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Question on X-RAID2 RAID6
I'm the proud owner of the RN-428 with now current non beta firmware, When I set the device up a few weeks ago I only had a hodgepodge of 2TB, 5TB, and 6TB disks. I went and purchased another 6 8T...
You can safely add another drive (to an empty slot) during a re-sync. Replacing one that's a part of an active array is asking for trouble, even with RAID6. Either way, it's not going to decrease the required re-sync time unless you will simply not be available to add the next drive when the time comes. The OS will sync one drive, and then the next.
Welcome to the Community!
It would be best if you let the disks resync first before adding another.
https://kb.netgear.com/21415/How-do-I-expand-an-existing-X-RAID-volume-with-larger-disks
HTH
Regards
Marc_V wrote:
It would be best if you let the disks resync first before adding another.
Absolutely. While RAID-6 can tolerate 2 failed disks, it's best not to deliberately remove two. If a third disk were to fail during the resync you'd lose everything. Also if you hot-swap two, then the resync process will slow down - it won't go faster. The system will only resync one drive at a time, and it will be working harder because it needs to recover the data from the second disk you removed in order to rebuild the parity blocks on the first one.
If your goal is to speed up the process overall, then the way to do that is to back up your current files, and do a factory reset with all the new disks in place. Then reset the RAID to RAID-6, reconfigure the NAS, and restore the data from backup. The data will be unavailable until you restore it, but the overall process will take much less time.
I'll just wait for it to complete. I was hoping I could replace another 2TB disk now that the array is healthy, I think its just growing, its just confusing because the web ui just says resyncing, with no mention at all of expanding. I'm only talking about one disk, I'd never pull 2, it's just asking for trouble. I'm used to RAID, but I've never used X-RAID so it's all foreign right now.
I have noticed I'm up about 3TB from last night to 20TB now, with 4 more disks to go I should have it done by mid September :)
I have another backup for most of the data, but I'd rather not blow it away, It would take similar times just to reload the data, even with my bond.
FWIW, XRAID2 is NOT the same as RAID-6. Normally XRAID is has single redundancy - not dual redundancy. Unless you did something in the original setup (that is, switching to flexraid, selecting raid-6, and then switching back to XRAID), you only have single redundancy. That is a combination of RAID-1 and RAID-5 if you have mixed disk sizes. If that's your situation, then you certainly would have lost data if you'd hot swapped a second disk before the first resync was completed.
jreiners wrote:
I have noticed I'm up about 3TB from last night to 20TB now, with 4 more disks to go I should have it done by mid September :)
The capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest". That will give you the approx. size in TB. The NAS (like windows) reports TiB. Google will convert this for you. For instance, entering "8 TB in TiB" will give you ~7.27 TiB.
jreiners wrote:
It would take similar times just to reload the data, even with my bond.
Actually it won't. Every disk you add will take longer to resync. And it will require either reading or writing every sector in the entire volume (on all disks). You'll be doing that several times before you are done. It's much faster to build the volume once and then restore the data.
That said, there's nothing wrong with your process - as long as you are aware a disk failure during resync can result in losing all your data.
When I first set it up, it was XRAID with single redundancy, but I deleted that volume and created a XRAID2 RAID 6 instead, I have all 8 bays full, I don't want single redundancy. It shows in the web admin page it is a X-RAID (lit) and RAID 6.
My backup is offsite, and with 32TB of data, it'll take a long time with the cable modem upload on the other side, I could sneakernet but it'se just not worth it, the data has millions of small files and ~100ms latency since the other side is a cable modem. This is not critical data, and I don't care if it takes a while, it's 64TB RAW.
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