hard drive upgrade (replace existing)

For the record and hopefully for the benefit of someone expanding their system in the future, it took a total of Friday at 18:33-22:46 for Disk 1, Sat 06:13-14:37 for disk 2, Sat at 18:05-Sun 02:27 for disk 3, Sun 7:54-19:13 for disk 4. The expansion process took from Sat at 20:46-Tues at 01:55.

Here are my timings from the logs. Times are rounded to nearest 1/4 hour. The time per disk is from removal of former 750GB drive, insertion of new 1.5TB drive and time until the system was reported as redundant (initialization and sync complete). The expansion process is indicated as the time following the system reporting it was redundant after the 4th drive replacement and until I had the system back and it was reported as fully expanded.

Disk 1 - 9 1/4 hours
Disk 2 - 10 1/2hrs
Disk 3 - 8 1/2 hours
Disk 4 - 12 hrs
Expansion - 53 hrs
SYSTEM UNAVAILABLE - 53 HOURS (unacceptable)

TOTAL ELAPSED TIME TO COMPLETE 4 DRIVE REPLACE / EXPANSION: 93 1/4 hours

Total available space on 4 - 1.5TB drives = 4114 GB

Points of concern:

- no prior warnings of estimated time required to complete expansion time

- no prior warning that system would be unavailable during expansion process. The Jedia Council is indicating that NAS systems with a factory default firmware of 4.x or greater will do an expansion online (your system remains available). My documentation or any warnings 'before continuing' did not indicate this to me.

- no recommendations from Netgear as to how to approach a system upgrade/expansion (eg., should I replace one drive at a time, complete initializaiton, synchronization & expansion then move to next drive, or replace all intended drives - in my case 4 - and then do expansion)

- drive 4 failed the sync process shortly after initalization was complete. I removed the drive and reinserted. It immediately skipped the initiazliation process and appeared to successfully complete the sync process thereafter.

- 3 hours after expansion completed, the logs warn of, "Reallocated sector count has increased in the last day. Disk 2: Previous count: 0 Current count: 1 Growing SMART errors indicate a disk that may fail soon. If the errors continue to increase, you should be prepared to replace the disk."

As I have not had this issue during the prior 3 years with the NV+ and the 4 - 750GB drives, is this something to be concerned about? I realize this is 'only' one sector. However, having read some of the other reports in the forum I'm more interested in what Netgear's certification process entails in order to find a drive on their compatibility list. Are there hours of burn in, performance stress tests, swap / expansion tests, etc.

In this entire thread there has not been any responses from the forum reps. 'Skywalker' has responded to PMs for assistance. However, for the benefit of the greater community, I would request that Netgear provide a response to this summary, my concerns and commit to improvements in documentation.

This NAS is for home use and serving my home media distribution. As such, it isn't mission critical from a business perspective. However, if this had been in a business environment, had this been tax time and I needed access to my data I would be thoroughly concerned and disappointed that the system was unavailable for the duration of the expansion process with no warning - and, no indication of how long that might take. There is some algorithm used to determine how long the initialization / sync process takes as repoted in the logs. They should be able to determine how long the sync process should take. 53 hours is a long time to be without a system in any circumstance.

I hope this information helps someone. Please feel free to PM or email me with any questions or need for any detail. I will continue to report here should the logs indicate any additional warnings or failures.