Forum Discussion

Luminary

Feb 28, 2023

Solved

Upgrading disks in a RN316

I have a RN316 populated with Seagate 4TB drives. Drives are getting really old now, and finally stating to fail after 6+ years of power on time. 🙂

I had disk 4 fail, and I replaced it with a 8TB Seagate Ironwolf disk and it rebuilt just fine. I have 2 other disks that I'm going to be replacing next due to reallocated sectors,

Currently, the RAID5 is in Flex-RAID mode. Can I keep it in Flex-RAID until I replace all the disks with 8TB drives, and then switch it to X-RAID so that it can utilize the additional space? I'd rather not go through all of the rebuilds and expansion gyrations for every disk replaced.

StephenB
Mar 07, 2023
Sandshark wrote:

If you didn't enable XRAID, then you will not get that additional 4TB of space automatically added, nor can you add it via the GUI when in FlexRAID mode.

Leaving the mdstat printout aside, the web ui does show a volume size of 40 TB, so the volume does look like it expanded to 6x8TB RAID-5. It did not expand until the last disk was inserted, which is consistent with page 41 of the software manual.

https://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/READYNAS-100/READYNAS_OS_6_SM_EN.pdf

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StephenB
Guru
Feb 28, 2023
Laserbait wrote:

Can I keep it in Flex-RAID until I replace all the disks with 8TB drives, and then switch it to X-RAID so that it can utilize the additional space?

The admin UI might not let you switch back to flexraid (even now).
- Laserbait
  Luminary
  Feb 28, 2023
  Hello StephenB ,
  
  I don't mind about not being able to switch back to Flex RAID. I figure I'll have more than ample space for a LONG time after doubling the disk's capacity. I don't see me needing to do that again.
  
  Thanks!
  - Sandshark
    Sensei
    Feb 28, 2023
    I believe StephenB meant to say it might not let you switch back to XRAID, even now. If you have always had 4TB drives, then it likely will. If you already have multiple layers in the RAID, it likely will not. I have no idea if swapping in yet another larger drive but not expanding at this point will affect that.
    
    XRAID will always only add one drive at a time. So holding off on any expansion just means you're putting off all of those individual expansions until some time in the future.
    
    If you are comfortable with SSH and the Linux command line, you can do XRAID-like expansion while in FlexRAID mode, including adding or increasing the size of more than one drive at a time. See How-to-do-incremental-vertical-expansion-in-FlexRAID-mode. I can no longer add a response there, but I did find that using parted instead of fdisk will allow you to have partition boundaries that match what XRAID uses and not restrict you to specific increments.