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I have a few questions regarding a RN628X storage upgrade
Hello. My NAS is currently running RAID 5 (4x8TB) and I would like to swap all of the drives with 14tb ones without data loss. Would I simply replace one drive at a time, waiting for everything to fu...
usncole wrote:
StephenB I am wanting to expand the 8x4TB drives to 8x14TB.
Ok. Not sure if the system will let you switch to X-RAID, as it would normally use RAID-6 for 8 drives and not RAID-5.
Note that doing this one drive at a time will take quite a while, and will require a lot of disk I/O. Backing up the data, installing all the new disks at once, doing a fresh factory install, reconfiguring the NAS, and restoring the data from backup would be quite a bit quicker.
Building the array once (during the fresh install) requires 14*8 TB of disk I/O = 112 TB all together. Backup + restore adds at most 56 TB more (and that assumes your volume is completely full). So a max of 168 TB of disk I/O
One at a time with FlexRAID is about twice that - 336 TB of total disk I/O (not counting a backup for safety) That is because it resyncs the 8x4TB partitions every time you upgrade a disk, and then syncs the 8x10 TB partitions once after the final disk.
One at a time with X-RAID is even worse - 606 TB of total disk I/O (not again counting the backup for safety). That is because it supports unequal disk sizes, so it will be resyncing the 10 TB partitions multiple times.
Either way, one at a time puts a substantial load on the disks. If any of them fail during the process, you would lose all the data and would need to use data recovery. So I'd definitely recommend making the backup first.
usncole wrote:
StephenB I am wanting to expand the 8x4TB drives to 8x14TB.
Ok. Not sure if the system will let you switch to X-RAID, as it would normally use RAID-6 for 8 drives and not RAID-5.
Note that doing this one drive at a time will take quite a while, and will require a lot of disk I/O. Backing up the data, installing all the new disks at once, doing a fresh factory install, reconfiguring the NAS, and restoring the data from backup would be quite a bit quicker.
Building the array once (during the fresh install) requires 14*8 TB of disk I/O = 112 TB all together. Backup + restore adds at most 56 TB more (and that assumes your volume is completely full). So a max of 168 TB of disk I/O
One at a time with FlexRAID is about twice that - 336 TB of total disk I/O (not counting a backup for safety) That is because it resyncs the 8x4TB partitions every time you upgrade a disk, and then syncs the 8x10 TB partitions once after the final disk.
One at a time with X-RAID is even worse - 606 TB of total disk I/O (not again counting the backup for safety). That is because it supports unequal disk sizes, so it will be resyncing the 10 TB partitions multiple times.
Either way, one at a time puts a substantial load on the disks. If any of them fail during the process, you would lose all the data and would need to use data recovery. So I'd definitely recommend making the backup first.
If it does let you switch to XRAID before you do any expansion, then you wouldn't have to swap out all drives at once. Just two will give you an extra 10TB, and so will each drive thereafter.
If you are comfortable with the Linux command line, you can do the same from SSH and stay in FlexRAID mode: How-to-do-incremental-vertical-expansion-in-FlexRAID-mode.
StephenB I guess I didn't realize how much stress would be put on the disks during the upgrade. I am just going to back everything up and swap everything at once. Thank you for the assistance.
Unless you really need that huge an increase in space immediately, starting with fewer drives (either with some of the old, or by themselves) is something you should consider. Having all the drives of the same age makes a failure of two near the same time more likely, and the price will likely also drop before you need to finish filling it up. Or if your space needs start to really skyrocket, you could use even larger drives for the rest.
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