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Forum Discussion
RN104 Replace All Drives?
I've had my 104 purring along for a year or so without issue. But I'm running out of space, here's the setup: Latest firmware, checked weekly. 4 drives, 3x 2tb, 1x 1tb No flex raid or x raid setu...
vjkdigital wrote:
I want to remove all four drives, and install a single 8tb drive. It's really tempting to pull the power, remove and install then power up, but I don't want to mess it all up.
Reading these threads point towards replacing one drive at a time but I'm not using x raid, so maybe that wouldn't work for me. If I was confident that the shares data was stored in memory and not on the drives maybe I'd try my first idea.
So what would you recommend I do please?
All of your configuration is on the drives, not flash memory. Pulling all the drives and replacing with one or more larger ones will result in a NAS that is like factory fresh. You can, however, save and restore the configuration from the Settings page.
Replacing one at a time is for RAIDs with redundancy, so you don't have to restore all the data. With a RAID0 (what I think you mean by "
one large pool"), that won't work. Removing one drive kills the entire volume.
- Thanks, I think it may be JBOD, That rings a bell.
vjkdigital wrote:
Thanks, I think it may be JBOD, That rings a bell.You'll still lose the data if you remove a drive. The simplest way to minimize that is to create one volume for each disk. That does force you to manually balance the shares (managing the free space on each drive). But then when a drive fails, you only need to restore the files that were on that failed drive.
So you might consider going with one volume/disk. Since you are going to lose data anyway, now is good time to change the configuration.
vjkdigital wrote:
... I backup manually....That's great. Even if you used RAID redundancy, it isn't enough to keep your data safe - you need to have backups on other devices.
RAID redundancy does keep your data available through a routine disk replacement (either due to failure or expansion). If you choose to maximize capacity instead, then of course you do suffer the inconvenience of losing access to your data whenever you need to replace a disk.
- Hmm. I always saw raid "as" a backup. If it isn't, and it's still taking up valuable space it's pretty worthless to me.
So are suggesting I do a backup from administrator (can't say I've seen an option to do this and where would you save it to?). Shut down. Pull 4 drives, install the new one and see what happens when I power up?
I'm a bit worried that a backup won't restore every little detail like the user name I log into the nas with that seems to be a nightmare to find and set up. I can't even change the admin password, and I refused to delete that account in fear that I could never access my NAS again. I use my ready cloud email and password to access it, but I'm stuck with admin admin as a user name and password in there.
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