RN214 replacing good hard disks to more capacity

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Mikhail_L wrote:

Installed HGST 4TB hdn726040ale614, only 2 pieces Raid_1, at once installed them on the unpacking day, 5 years ago, i installed them and never touched them again.

 

I bought two new Seagate 8TB ironwolf ST8000VN004 drives.

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First piece of advice is to test the two new drives in a Windows PC with Seatools.  Either connect the disks with SATA or a USB adapter/dock.  I always run both the long non-destructive test and the "advanced" erase test - because over the years I have found some drives that pass one of these tests, but fail the other.  Though this will take a couple of days, it is far easier to deal with a bad out-of-the-box drive before you install it in the NAS.

As far as the upgrade goes, you have two options.  One is to replace the two disks - that will give you an 8 TB RAID-1 volume size.  The other is to use all four disks - that will give you a 16 TB RAID-5 array.  If the HGST drives are healthy, I'd go with the second option myself.  But totally up to you.

The upgrade process is simple.  If you are replacing, then

1. hot-swap disk 1 with one of the new Seagates (NAS running)
2. wait for the NAS to tell you that the volume is resynced (check the logs page)
3. hot swap disk 2 with the second Seagate (NAS running)
4. wait for the NAS to tell you that the volume is resynced.  Expansion will happen here.

If you are just expanding, similarly

1. hot-insert one of the new Seagates into bay 3 (NAS running)
2. wait for the NAS to tell you that the volume is resynced (check the logs page).  Partial expansion will happen here.
3. hot insert the second Seagate in bay 4 (NAS running)
4. wait for the NAS to tell you that the volume is resynced.  Full expansion will happen here (in two steps).

The resync will take a while (a day or longer), and the second resync will take longer than the first.

In both cases, expansion is automatic.

With either process, the data is unprotected during the RAID resync.  So if a disk fails (or you have a power failure, etc) you could lose the volume.  Netgear always recommends having a backup (and personally I do also).   That said, the process is reasonably safe if you test the new disks first.

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Mikhail_L wrote:

... With total 3.8TB information ...

I don't want to adjust or resize volume, because i'm afraid. 

 

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Always good to check here first.

Both FlexRAID and XRAID will automatically expand your volume. 

You should always have at least 10% free space on your volume, and ideally 15% or more.

The NAS will reports your current volume size as 3.6 TiB, so I am thinking you might not actually have as much data as you think.  But if the volume is more than 90% full, then you really do need to expand the volume.  If the NAS runs too low on free space, then you can lose your data very easily.

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Mikhail_L wrote:

Installed HGST 4TB hdn726040ale614, only 2 pieces Raid_1, at once installed them on the unpacking day, 5 years ago, i installed them and never touched them again.
No other options were configured, backup options were also not configured.

 

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FWIW, a NAS is not a "set up and forget" kind of device.  You do need to periodically check it.  There are maitenance functions you can schedule that can give you warnings of trouble before your data is at risk.  Ideally you should schedule those, and also make sure email alerts are functioning.

A NAS can fail at any time, and RAID is not enough to keep your data safe.  So I also recommend putting a full backup plan in place.  Many people use USB drives for this.  You can connect the drive to a PC, and use something like FreeFileSync, or you can connect it to the NAS, and set up backup jobs.

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Mikhail_L wrote:

A dialog box appears that suggests replacing X-Raid with Flex-Raid.
I don't understand the difference of this options, can you please describe for my case what is more preferable case? Do i need perform a Flex-Raid?

 

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It's not suggesting - it's just asking if you want to change it.

FlexRAID gives you more options in managing the RAID.  X-RAID is a better option for you (like most users).  So I recommend staying with that.

FlexRAID gives you more control over the RAID setup - which can sometimes be useful.  But it is also quite a bit more complicated, and most users find it confusing.  Personally I use X-RAID on most of my NAS (though I do run FlexRAID on an RN202).