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Forum Discussion
hard drive upgrade (replace existing)
I have a NV+ that has 4x750GB drives configured as XRaid and running v4.1.5. FYI, I never expanded their capability to the additional 40gb. In any case, I am about to replace the 4 drives with 4x1.5TB Seagate drives. I just read the manual and couldn't find reference to upgrades, only replacing failed drives. I want to assume the process is the same but would rather ask the questions first. So here are my questions;
1 - can I only replace one drive at a time?
2 - when i replace them, does it matter from which position I start?
3 - as the 4 drives are 81% full, approximately how long will the process take per drive?
4 - are there any gotchas or tips to share?
I'm on my way to pick up the drives that just arrived at my UPS Store address. I expect all the answers when I return ;) Ok, just kidding ... but of course you can imagine I'm excited to tackle this as soon as I'm comfortable with what I need to know.
Thanks to all in advance for the assistance!
David
1 - can I only replace one drive at a time?
2 - when i replace them, does it matter from which position I start?
3 - as the 4 drives are 81% full, approximately how long will the process take per drive?
4 - are there any gotchas or tips to share?
I'm on my way to pick up the drives that just arrived at my UPS Store address. I expect all the answers when I return ;) Ok, just kidding ... but of course you can imagine I'm excited to tackle this as soon as I'm comfortable with what I need to know.
Thanks to all in advance for the assistance!
David
27 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- No you don't, but might aswell. To get the extra disk space, you will have to restart the unit a few times. so if you don't wait now, you will still have to do it when you install the final drive.
- ok, i'm on the last drive. It completed the init process as the others. However, it started the sync around 12:10p EST and would seem to have another 30 minutes or so to go based on the other drives. The others have been taking about about 4 1/2 hours (according to the logs).
The problem is, neither the LCD on the ReadyNAS nor the volume settings tab in Frontview are telling me that the sync is taking place. Frontview in the volumes tab has been showing me the percentage complete. Now, it is only telling me that the system is not redundant. The logs last show that the sync started this morning at 12:10p EST and nothing since. The light on the drive is flashing. There is no activity from the activity light. I believe I've seen the activity light flashing consistently when the first 3 drives were doing the sync process.
Just as I was sending this note, I saw the screen on the ReadyNAS switch from its normal screen to tell me that the sync was in progress on drive for but was at 0% !! This has been running for nearly 4 hours. It should be almost done. Should I pull the drive, reinsert? Should I leave the drive in and do a restart?
UPDATE - the NAS has just reported the following:
The disk on channel 4 has failed. The NAS will automatically shutdown in 30 minutes to prevent possible data loss resulting from additional failed drives.
UPDATE2 - I decided to pull the drive and reinsert. It immediately went to resync which I imagine it knows it was initiazlied already.
Thoughts? - After the 4th drive finished initialization and the sync process failed, I removed and reinserted the drive. It then restarted the sync process and finished in the appropriate amount of time.
With guidance of another member, I restarted the NAS. It asked me to restart once again. When it restarted the second time it told me it was starting 'expanding'. It took quite sometime but it counted the percentage complete until 100%. It then restarted on its own and again, went through 'expanding'. This time, it completed to 100% very rapidly (30 seconds?). It then restarted again. This time, it showed expanding but unfortunately is still showing 0% after nearly 7 hours! The drive lights are rotating (1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, etc.) and the activity light is flashing but in an irregular pattern. When I hover over the 'vol disk' button on raidar it is still showing me the capacity of my original 4x 750GB drives. The power button is slowing fading in and out. Raidar is showing the same. Obviously, I can't use Frontview as the NAS is not fully booted.
What do I do now? Is this related to the 4th drive not syncing properly the first time? Would seem like i need to call support at this point? - 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. - - 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 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
Thanks!- As seen in other threads in this forum, I have a drive that reported a sector issue on the first night following expansion. Coincidentally, a few seconds after the same time as the first sector issue, i received a second on the same drive the next night (4:00a). I'm now concerned. One sector or even two I'm sure in itself on a 1.5TB drive is no big deal. However, all indications seem to point to this being the start of a growing issue for this drive.
