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Forum Discussion
Changing all disks on RN314
Hi all, one of the disk on the RN314 at my parents' home failed and I have just noticed that all disks there have >55k hours of on time, so... maybe it's time for some renewal :) Oddly (but that mu...
StephenB wrote:Personally I tend to run the disks until I see some signs of failing. Though of course others will replace them on a schedule.
Well, one died from one moment to the other, with no previous advice. Now I can't even see it's details any more, so it's dead dead. I see that they all have the same age, so... I prefer to avoid disasters. Even if I have backup (I have learned my lessons).
Normally the process would be to replace the disks one at a time, and wait for the system to resync before moving on to the next. But that would require you to replace all four.
The other way is to back up the files, power down the NAS and remove all four disks (labeling by slot). Then put in the two new disks, and power on the NAS, doing a factory install. Reconfigure the NAS (creating any user accounts, shares, installing any apps, etc), and restore the files from the backup. OS-6 will be reinstalled from scratch (as you note in your post). Is there a reason why this is a problem?
Well, one is that I have to do all the process remotely connected to one of the PC, the other is just... time. It's not my NAS, so I need to find out how I configured everything long time ago and redo it.
There's no way to shift from 4-disk XRAID to RAID-1 via the web ui. There is a fairly risky way to do that with ssh/linux command line.
Ok I think I might have not explained myself properly here. It's not that I want to shift from XRAID to RAID-1, it's more like, I would like to get rid of XRAID and start a brand new RAID-1 without being forced to do a factory reset because taking all the disks off would mean to lose the copy of OS6.
I don't know if it's a bit more clear in this way...
You can save the configuration from the System/Settings page. Then restoring it on the newly factory defaulted NAS will take care of everything except the actual data and apps. If there are any apps, you do need to restore them before restoring the config backup. In the long run, that will be cleaner and faster, since you already have the data backed up for restoration. Oh, and if you use user home folders, the user must log in via ReadyCloud or SMB (depending on the type of user) for the user folder to be created. Then you can restore that data.
You could leave the RAID5 degraded to leave an empty bay to be filled by a new drive on which to create a new JBOD volume, then destroy or export the original volume, remove the remaining old drives, add the second new one, then add redundancy to the JBOD to get RAID1. But that process has many potential pitfalls which could push you into the first scenario to recover. As with starting over, destroying or exporting the main volume does not move apps though it is supposed to (and usually does) move their location to the new volume. This option's only plus is that you can copy data from the original RAID directly to the new one instead of using an external backup.
For the future, you may want to look into a VPN (I use ZeroTier, which is not a traditional VPN) to make it easier to do remote administration. You could then log directly into the NAS instead of going through a PC on the remote network.
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll see what I can do.
You know, my biggest issue is that it's not the NAS which I use every day, many things were configured years ago and getting all stuff back -particularly apps- will be a very tedious job.
Just for my understanding, let's say that I don't care about the data (it's all backed up twice), if I remove two disks and leave the RAID5 degraded, then plug the two new drives, then create a new volume on those two new disks, then remove the last two RAID5, do I expect that the OS6 copy is transferred on the new disks?
gpaolo wrote:
if I remove two disks and leave the RAID5 degraded, then plug the two new drives, then create a new volume on those two new disks, then remove the last two RAID5, do I expect that the OS6 copy is transferred on the new disks?
If you remove two disks the volume will be dead, not degraded. Since the data volume holds your apps, you will then need to reinstall them.
What you can do is
- uninstall your apps
- switch to flexraid
- destroy the volume
- remove two of the disks
- replace the disks with the new ones.
- create a new RAID 1 volume on the new ones
- re-apply the volume settings you want (quota, maintenance schedule).
- reinstall the apps
- recreate your shares and any backup jobs.
- restore your data from the backup.
The OS is preserved. But at the end of the day, you won't save any significant time or effort compared with simply starting over. You avoid needing to set up the user accounts again, and perhaps setting up the NAS network configuration settings. Those setting are easy to re-apply for almost home NAS users, since there usually aren't very many user accounts.
The simple way to accomplish what you want is to replace all four disks one at a time. That eliminates any need to change the NAS setup. The extra work here is because you want to start off with RAID-1 in the new volume.
Either way, if something were to go wrong, you need to start over anyway. So you will need to document the configuration before you start.
I see... ok thank you very much for the guidance!
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