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Forum Discussion
ReadyNAS NV+ upgrade after PSU failure
I've had a ReadyNAS NV+ (RND4000) since it was an Infrant product (est. purchase 2005?). Except for a PSU failure several years back, which I replaced, it's been rock solid. Given it's age, I've be...
I took the liberty of fixing the title on the first post.
It is possible to replace the PSU. The pinout isn't standard, so if you use an off-the-shelf PSU you'll need to modify it. The wiring changes are described here: https://www.readynas.com/download/archive/pdf/ReadyNAS_PSU_pinout.pdf
There are some folks out there who are selling turnkey PSUs (already modified), but they are quite expensive. There are also some used NV+ out there, so you could purchase one with a working PSU and swap that over.
If you have an ATX supply, you can jury-rig something that will work temporarily - using extension cables to connect the PSU to the NAS. You can modify the pinout in the extension cable.
If you buy a new ReadyNAS, you can use paid support to temporarily mount your disks in the new NAS. That would let you off-load the data. However, this can be pretty expensive. https://kb.netgear.com/29876/ReadyNAS-Migrating-disks-from-RAIDiator-4-1-or-RAIDiator-5-3-to-ReadyNAS-OS-6
If you can connect the disks to a PC (either with SATA or USB) you can either
- boot the system under linux, and manually mount the RAID array or
- use RAID recovery software (R-Studio is reasonably priced). https://www.r-studio.com/
Thanks for the reply and the fix, StephenB. Revealing my ignorance here but... re the new NAS option, wouldn't my disks old just mount, and then I could backup to another device before upgrading to next/larger disks? or is there something proprietary about the RAID used in the NV+?
EricBlantz wrote:
re the new NAS option, wouldn't my disks old just mount, and then I could backup to another device before upgrading to next/larger disks?
No. It's not that your RAID is proprietary - it's because too much has changed since 2005.
One barrier is that the new ReadyNAS use a completely different file system underneath - BTRFS instead of the older EXT.
Another barrier is that your NAS uses a sparc processor, current NAS use either an ARM or Intel processor. All ReadyNAS systems boot from the disks, but since your system uses a different processor, the NV+ disks can't boot on a newer NAS.
FWIW, the RAID is differently organized too. Your system has a dedicated parity disk. The newer NAS distribute the parity blocks across all the disks. Distributing the parity improves performance and evens out the disk I/O.
In principle Netgear could have included a boot mode that would mount the disks (at least read-only), instead of requiring support to do it manually. Though there is a limited amount of space in the boot flash, so they do need to prioritize how it's used.
Pardon my naivete, but the idea that the NV+ can never be migrated to a newer platform except by Netgear engineers sorta boggles my mind. Why couldn't some backup from NV+ to a new platform work, using e.g. Rsync or some such, and then once the data is all on the new platform "just organize it the way you want"!?
I suppose that last part is non-trivial huh!?
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