hard drive upgrade (replace existing)

nvladik wrote:

- 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. Unfortunately, that is incorrect. The estimated time provided is for sync only. During expansion it only indicates % complete but even that is misleading as it goes through an expansion process no less than 3 times, each with extremely different intervals (4 hrs, 30 seconds, 49 hours). Again, this is undocumented which does not provide any advance planning opportunities. - 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. As mentioned, 'Skywalker' informed me that this depends upon the firmware installed at initial system default configuration. Again, not documented to my knowledge. - 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. HOT SWAP to me means just that. I can swap drives without downtime. If I have to lose the system for 53 hours while it is doing an expansion this is not truly 'hot swap'. The expansion should be done online and if it doesn't for particular units / configurations, we should know this. - 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. That is what I suspected when I removed and reinstalled. 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