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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 i...
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.
janpeter1 wrote:
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?
It's ok - they do take quite a while. The test reads every sector.
janpeter1 wrote:
How do I check the SMART status?
It's shown in several of the logs in the log zip file. For instance, disk-info.log.
Now both RAID-1 disks and also single JBOD disk have been tested and no faults found!
Slightly surprise the difference in 200 power-on hours for the RAID-1 pair, but it has happened a few times over the year when they needed a re-sync and that may change the balance. I am not sure. Or they start-up and close-down slightly differently which just accumulates.
I guess a "scrub" is a good idea to do on the RAID-1 pair before exhanging one of them?
Is there any small difference if one choose diska 1 or disk 2 to exchange for the larger 8TB also 5400 rpm disk? Recall vaguely that the firm-ware is on only one of them, but nut sure at all. But there is some small odd difference in the Ready NAS design, or am I wrong?
As an aside, I am wondering why you chose FlexRAID when you set up the NAS. X-RAID with 3x4TB would have given you an 8 TB volume - the same space you have with FlexRAID.
janpeter1 wrote:
Recall vaguely that the firm-ware is on only one of them, but nut sure at all. But there is some small odd difference in the Ready NAS design, or am I wrong?
The firmware is actually on all three disks. Apps and home folders are on the data volume, so they are on both disks.
It doesn't matter which disk you replace.
janpeter1 wrote:
I guess a "scrub" is a good idea to do on the RAID-1 pair before exhanging one of them?
I don't see the need (and wouldn't do it if I were in your shoes).
StephenB wrote:
janpeter1 wrote:I guess a "scrub" is a good idea to do on the RAID-1 pair before exhanging one of them?
I don't see the need (and wouldn't do it if I were in your shoes).
Ditto. A scrub from the GUI does a BTRFS scrub and an MDADM re-sync simultaneously. So, it's even more stressful on the drives than a re-sync for a drive replacement. If one drive is near failure, that might push it over the cliff and you'd know it's the one that you should replace first. But it could harm the volume when it did, or even push both over.
Sandshark wrote:
StephenB wrote:
janpeter1 wrote:
I guess a "scrub" is a good idea to do on the RAID-1 pair before exhanging one of them?
I don't see the need (and wouldn't do it if I were in your shoes).
Ditto. A scrub from the GUI does a BTRFS scrub and an MDADM re-sync simultaneously. So, it's even more stressful on the drives than a re-sync for a drive replacement. If one drive is near failure, that might push it over the cliff and you'd know it's the one that you should replace first. But it could harm the volume when it did, or even push both over.
Plus the disk tests you just finished show that all sectors of the existing two drives can be read. Which is enough to sync the new disk when you insert it.
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