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Forum Discussion
johnmacnab
Jul 02, 2020Aspirant
Replace ReadyNAS RND4000v2 with new 214 or similar
My ReadyNAS is now 8 years old and I feel it is time to replace it probably with an RN214
If I buy the new NAS with 1 drive and copy the data on to the new drive can I then take the old disks out of the old ReadyNAS and use them for either extra volumes or RAID. Having copied the data to the new disk in the new NAS I won't be bothered about losing the data from the old disks when I put them in the new NAS.
Will this work OK?
6 Replies
- Marc_VNETGEAR Employee Retired
@johnnmacnab
Welcome to the Community!
Yes that should work. The drive on the new NAS will be setup as JBOD and once you have transferred all data to it and insert the old drives, on X-RAID it will auto expand and if you are on Flex-RAID you will have the option to expand it to a new RAID or another JBOD volume.
Just make sure the new drive has the same capacity with the old ones, if it's higher than the old ones it would be better if you are on X-RAID so you can optimize all the space.
HTH
https://www.netgear.com/images/pdf/WP_XRAID2vsFlexRAID%20_12May14.pdf
johnmacnab wrote:
Having copied the data to the new disk in the new NAS I won't be bothered about losing the data from the old disks when I put them in the new NAS.
To be clear on this - you will lose the data from the old disks.
If your disks are old, then you might instead consider starting fresh with new disks. It's generally more cost effective to start with fewer but larger ones, so you can expand into empty slots. One benefit of getting new disks is that you can use your existing NAS as a backup - scheduling automatic daily backups from the new one. I use my own older NAS that way, and it works quite well.
- SandsharkSensei
I just want to re-iterate what Marc_V said, that the new drive cannot be larger than the old drives you are re-using if you want them all to form a single RAID volume in the end. Drives added after initial set-up must be as large or larger than the original. You could, after switching to FlexRAID, make the two old drives a separate volume if they are smaller.
Sandshark wrote:
I just want to re-iterate what Marc_V said, that the new drive cannot be larger than the old drives you are re-using if you want them all to form a single RAID volume in the end.
Yes - I should have pointed that out in my reply. If you go with new larger disks, you won't be able to add your existing disks to the same volume. So get the same size as the smallest drive you want to reuse; but consider larger/fewer disks if you want to start fresh.
OS-6 is more flexible than older ReadyNAS as far as flexraid goes - you can switch to flexraid at any time w/o data loss.
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