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Hit 8Tb limit - how to expand to 18T physical?
Hi all, hoping for suggestions here for an easy(ish) fix... first let me stress that I've had experience in UNIX and I'm not stupid, but my training is out of date and to be honest I find all the technical hoop-jumping that seems to be necessary to run a ReadyNAS a little daunting.
Anyway, here's my situation. I have a ReadyNAS Ultra 6 Pro with the latest firmware, and I began a couple of years ago with a few 1Tb drives (4? can't remember) and have since expanded through 2Tb drives and now I have enough 3Tb drives to fill all six slots. Two of these are already hot-swapped in, but I think I'm hitting the 8Tb limit because the last volume expansion to 6x2Tb failed to expand the volume, and now it's failed again with the two new 3Tb drives.
My volume is, unfortunately, 94% full. I will try to get this down to a reasonable size, but it's not going to be easy. I don't have a backup at the moment, and I'm aware that I should have a strategy in place - but that's something I need to get around to later, as the lack of space is causing immediate issues that I need to solve quickly.
I realised that I needed a backup of the current data first of all, so what I have done already is use three of the four spare 3Tb drives to make a JBOD array on my Mac Pro, which I've mounted on the LAN, hoping to back up to that. So I have two tasks facing me here:
1. Is it a good idea to back up to the JBOD I've created (it's Mac OS Extended Journalled f/s at the moment)? If so, how do I do it in such a way that I can later reliably restore all my data including the permissions? I found a couple of other threads on here that talk about this kind of thing, but I found it all a bit hard to follow. Unless I've missed something, the official FAQ doesn't seem to help with this exact requirement, though it has plenty about backups. It mainly talks about rsync...
2. Once I've done that, I'm guessing I'll need to do a factory reset to get around the 8Tb limit. However, I'm now wondering whether I've done this wrong... do I need all six drives in place for that to work properly? I've used three of them to make the backup device, so if so, I've kind of shot myself in the foot :(
Any help very much appreciated, even if it's just a link to the best information source...
Thanks!
Anyway, here's my situation. I have a ReadyNAS Ultra 6 Pro with the latest firmware, and I began a couple of years ago with a few 1Tb drives (4? can't remember) and have since expanded through 2Tb drives and now I have enough 3Tb drives to fill all six slots. Two of these are already hot-swapped in, but I think I'm hitting the 8Tb limit because the last volume expansion to 6x2Tb failed to expand the volume, and now it's failed again with the two new 3Tb drives.
My volume is, unfortunately, 94% full. I will try to get this down to a reasonable size, but it's not going to be easy. I don't have a backup at the moment, and I'm aware that I should have a strategy in place - but that's something I need to get around to later, as the lack of space is causing immediate issues that I need to solve quickly.
I realised that I needed a backup of the current data first of all, so what I have done already is use three of the four spare 3Tb drives to make a JBOD array on my Mac Pro, which I've mounted on the LAN, hoping to back up to that. So I have two tasks facing me here:
1. Is it a good idea to back up to the JBOD I've created (it's Mac OS Extended Journalled f/s at the moment)? If so, how do I do it in such a way that I can later reliably restore all my data including the permissions? I found a couple of other threads on here that talk about this kind of thing, but I found it all a bit hard to follow. Unless I've missed something, the official FAQ doesn't seem to help with this exact requirement, though it has plenty about backups. It mainly talks about rsync...
2. Once I've done that, I'm guessing I'll need to do a factory reset to get around the 8Tb limit. However, I'm now wondering whether I've done this wrong... do I need all six drives in place for that to work properly? I've used three of them to make the backup device, so if so, I've kind of shot myself in the foot :(
Any help very much appreciated, even if it's just a link to the best information source...
Thanks!
19 Replies
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- If you install one of your old 2TB drive and three 3TB drives and then do a factory reset, you'll be able to expand the the full 15 TB volume size. Just replace the 2 TB, then fill up remaining slots with your 3 TB drives. Do the expansion with the ultra powered on, waiting for each new drive to complete resync (confirming that you get the expected size increase) before proceeding to the next. It will take 8-10 hours per disk.
I'm not a mac user, so I can't address the preserving permissions/ownership question. Depending on the details of how you do the backup, you might also lose modification dates for folders (or even files). You shouldn't lose any data though. How many users are we talking about? - Thanks for the quick help StephenB, much obliged.
I've been busy since yesterday. I hot-swapped drive 3 from 2Tb to 3Tb, so now I have 3x3Tb in bays 1-3 and 3x2Tb in bays 4-6. Drive 3 took about 6 hours to do the RAID sync last night, and is actually now restriping (currently 74%) and has been for the last 9 hours, with a predicted 11 hours to completion. That seems very slow - is it normal?
