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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 8...
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.
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).
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!
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.
That's interesting! Hmm, it gives me the option to switch right now, but I have not done it yet.
This array was never upgraded, meaning that the initial volume was created with 6 x 4TB disks. This is the first attempt at an upgrade. If I need to go through the an expansion for each disk, even after I swap out the remaining 5 disks, I guess I'll just have to suffer through it. I was just hoping to save time.
Sandshark wrote:
I believe StephenB meant to say it might not let you switch back to XRAID, even now.
Correct.
Sandshark wrote:
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.
Yes. If it will let you switch to X-RAID now, then I suggest doing that.
If you want to minimize the total time, it often is faster to back up the volume, insert all the new disks, set up the NAS from scratch, and then restore the files from backup. Counter-intuitive, but the sync time is fastest when you are creating a new volume, as that is done in parallel. Setting up a 4x8TB volume from scratch takes 32 TB of disk I/O. Expanding one disk at a time will take 16+24+28+32 TB of disk I/O (100 TB total, of which you've done the first 16 TB). As Sandshark says, switching to XRAID later in the process won't change the amount of I/O.
Ok, this is really weird.
I decided to just replace the 4TB drives with 8TB drives, and leave X-RAID off for the time being, so I could watch the rebuilding process when I flipped it to X-RAID.
As you can see, all 8TB drives are installed, and FlexRAID is still active:
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