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Factory Reset to Expand Drives 3200 4.2.28
Hello. I have a ReadyNas 3200 Running firmware 4.2.28. I expanded the drives from the initial defualt of 9TB to 12TB. Now I want to do a factory restore since I have upgraded many of the disks to...
This is a great forum. Thanks everyone for your help and Support.
Since the unit is older I decided to upgrade it to OS6. The instructions below are a bit unclear. This is what I have done so far
(1) I downloaded and installed PREP4TOR6_0.1-x86.bin
(2) I downloaded and isntalled R4toR6_latest.bin
(3) I did a factory restore of the RadyNAS 3200
Happy to report that the RAIDar now says Volume data is syncing (6.5% complete)
I logged in to the Admin page and it says Firmware: 6.5.0-T338 and when I click on Check for Update it says I am now running the latest firmware. The data size now says 17.78 TB free. So it grew from 12TB to 17.78 TB (I am very happy)
I have rearranged the drives as follows below. The Resyncing process is also running much faster. Does anyone know if this will be the final size of the volume? It does seem to have cleared the 16TB limit on the x86 4.2.28 firmware. So strange that the new OS6 sees drives 5,6 and 7 as 2.2TB drives?
I have been told that bays 5-12 willn not see a drive larger than 2TB so here is what the Calculator says should be the final size
Capacity with Overhead 22TB = 20 TiB
I am surprised that ReadyNAS will not support this officially for its clients on the older X86 4.2.28 firmware for all devices. Clearly this proves it is possible so why not allow customers on older gear to upgrade.
We get longer life out of their gear and this would encourge many of us to continue to buy Netgear in the future.
Will post again after the entire process is done and I restore all of the orignal 11 TB of data which was backed up to Tape before I began this upgrade process.
Thanks again everyone.
Re: x86 homebrew OS6 development: no warranty/support Options 2013-03-20 11:54 PM Directions to upgrade your x86 legacy hardware from 4.X to 6.x Supported so far: pro 2/4/6, ultra 2/4/6, old pro / Pioneer Pro, 2100v2 Not Supported: NVX and 2100v1 You will lose all of existing data on board. You will most likely lose support from NTGR 1. BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP 2. Download 6.0.X package from NTGR 3. Edit the latest IMG for instalation by 4.2 Frontview 3. Install via 4.2.x menu 4. Reboot 5. Factory Default the system Specifics here: http://netgear.nas-central.org/wiki/Con ... ReadyNASOS OR (once your data is backed up) Optional (do before step 2 below): R4toR6_Prep_Addon.bin (26 KB) (upload before modified IMG, don't reboot, avoids the need for manual factory default in between) OS6 in 3 Steps: 1. Download pre modified IMG, (see link above to see what has been modified) 2. Upgrade firmware in Frontview 4.2 (with above file) 3. Reboot & factory default via boot menu
What is the drive mix (how many of each size)?
If there are mixed sizes, then the volume is built in two steps (the second step being vertical expansion). the vertical expansion step starts when the first phase completes.
However, the second step will fail if the final volume size ends up more than 16 TiB.
Yes the drives are differnet sizes. Why will it fail? I thought the maximum size was 24TB and the 16TB limitation was only for how large it could grow without doing a factory reset?
The drives in the unit are the following sizes:
2TB 2TB 6TB 6TB 1TB 1TB 1TB 3TB 3TB 3TB 3TB 3TB
http://rdconfigurator.netgear.com/raid/index.html
The Netgear Raid Calcultor says that for X-Raid (raid6) for this drive configuration should make it 19.9 TB
Capacity 19.9 TB
Protection 5.46 TB
Unused 5.46 TB
Is that not true?
Actually those were TiB numbers
Here is what the Calculator says
Capacity with Overhead 22 TB = 20 TiB
Overhead 84.7 GB = 78.9 GiB
Final Capacity withour overhead 21.9 TB = 19.9 TiB
Protection 6TB = 5.46 TiB
Unused 6TB = 5.46 TiB
The 3200 only supports disks larger than 2TB in bays 1-4.
Furthermore to get a volume larger than 16TB the disks must all be the same size. If you have mixed disk capacities the NAS will create a RAID layer using the capacity of the smallest disk then try to expand and the expansion will fail as you cannot expand past 16TB.
You can create multiple volumes using Flex-RAID. With this many disks you should be using a RAID level with a higher level of redundancy than RAID-5.
Though unsupported you can put ReadyNAS OS6 on this unit. It would remove both the expansion limitations however for bays 5-12 2TB disks would still be the max that will work in the 3200. Also the upgrade to OS6 would require a factory reset (wipes all data, settings, everything).
As for the disk choice you should only use enterprise disks in this NAS.
You may wish to consider getting a RN3220 or RN4220 which we shipped with OS6. These models support disks larger than 2TB in all drive bays.
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