Upgrading from 6 x 1.5tb to 6 x 3tb ( ReadyNAS Pro )

peterdgreenway wrote:
Is it a case of buying suitable drives, we were looking at Seagate Barracuda XT 3 TB Internal hard drive - 600 MBps - 7200 rpm and putting them in one by one ?

Do be aware that the Pro has SATA II ports (I think). In any case a mechanical hard disk is not going to saturate SATA I, though the newer disks do tend to be faster than the older equivalent ones. Be sure to check that the disk you want is on the HCL

peterdgreenway wrote:
At present the sector allocation is 512 I assume that this will effectively upgrade the sector size to 4k as the old drive is ejected and a new one installed?

Yes. Do be aware though that if using 4k sector disks without all disks being 4k sector aligned write performance will be poor. So if your disks aren't 4k sector aligned you may still find it better to backup your data ... factory reset with new disks in place ... restore data from backup.


I would recommend you ensure you have a good backup of important data primarily stored on the NAS before beginning the process of replacing your disks.

I'd also suggest running the "Disk Test" boot option (http://www.readynas.com/kb/faq/boot/how_do_i_use_the_boot_menu) to check for a bad disk. If a disk is failing/bad obviously you want to replace that one first.

It could also be a good idea (though not essential) to test your new disks by hooking them up to a SATA port on your PC and running both short and long tests using vendor tools to ensure you are adding a good disk to your system.

Performance will obviously be reduced while the resync etc. is taking place, so if you have a period of time during the week where the NAS tends to get minimum access (e.g. weekend) that would be a good time to swap a disk over.

If not already running X-RAID2 dual-redundancy or Flex-RAID RAID-6, you might want to consider backing up your data, doing a System > Config Backup, power down, remove old disks (label order), insert new disks, do a factory reset (http://www.readynas.com/kb/faq/boot/how_do_i_use_the_boot_menu), discover NAS using RAIDar during 10 minute countdown (a few tests will run before this), click setup, choose X-RAID2, tick dual-redundancy and confirm your choice. Then restore config backup and restore data from backup.

With 3TB drives I would want the extra protection that dual-redundacy provides.

You may wish to have a read of Why you might want to factory reset a x86 ReadyNAS as it explains a few other reasons why you might want to do a factory reset.

Thanks for this, does anyone have any recommendations for 3tb disks which they are using Enterprise grade or otherwise ?

Thanks