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Ready NAS 104: Replacing a 2TB drive with a 4TB one?
I spotted an error message on my Ready NAS Admin page this afternoon and so am investigating replacing one of the drives. This was the message:
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"Disk: Detected increasing reallocated sector count: [845] on disk 4 (Internal) [TOSHIBA DT01ACA200 X4JYHSATS] 99 times in the past 30 days. This condition often indicates an impending failure. Be prepared to replace this disk to maintain data redundancy."
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I've read the manual and the replacement looks simple enough to do. I have X-RAID turned on and so I'm reasonably confident that hot-switching the old 2TB drive out for a new one won't mean the loss of any data.
But here's the thought: my existing configuration has 4x2TB drives and whilst only one is indicating problems I'm sure that the others will probably need replacing in the near future. What if I replace all of the drives over a period of time with 4TB drives? Can the software cope with that? I'm assuming that I probably won't have the full 8TB of storage capacity until the last drive is inserted but can a ReadyNAS cope with a slow change of the drives from 2TB to 4TB?
KRT-UK wrote:
I've read the manual and the replacement looks simple enough to do. I have X-RAID turned on and so I'm reasonably confident that hot-switching the old 2TB drive out for a new one won't mean the loss of any data.
Correct. Though we do recommend updating (or making) a backup first. If a second drive fails during the resync process, you will lose all the data.
KRT-UK wrote:
What if I replace all of the drives over a period of time with 4TB drives? Can the software cope with that?
Yes. Currently you have 6 TB of storage (reported as 5.45 TiB). There would be no increase when you hot-swap the first drive. But you'd see a 2 TB increase for each drive after that - ending up with 12 TB total. The capacity rule is "sum the drives and subtract the smallest".
Note that the capacity rule assumes that you are either
- replacing a drive with one of the same size
- replacing a drive with one that is greater or equal to the largest drive currently installed.
4 Replies
KRT-UK wrote:
I've read the manual and the replacement looks simple enough to do. I have X-RAID turned on and so I'm reasonably confident that hot-switching the old 2TB drive out for a new one won't mean the loss of any data.
Correct. Though we do recommend updating (or making) a backup first. If a second drive fails during the resync process, you will lose all the data.
KRT-UK wrote:
What if I replace all of the drives over a period of time with 4TB drives? Can the software cope with that?
Yes. Currently you have 6 TB of storage (reported as 5.45 TiB). There would be no increase when you hot-swap the first drive. But you'd see a 2 TB increase for each drive after that - ending up with 12 TB total. The capacity rule is "sum the drives and subtract the smallest".
Note that the capacity rule assumes that you are either
- replacing a drive with one of the same size
- replacing a drive with one that is greater or equal to the largest drive currently installed.
Thank you!
You may want to look at even larger drives. I believe the best bang for the buck right now is 8TB for most brands/models if you eliminate the SMR varieties that you should avoid for RAID. Replacing two drives with 8TB will immediately bump you up to double your current capacity, and each additional 8TB you swap in later as you need the space will bump you another 5.4TiB.
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