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Tommy10k's avatar
Tommy10k
Aspirant
Jul 18, 2012

Temporarily swapping drives in duo

Hi, I want to temporarily swap out my 2x 2tb drives in the duo for a couple of 500gb ones, test them, then I want to swap them back. What I want to know is whether this will break anything on the main 2tb array.

Cheers
Tom

5 Replies

  • It should not if you shut the Duo down normally, remove the two 2TB drives noting the bay each drive was in (using a Post-It note works well) then mount the two 500GB drives in the trays and install them. The two 500GB drives should have no partitions on them. (If they have been previously used/formatted, connect them to a PC and use Windows Disk Management to remove all partitions.) Once they are installed in the Duo, power it up and let it go through the set up process. You can let it default and do this on it's own. You then shut it down, restore the original 2TB drives to the trays, re-insert into their original bay and power up. It should be up and on line in a few minutes.

    If you don't mind the question - why are you using the Duo to test the drives unless you are going to use them in the Duo? Using the vendor tools to test the drives as they are connected to an SATA port on the PC motherboard is the proper way to really test the drives.
  • Great, thanks for the reply, yeah I know the methodology is a bit odd, I'm limited on resources at the moment only having a laptop and the duo. I want to upgrade to the duo v2 and then sell the duo with these two Sata drives In it that I happen to have knocking around from an old NAS drive that the psu packed up on a few years back. Thing is I can't remember whether the disks were ok and they have been sitting around in a box for a year or so...so just wanted to make sure all was well before embarking on the migration. The difficulty might come in trying to remove the partitions so I guess a hdd caddy from eBay will be my friend!
  • To Tommy,
    You say "upgrade " to Duo v2. The v2 has less features than v1, and the marketing people intended it as a home unit
    only, rather than a business unit. However recent Firmware upgrade have changed the available features.

    Can you study the other posts.

    Don't sell the v1, unless you are fully sure that v2 supports your needs. :naskiller:
    You cannot plug disks out of v1, into v2 without factory defaulting.
    You may sell NAS on eBay, but the 2nd hand buyer, will not have the 5 year warranty,
    that the original purchaser had.


    Regards, Marto,
  • mdgm-ntgr's avatar
    mdgm-ntgr
    NETGEAR Employee Retired
    Duo v1 only ever had 3 year warranty. Depending on the purchase date a NV+ v1 might have a shorter/longer warranty than 3 years.
  • Tommy10K - first I agree with Marto73 that you would be better off keeping the Duo and acquiring the Duo v2 and putting new disks in the new unit. Once you have your data copied over to the Duo v2 (use a Frontview backup job with NFS to do the copy and then change it to rsync and run it again. The second time will verify your backup and will take a lot less time). Then convert your existing Duo to a backup role. The Duo v2 will be much faster than the v1 for regular operations and you can set the backup jobs to run at night and using rsync the jobs will run in minutes. Rsync is a built in process to synchronize the files between two NAS units.

    If you still want to test the 500GB drives, go ahead with the procedure I posted above without clearing the partitions. If you get an error, most like is the bad firmware error, you can shut it down and then do a Factory Default when you restart the unit.

    Factory Default on Duo v1/NV+ v1/NV:
    To perform an OS Re-install or Factory Default, this is managed via the Reset button on the back of the chassis.

    Locate the reset pinhole.
    ReadyNAS Duo v1/NV/NV+ v1: the pinhole is next to the USB port in the back.
    Get a straightened paper clip and depress the hidden switch in the pinhole while the power is off, and then power on the ReadyNAS.
    After 5 seconds you will get the first flash of the LED's for the OS Re-install
    At 30 seconds you will get the second flash of the LED's for the Factory Default.

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