hard drive upgrade (replace existing)

- no prior warnings of estimated time required to complete expansion time
A bit hard to calculate it. It is estimated int he volumes section of front view, but I noticed myself that the time changes as the speed goes down. My initial estimate was 12 hours, 12 hours later I still have 8 to go.

- 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.
My system remained online, strange.

- 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)
I see your point, but I think your experience is such since this is the first time you are doing it. I think it's pretty well known with NAS and HotSwap RAID systems how to approach drive changes.


- 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.
Not sure what to say here, I would keep close look at the SMART data of this drive. Could be the drive, could be a bad connection with the NAS.

- 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.
Definitely issue with the drive. Keep on the look-out, if the number does go up, RMA the drive. Bigger drives get bad sectors all the time, and drive manufacturers are getting lazy. I can't believe how many 1.5 TB seagates are failing all over the place, and seagate is still reporting the failure rate of .32%.

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.
Sure does, I think this is a great log. :D