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Increasing Capacity of RN314
I am about to upgrade my RN314. It came with 4 3TB drives and is getting full. I have searched around on the Netgear support and this community and did not see any clear instructions so I wanted to post my plan here in hopes that a wiser person will say its good or that I am missing something important.
Here are a few screen shots of the current status:
I have chosen a drive off the Compatiability List: Seagate 6-TB Ironwolf
I am using X-RAID and from what I have read, I can swap one drive at a time, allowing for the resycn to make the system redundant again. What I read seems to indicate that it will expand my capcity automatically. I do plan to add 3 more drives, but not right away.
I plan to replace the drives from Right to left.
I plan to do this with the unit running (Hot Swapping).
I will be mounting the new drives in the tray with screws and only using the back two bottom mounting points (see my last paragraph in this post as to why).
My questions:
Is this all correct?
Will it increase my capacity if I do it one drive at a time?
Have I missed anyting?
Why Two Screws?
I posted elsewhere about the plastic sleeves in the easy mount system do not accomodate newer drives as the side mounting holes are different. I also started a support ticket. So while the compatibility list may list elecronically compatiable drives, it does not take into account PHYSICAL compatibility.
The result was I should use screws on the tray to the bottom of the drive. FInding these screws was a royal pain. Two hardware stores, 1 computer repair shop, Fry Electronics, and MicroCenter all did not carry them....really odd. I bought a bag of 100 on amazon for $6.
Unfortunately there are only 2 screws ont he bottom of the tray that allign, so the drive will not mount 100% securely to the rack and could torque in one dimension(unlikely). The support personnel said that it was not an issue and two screws are fine. Stephen commented in the forum post and suggested I ask for newer trays that shipped with newer models which do have the correct bottom mount screw locations. The desk, looking at my tray picture, said there are no newer trays, that the tray I have is current.
Note that the WDC Red WD60EFRX does have side mounting holes, so it is compatible with your current tray. Specs are similar to the 6 TB Ironwolf. So part of the story here is your desire to use the Ironwolf.
JustKJ wrote:
Is this all correct?
Will it increase my capacity if I do it one drive at a time?
Have I missed anyting?
The process will work, though it will need to do a full resync after each drive insertion. The resync time will grow as the volume increases.
Capacity will begin to increase when you upgrade the second drive (growing 3 TB per disk at that point). You likely will need to reboot after the second resync completes in order to trigger the vertical expansion. After that, you shouldn't need to reboot.
If you can back up the NAS, you might instead do a factory reset with the new drives in place, reconfigure it, and then restore the data from backup. The data will of course be temporarily unavailable, but the overall process will be quicker (avoiding the repeated resyncs).
JustKJ wrote:
The desk, looking at my tray picture, said there are no newer trays, that the tray I have is current.
There are new trays, and they are shipping with the new NAS (RN400, RN52x, RN62x). The new ones fit your RN314, and they probably didn't switch over on the RN300 since they stopped manufacturing it when they launched the RN400 series.
I'm sure many users will want trays that accomodate the alternative mounting points - not great that Netgear refuses to sell replacement trays for their ReadyNAS.
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Note that the WDC Red WD60EFRX does have side mounting holes, so it is compatible with your current tray. Specs are similar to the 6 TB Ironwolf. So part of the story here is your desire to use the Ironwolf.
JustKJ wrote:
Is this all correct?
Will it increase my capacity if I do it one drive at a time?
Have I missed anyting?
The process will work, though it will need to do a full resync after each drive insertion. The resync time will grow as the volume increases.
Capacity will begin to increase when you upgrade the second drive (growing 3 TB per disk at that point). You likely will need to reboot after the second resync completes in order to trigger the vertical expansion. After that, you shouldn't need to reboot.
If you can back up the NAS, you might instead do a factory reset with the new drives in place, reconfigure it, and then restore the data from backup. The data will of course be temporarily unavailable, but the overall process will be quicker (avoiding the repeated resyncs).
JustKJ wrote:
The desk, looking at my tray picture, said there are no newer trays, that the tray I have is current.
There are new trays, and they are shipping with the new NAS (RN400, RN52x, RN62x). The new ones fit your RN314, and they probably didn't switch over on the RN300 since they stopped manufacturing it when they launched the RN400 series.
I'm sure many users will want trays that accomodate the alternative mounting points - not great that Netgear refuses to sell replacement trays for their ReadyNAS.
Stephen, you rock. Thank you for taking the time to help us less knowledgeable users.
Note that the WDC Red WD60EFRX does have side mounting holes, so it is compatible with your current tray. Specs are similar to the 6 TB Ironwolf. So part of the story here is your desire to use the Ironwolf.
I was not tied to it, but researching price and compatibility lead me to it. Had I known to look for physical compatibility I would have. I have opened the drive, so I will have to see if Amazon will take it back at no cost. If they won't then I will proceed with what I have.
Capacity will begin to increase when you upgrade the second drive (growing 3 TB per disk at that point). You likely will need to reboot after the second resync completes in order to trigger the vertical expansion. After that, you shouldn't need to reboot.
Wow, I was hoping to wait a few months before buying my second drive. I thought from what I read, that there would be increase. But if I must replace a minimum of two, then I'll have to bite the bullet.
If you can back up the NAS, you might instead do a factory reset with the new drives in place, reconfigure it, and then restore the data from backup. The data will of course be temporarily unavailable, but the overall process will be quicker (avoiding the repeated resyncs).
I have a USB external hard drive that is 4TB, but the NAS only recognizes 3TB of it. So while I can safeguard most of my data, its the TimeMachine backups and another share that contains VM backups would necessitate me buying 2 more of those, and that gets too expensive. So as my time is free to me, the resync, while it could take a day or longer, is my best option and the data and drives are still accessable. What I risk is a drive failure during the resync, and that would be a rare occurance.
Also, I can only afford to upgrade 1 drive at time, so do replacing two (on at a time) to get the capacity add is my only real option as I cant do all 4 at once.
The only thing I can add is that if you do go with the Ironwolf and two screws, I would recommend not transporting the unit with the drives installed. That is the one time that the lack of additional lateral support could be an issue and result in damaging the SATA backplane.
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