the partition.log.
Disk /dev/hde: 500.0 GB, 500097376256 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60800 cylinders, total 976752688 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

So I think from what you have said, I could do the hot-swapable. Would it be preferable to follow your methodology instead?

Dumb question #1. How do I tell if I have "addons?" I doubt I would as I don't recall doing anything of the sort.
Dumb question #2. When backing up the config do I also want to include "Data Volumes - Save the files and folders in the data volumes. This is useful for transferring folder trees and default share contents. It is limited to a combined total of 50MB" as part of the config backup options?

Thank you again!

drennman wrote:
The partition log looks to be like 4 k sector partitions as I see "sectors of 1*512 bytes" in the partition.log. Disk /dev/hde: 500.0 GB, 500097376256 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60800 cylinders, total 976752688 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Look again at the guide - you need to verify that the start sectors are all divisible by 8.
[quote="http://www.rnasguide.com/2011/06/22/why-you-might-want-to-factory-reset-a-sparc-readynas/":38euybe5]If unsure if your disks are 4k sector aligned, download your logs (Status > Logs > Download all Logs), extract the zip contents and look at partition.log. If your disks are 4k sector aligned the entry for a disk should look something this (you can see the start sectors are divisible by 8, remember 4096 = 8 * 512, so 4k sector aligned disks are also 512-byte sector aligned):

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 32 4096031 2048000 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdc2 4096032 4608031 256000 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdc3 4608032 976736335 486064152 5 Extended
/dev/hdc5 4608040 976736335 486064148 8e Linux LVM[/quote:38euybe5]"Start" is the 2nd field in the sample: 32, 4096032, 4608032, 4608040

drennman wrote:
Dumb question #1. How do I tell if I have "addons?" I doubt I would as I don't recall doing anything of the sort.

look in services->installed add-ons. ReadyNAS remote will likely be preinstalled, so ignore that one.

drennman wrote:
Dumb question #2. When backing up the config do I also want to include "Data Volumes - Save the files and folders in the data volumes. This is useful for transferring folder trees and default share contents. It is limited to a combined total of 50MB" as part of the config backup options?

There's no real point - 50 MB is not enough to be useful. So don't bother setting that.

drennman wrote: Dumb question #2. When backing up the config do I also want to include "Data Volumes - Save the files and folders in the data volumes. This is useful for transferring folder trees and default share contents. It is limited to a combined total of 50MB" as part of the config backup options? There's no real point - 50 MB is not enough to be useful. So don't bother setting that.

No point for the average home user. This was more for deploying many systems in SMB. You could setup initial directory structure, which the config backup would help create on multiple systems. If you already have data on the NAS, this is useless.

Thank you again StephenB! Start values (as you assumed) are not divisible by 8 so I will follow your steps and do the factory reset on the new drives. I did install ReadyNAS Photo as an add-on but never used it so I can skip your step (e)?

Thank you Chirpa for more details on my Question #2.

Thanks!

drennman wrote:
...I did install ReadyNAS Photo as an add-on but never used it so I can skip your step (e)?

Yes, if you uninstall it before step b.

Also, label the drives (by slot) as you remove them in (c). You can still reinstall them (NAS powered down) if needed, and the NAS will work as it does not.