FYI, I bought this drive from Amazon.Though they say they can't arrange an exchange (must return and reorder), I just received an apology email and a new order that was placed on my behalf for overnight shipping. I will have it tomorrow (I again say, Amazon.com has some of the best prices and customer service on the internet!). For experimental purposes, I've submitted a defect exchange request with Seagate. They have a $20 advanced exchange plan (they send you the new drive before you send them the defective one on their dime). Without that, shipping back to Seagate is on the customer and the return will come some days after they receive it. HOWEVER, in the confirming email received and in the return policy section it says:
"If your defective drive is part of a mirrored or RAID system, please contact your Seagate Customer Service Center BEFORE returning the drive to Seagate."
Would they deny this as a failure because a raid system repoted it as such? I suspect even if I don't own up to it being part of a raid system they will be able to determine that if they evaluate the drive itself? What is the indication here?
For those interested, here is what the SMART Information is reporting for the disk in question:
SMART Attribute
Spin Up Time 0
Start Stop Count 3
Reallocated Sector Count 2
Power On Hours 97
Spin Retry Count 0
Power Cycle Count 3
Temperature Celsius 40
Current Pending Sector 0
Offline Uncorrectable 0
UDMA CRC Error Count 0
Head Flying Hours 272842092445793
ATA Error Count 0
Extended Attribute
Hot-add events 0
Hot-remove events 0
Lp stat events 101
Power glitches 0
Hard disk resets 0
Retries 0
Repaired sectors 0
Regards,
David - I only saw this message after I had started upgrading my Readynas NV+ and was wondering why it was so damn slooooooow to expand.
I had updated my firmware before upgrading my 4 500Gb disks to 4 1.5Tb disks.
My experience was as follows:
Each disk swap took about 4.5 hours to initialise and 2.5 hours to resync. The total of 7 hours was very consistent across the 4 disks. Hardly any variation at all.
The volume expansion was worrying. It took place offline - despite me having the latest firmware installed. GRRRRR. At one point the expansion % was increasing so slowly I estimated it was going to take over 60 hours to complete... but then it 'suddenly' (I was out at work and didnt expect it to finish) it finished and caught me unawares! In total the expansion took around 15 hours and now I am sitting with available space of 4114Gb.
MSteinyD wrote: 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
-cut- - Something to keep in mind regarding firmware release and online expansion. It's not just a question of what release you have installed, but what version was installed when the X-RAID volume was originally created. In particular, if you were running RAIDiator 3.x (or earlier) when initially installing your ReadyNAS and then later upgraded to 4.x... you do NOT automatically get the benefit of some of the volume changes that 4.x supported -- block size and online expansion.
To get the extra benefits, you would have to perform a FACTORY RESET (completely wiping and re-creating the X-RAID volume, and requiring you to restore your data) in order to accomplish that.
I lucked out, I guess, and 4.x happened very soon after I got my NV+ in 12/2007. When the time came for me to expand (4x500 to 4x1.5T), I did have to do a few restarts but the NV+ otherwise was available for use during the entire process.
I agree with the frustration that this is not well documented in product manuals or very visible in the web site... but if you search the forums regarding online expansion you will see the discussion of this topic come up repeatedly. - Yes I understand now about the firmware at X-RAId creation....
What does the future hold for me though? Having now expanded once with a new firmware installed, is my new X-RAID volume still 'old style' and further expansion will also be offline? Or has this expansion process converted me to the latest firmware/volume type?
Thanks
Michaelbtaroli wrote: Something to keep in mind regarding firmware release and online expansion. It's not just a question of what release you have installed, but what version was installed when the X-RAID volume was originally created. In particular, if you were running RAIDiator 3.x (or earlier) when initially installing your ReadyNAS and then later upgraded to 4.x... you do NOT automatically get the benefit of some of the volume changes that 4.x supported -- block size and online expansion.
To get the extra benefits, you would have to perform a FACTORY RESET (completely wiping and re-creating the X-RAID volume, and requiring you to restore your data) in order to accomplish that.
I lucked out, I guess, and 4.x happened very soon after I got my NV+ in 12/2007. When the time came for me to expand (4x500 to 4x1.5T), I did have to do a few restarts but the NV+ otherwise was available for use during the entire process.
I agree with the frustration that this is not well documented in product manuals or very visible in the web site... but if you search the forums regarding online expansion you will see the discussion of this topic come up repeatedly.
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