Now when you say 15Tb, I assume you mean with 6x3Tb installed, is that right? If so, my sequence would be:
1 Upgrade drive 4 to 3Tb, making 4x3Tb + 2x2Tb (but still limited to 8Tb volume)
2 Back up the data (plus the OS and config) over the LAN
3 Factory reset and firmware update
4 Restore the OS and config
5 Restore the data
6 Upgrade the final two drives from 2Tb to 3Tb
Does that sound good?
I'm still trying to find a way to back up. I have installed rsync on my Mac Pro but until I can make the network authentication work, I'm a bit stuck, unless I want to go into the command shell and use tar myself (which I could do, but I'm nervous about screwing it up). A friend has suggested installing a VM on the Mac, and installing Linux on that so that NFS becomes easier (OS X makes it hard I think). I'm not sure I want to do that much stuff to my Mac Pro, as it's supposed to be a carefully-controlled workstation (I write music on it).
I'm the only user at the moment, but there are a couple of different file owners, because I am using the WD TV Live SMP and I found that it didn't work correctly unless I changed the media files to be owned by a special "nas" user. I can't remember exactly why now! But I'm not too worried about the permissions really, since I can always list them all before I start, and then change them back after the restore if I need to. - You'll find that the predictions aren't that accurate. It does take a while though.
~15TB would be your final volume size with 6x3TB xraid, so you are correct in your thinking
I would have done the backup before the expansion myself, but of course that is in play already. One small modification - if you have add-ons installed you need to reinstall them before you restore the OS config. Remove any you don't need prior to the backup.
1 Upgrade drive 4 to 3Tb, making 4x3Tb + 2x2Tb (but still limited to 8Tb volume)
2 Uninstall any un-needed add-ons
3 Back up the data (plus the OS and config) over the LAN
4 Factory reset and firmware update
5 Reinstall any add-ons you had remaining after step 2
6 Restore the OS and config
7 Restore the data
8 Upgrade the final two drives from 2Tb to 3Tb
It sounds to me like you can backup and restore data with normal AFP. Then reset owners/permissions as desired after the install via the "advanced options" tab for each share. If you can locate a file utility that verifies after copying, you might want to use that. Teracopy will do that for Windows - but (being a non-mac guy) I don't know what you could use with OS X. It's reassuring to know that all your data got onto the JBOD with no problems (and equally reassuring when you restore it!). StephenB wrote:
It sounds to me like you can backup and restore data with normal AFP. Then reset owners/permissions as desired after the install via the "advanced options" tab for each share. If you can locate a file utility that verifies after copying, you might want to use that. Teracopy will do that for Windows - but (being a non-mac guy) I don't know what you could use with OS X. It's reassuring to know that all your data got onto the JBOD with no problems (and equally reassuring when you restore it!).
Excellent idea! I have a thing called SuperDuper for Mac, which is very good at preserving stuff like permissions and metadata - maybe that will do the job nicely. I have to say that it will be MUCH easier to just copy everything using the AFP mount, rather than use rsync. You may just have saved me a ton of work, thank you :)
Point taken about add-ons, but I'm not sure I even have any, to be honest. The only one listed as installed is ReadyNAS Remote - it's not enabled, and I get the feeling that's a pre-installed default anyway(?)- ReadyNAS remote should be ok.
- OK, well the backup is finally done - it took over week once I had done both shares, complete with verification. A long time, but I guess it's worth it for peace of mind.
I have another problem now before I continue though - I realised that I don't know how to back up the OS. I'm guessing it's done via ssh access, but I've never done that. Also, I'm not clear on WHY it needs to be backed up. Won't it all be re-installed when I wipe and reset to factory settings anyway? What would I lose? I have the config backed up already by pulling the ZIP from the Frontview app... - You shouldn't need to back up the OS. You can backup the config, just be careful to reinstall any add ons before you restore it.
- Oh I see - thanks! That's probably why I was having trouble finding information on doing it then... :)
- New disks in place, config restored, data restore commencing now. Looking good so far!
I have 4x3Tb and 2x2Tb installed, and this is giving me 11Tb. A quick calculation based on what I know of X-RAID 2 seems to agree with this size, so that seems OK. I hope it will expand a little when I upgrade to 6x3Tb, but I guess it will 'only' (ha ha) be 12Tb, because it's using double redundancy. Have I got that right? - If you were using dual-redundancy your current volume capacity would be around 7TB as the fourth highest capacity disk is a 2TB one. Dual-redundancy uses RAID-6 layers and RAID-6 requires a minimum of four disks per layer.
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