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Maintenance needed before horizontal expansion of Flex-raid-1
I plan to upgrade my disks in NAD RND314 where I have two disk in FlexRAID-1 and one disk as JBOD.
Run the latest firmeware.
My idea is to just for safety right now incrase one 4TB to 8TB disk in the RAID-1.
And in a year or so take the next disk and really get volume expansion.
What maintenance is important to do just before doing the expansion?
I read in the manual around page 40 and find littel information about it.
Both my disks are 5 years old and coming of age - both are WD and run only at 5400 rpm.
So I do not want to do maintenance that create "a lot of stress" for the disks. I have made bakup externally of course.
And so far no indications of any problems.
Thanks for your advice
janpeter1 wrote:
Sound good. Just a last question, I guess. Since I have one slot (out of 4) free I thought I could mount it there first and perhaps make some check, before I use it to replace one of the RAID-disks. Is that a reasonable idea? Perhaps make disk test of this new disk?
Personally I always test my disks in a Windows PC using vendor tools (Lifeguard for Western Digital; Seatools for Seagate). I run the long non-destructive test, and follow that up with a full erase / write zeros test. I have had some disks that pass one of those tests, but not the other - and I have sometimes found failures with just-purchased disks.
The NAS will do the short SMART self-test before it adds the disk to your volume. If you can't test the disk in a PC, then you could insert the disk the 4th slot, create a volume on it, and then run a disk test on that volume. Then destroy the volume, format the disk, and remove it. After that, hot-swap with the disk you want to replace. (Note that if you were running XRAID you couldn't do this).
FWIW, I suggest you reconsider your use of FlexRAID. You can make a full backup, and switch to XRAID (reconfiguring the NAS and restoring the data from backup). You'd have the same amount of storage as you have now - just on one volume. Expansion in the future would be a bit simpler.
19 Replies
janpeter1 wrote:
My idea is to just for safety right now incrase one 4TB to 8TB disk in the RAID-1.
And in a year or so take the next disk and really get volume expansion.
What maintenance is important to do just before doing the expansion?
The most important thing is to back up your data before you start. If you don't have the capacity to do a backup, then take care of that before you invest in new internal disks. Your volumes (or the NAS itself) can fail at any time w/o notice. The way to protect your data is to back it up.
As far as the maintenance tasks go, personally I don't tie them to expansion. I run all 4 maintenance tasks on a monthly schedule - currently I just schedule one test per month in the maintenance schedule in the volume settings wheel. That said, it wouldn't hurt to run the disk test on the RAID-1 volume before you replace one of those disks. Perhaps check the SMART stats before and after the test, and see if any of the counts have changed.
Actually making a disk test I found quite obvioius to do and I started on my lonely JBOD disk first.
More than a year since I did that, do not remeber. This disk is not as old as the RAID-par.
But it takes very long time to do this test, right now more than 5 hours for a single 4 TB disk.
Is this really ok?
How do I check the SMART status?
Also I reasoned like you, first expand the external USB HD and then go to the NAS-disks. Do not worry!
On the System/Performance page, hover over the green dot beside the drive type and a pop-up will show you the SMART data. If you click in the pop-up, it'll let you scroll in it.
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