Maintenance needed before horizontal expansion of Flex-raid-1

---

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.