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Forum Discussion
Expanding NV+
Hi Folks,
I have a question related to progressive expansion of my NV+ as I can't seem to get it to expand to the full capacity and I suspect it is due to the sequence I have used to expand.
Originally it had 2 x 500GB drives.
I added a third disk of 2TB capacity which then pushed it up to 923GB capacity. It was then that I realised that it would limit the size of the third disk to the smallest of the two original disks so the 2TB was being wasted.
All good, bought two more 2TB drives, replaced the first and let it init etc, all worked fine and remained, as expected at 923GB capacity.
Replaced disk 2 and let it init etc at which point I rebooted to complete and expected to see 4TB capacity (3 disks of 2TB each). It remains however, at 923GB capacity!
Is this because the progressive disk additions have all been working from the original base of 500GB and the NV+ is not bright enough to realise it now has overall a much larger capacity?
Or is it that I am not bright enough and have missed something obvious?
My bold assumption is that I may be able to do a factory reset and let it trash what is there and start from scratch however, I am also fundamentally lazy and don't really want to set up all my shares etc again.
Any thoughts on what I have done wrong/right and a possible way ahead to get the full capacity?
Cheers,
Gary
I have a question related to progressive expansion of my NV+ as I can't seem to get it to expand to the full capacity and I suspect it is due to the sequence I have used to expand.
Originally it had 2 x 500GB drives.
I added a third disk of 2TB capacity which then pushed it up to 923GB capacity. It was then that I realised that it would limit the size of the third disk to the smallest of the two original disks so the 2TB was being wasted.
All good, bought two more 2TB drives, replaced the first and let it init etc, all worked fine and remained, as expected at 923GB capacity.
Replaced disk 2 and let it init etc at which point I rebooted to complete and expected to see 4TB capacity (3 disks of 2TB each). It remains however, at 923GB capacity!
Is this because the progressive disk additions have all been working from the original base of 500GB and the NV+ is not bright enough to realise it now has overall a much larger capacity?
Or is it that I am not bright enough and have missed something obvious?
My bold assumption is that I may be able to do a factory reset and let it trash what is there and start from scratch however, I am also fundamentally lazy and don't really want to set up all my shares etc again.
Any thoughts on what I have done wrong/right and a possible way ahead to get the full capacity?
Cheers,
Gary
21 Replies
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PapaBear wrote: If this is an older NV+ that was shipped before RAIDiator 4.1.x came out, and was later upgraded to the newer version, but never was factory defaulted on 4.1.x, then your system may be still using 4k blocks rather than 16k blocks which are necessary for expansion beyond 2GB.
Almost right. The 4k block size doesn't work with expansion beyond 5TB (i.e expansion when you have 4x2TB disks in place).
So backup and factory default is the way to go here.
If your disks are not 4k sector then it is possible to manually expand to 5TB but that's not recommended.- Everyone:
Thanks for all the knowledgeable advice. The system was in fact using the old 4k block size and was hanging up on the expansion to >5TB. I backed up the volume and then nuked the NV+. Its always nerve wracking when pushing the button to wipe out an entire working drive, but your advice lessened the aprehension (plus two backups of everything). After the Factory Reset, all is now good and I've started shuffling data back into the NV+ with enough room to spare for at least a few years. The only hiccup was the new default password imposed when doing the reset, which was a bit of a surprise and required some additional trolling of the forum to find the secret word. Thanks again. - Default password is here: http://www.readynas.com/kb/faq/boot/what_is_the_frontview_default_login_and_password_after_a_factory_default
NetGear acquired Infrant back in 2007 and the change in default password with a major firmware update to RAIDiator 4.x was a logical change as NetGear chose to rebrand the products as NetGear ones. The default password is only needed after a factory default or an OS re-install. - I have an NV+, and had the same block size problem when expanding to 4x2TB drives which I figured out thanks to this thread. However, after resetting to factory defaults with radiator 4.1.8 I still have 512 byte sectors on my drives. Is there some setting I need to change to get 4k sectors? The only thing I can think of is that I shouldn't have restored my previous configuration so I'm just doing another reset now to see if that fixes things.
- How did you do the factory default on 4.1.8? Via System > Update > Factory Default or via the boot menu? If you did it via the boot menu did you make sure to follow the steps exactly?
After you did the factory default all your data would have been wiped as well as the config, the admin password reset to default and Frontview would have reverted to showing the setup wizard when you first connected to it.
The change to 4k sector partition alignment should have happened if you did a factory default on 4.1.7 or later. - i did it via the boot menu. i powered it down, held down the reset button while i powered it on and waited for "factory default" to show up on the lcd. everything else looks right about it except for the sector size. it's doing a resync right now after the initial boot; does the sector size update after that?
maybe i'll try to do the reset again via the other method if it's not corrected when the resync finishes. - Can you post some output from the partition.log please?
- partition.log:
Disk /dev/hdi doesn't contain a valid partition table
Disk /dev/hdc: 2000.3 GB, 2000388448256 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243200 cylinders, total 3907008688 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 32 4096031 2048000 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdc2 4096032 4608031 256000 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdc3 4608032 3906992335 1951192152 5 Extended
/dev/hdc5 4608040 3906992335 1951192148 8e Linux LVM
Disk /dev/hde: 2000.3 GB, 2000388448256 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243200 cylinders, total 3907008688 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hde1 32 4096031 2048000 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hde2 4096032 4608031 256000 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hde3 4608032 3906992335 1951192152 5 Extended
/dev/hde5 4608040 3906992335 1951192148 8e Linux LVM
Disk /dev/hdg: 2000.3 GB, 2000388448256 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243200 cylinders, total 3907008688 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdg1 32 4096031 2048000 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdg2 4096032 4608031 256000 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdg3 4608032 3906992335 1951192152 5 Extended
/dev/hdg5 4608040 3906992335 1951192148 8e Linux LVM
Disk /dev/hdi: 2000.3 GB, 2000388448256 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243200 cylinders, total 3907008688 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000 - That is 4k sector partition aligned. Note that the start sectors e.g. 32 are divisible by 8.
- ohhhh ... excellent! i don't know why but i guess i thought that 4k sector aligned meant that the sectors would be 4k (ie 4096) bytes. i feel much better now. thanks! if i restore my previous configuration (with volumes etc) this shouldn't be affected correct?
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