6.2.0 upgrade problems on RN104

Try running a balance on disk 4 (go to System > Settings > Volume Schedule and a schedule for a balance on the volume on disk 4.

Your volumes are quite full so it's quite possible your other volumes could encounter a similar issue at some point.

Do you have a backup of your data?

Why did you use a separate volume for each disk rather than e.g. a RAID-5 volume?

Thanks, I've run a balance but it hasn't made any difference. What next?

The drives are indeed quite full, and they are all backed up. I've been moving some data from drives 1,2 & 3 onto drive 4 but don't really see the need to leave a lot of empty wasted space on the drives as these are just TV recordings that I'm gradually watching and deleting or keeping as the mood takes me. I'm not constantly adding / updating / deleting a lot of small files. What's the recommended amount of free space to leave, and why?

As for using separate volumes, I've never seen the point in using RAID at home. I want to have the maximum amount of storage space available on the NAS and a simple way of backing it up, and I don't want to trust all my data to a single device even if it has redundancy.

Using separate volumes and backing them up to separate drives via a USB enclosure connected to my PC is the method that makes sense to me at the moment. I could perhaps switch to RAID 0 to give me one large volume without any redundancy, and use an identical RAID array in a NAS, DAS or PC to back it up. That would actually make my life easier as I wouldn't have to keep swapping drives when I do my backups.

I use jbod on my backup NAS, and raid on the primary.

If you RAID-0 to span multiple drives, then a failure of any single drive will cause the entire array to be lost.

Although it can make your life a bit easier by eliminating the need to manually balance storage, the reliability price is pretty high.

>>>That would actually make my life easier as I wouldn't have to keep swapping drives when I do my backups.
I don't see how this is related to RAID-0 on the RN104, can you clarify?

Can you send in a fresh set of logs?

New logs sent, thanks.

StephenB - I have a single bay USB enclosure connected to my PC, and 4 bare drives that I put into it depending on which drive in the NAS is being backed up. I realise I'm making work for myself in managing which drive in the NAS I copy files to and then backing up each drive separately, so I've decided I will switch to RAID 0. As it happens, I have a brand new 4 bay D-Link NAS on my desk that I bought for another purpose last week as it was only £100, but I haven't done anything with it yet so can use it for backing up instead. I just need to buy a couple more drives to go in it.

That's a good point about losing the entire array though, so I will use JBOD in the D-Link. The odd thing is, Netgear use JBOD to refer to each drive being a separate volume (as per my current setup) but D-Link call this Standard, with JBOD meaning all the drives combined into one volume but not striped like RAID 0. As far as I can tell, it just fills up the drives in turn as you copy data to the single volume, so one drive failing will only take out the contents of that drive. Isn't there an option to do this in the ReadyNAS? I'll take security of my data over speed any day!

Not sure what is up with that volume, but I think it would probably be best to backup all the data off it, verify the backup is good, delete the volume and create a new one.

Babbage wrote:

Netgear use JBOD to refer to each drive being a separate volume (as per my current setup) but D-Link call this Standard, with JBOD meaning all the drives combined into one volume but not striped like RAID 0. As far as I can tell, it just fills up the drives in turn as you copy data to the single volume, so one drive failing will only take out the contents of that drive. Isn't there an option to do this in the ReadyNAS? I'll take security of my data over speed any day!

ReadyNAS doesn't have a mode that spans drives like the one you describe for dlink. It would be convenient, though of course you wouldn't be sure what data you'd lose if particular drive fails. Not sure how it would handle folders that are larger than a single drive.

Anyway, as long as you know the implications of RAID-0 and have a solid backup strategy in place that takes those limitations into account, then you should be fine.

OK, thanks guys. There are 2 more drives being delivered tomorrow so I'll be able to do a second full backup before I wipe everything and start all over with RAID 0. I'll report back after Christmas.

Time for a frustrating progress report. The backup finally finished yesterday and I removed the offending drive and thoroughly tested it with HD Tune, which reported no errors. I put it back in the NAS and decided to stick with JBOD to start with, so I could try filling up the drive again to see what happens before I commit to starting from scratch with RAID. I also upgraded to 6.2.2 after starting up the NAS. I hit two problems with re-adding the drive:

1 - I tried naming the new JBOD volume Cygnus4 the same as it was previously, only to be told this name is already in use (despite the drive having being formatted) so I had to call it Cygnus_4. Maybe I should have destroyed the volume before removing the drive?

2 - If I try to create a shared folder on this drive I get "Folder operation failed. 1013060008 Cannot get UID for Guest." Rebooting the NAS hasn't helped, so I am now stuck. I might try reinstalling the firmware again this evening after work.

Still no joy so I decided I might as well do a factory reset as everything's double backed up. I've now got drive 4 set up as a single volume and am filling it up just to make sure it's OK, which will take 22 hours with no verification enabled. If I don't hit an invisible wall at 2.12TB again I should be good to go for combining all 4 drives into a single volume tomorrow evening.

I've been reading the manual again and giving some thought to which RAID mode to use, and it occurs to me that X-RAID2 might be a better choice as it would allow me to gradually upgrade to 6TB drives over the next 4 months rather than buying 4 all at once and having to restore all the data yet again. However, with the existing 4 x 3TB drives it will mean 3TB of disk space will be reserved for data protection, which I would have to cope with by temporarily keeping the double backup, and I would only end up increasing my total storage space by 4TB (EDIT: 6TB!), so I'm not sure if this is going to be worth it.

By the way, despite reading the Netgear description of X-RAID2 and the Wikipedia entry on RAID-5, I found myself baffled by how, when a drive is replaced, the lost data can be rebuilt from the parity spread across the other three drives. I wondered if I could find an easily understandable explanation of how it actually works in practice or if should I just accept it as magic and get on with life. Well I found an explanation, and it turns out it is magic! http://riceball.com/d/content/raid-5-parity-what-it-and-how-does-it-work