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Increasing disc capacity
Hi, I currently have 2 x 500GB discs in my Duo which have been working fine for a number of years. I now want to update the discs to increase storage capacity (and also just part of routine maintenan...
Reefergeezer wrote:
I now have a 1 TB disk in bay 1 and a 500GB disk in bay 2 which i hope to replace tonight so both dsks will be 1TB each. Will it automatically allocate the full 1TB to the shares once the second disk is replaced?
When you replace the drive, the system will first sync the existing 500 GB volume. After that it should prompt for a reboot and expand to the full 1 TB.
Post back on how it goes.
Reefergeezer wrote:
Is the process as simple as powering the ReadyNAS down, removing disc 2, replacing it with the new 1TB disc and waiting for a resync to complete and then do the same for disc 1, or is there more to it than that?
Actually you don't need to power down. It's fine to hot-swap disk 1, wait for resync, and then hot-swap disk 2. There likely will be a reboot during the second disk resync (so look for a prompt for that).
Reefergeezer wrote:
Also, any 1TB HDD recommendations?
I suggest a WD10EFRX. Though it's not much more to max the storage with 2 TB drives, so perhaps also look at the WD20EFRX.
Thanks Stephen.
I assume the order is important then, swapping disc 1 first and then disc 2?
Would either one of the 500GB discs be useful as an emergency backup? Say it all goes wrong, would I be able to revert to the original disc 1 for my data or would I be better off copying everything to an external USB HDD before changing discs?
Reefergeezer wrote:
I assume the order is important then, swapping disc 1 first and then disc 2?
You could do it in the other order. But I'd do disk 1 first.
Reefergeezer wrote:
Would either one of the 500GB discs be useful as an emergency backup?
Yes. Disk 1 will still contain all your data when you remove it. The NAS would boot up with the original disk 1 alone, and you could even access the data on a windows system (or a linux system) if you have the right tools.
Disk 2 would also contain the data, and the system would also boot up with the original disk 2 alone. However, it is harder to recover the data from the parity disk alone (from another linux system or a windows system). That's why I'd start by removing disk 1 btw.
The NAS would probably have problems with booting up with both original disks installed, it likely would think they are out of sync.
Reefergeezer wrote:
...would I be better off copying everything to an external USB HDD before changing discs?
In general I do advise people to have full backups (and I keep them myself).
In this case you have working disks, and a reasonable fallback if there's an issue with the resyncs, Though of course it wouldn't hurt to have a backup..
Thanks again for your help.
I've now ordered the 1TB WD drives you suggested - let's hope for a smooth upgrade :)
One more question regarding the backup situation: assuming all goes well, would it be possible in a few months to swap the new 1TB disc 1 (let's call it disc X) for another (3rd) 1TB disc and then keep disc X as an emergency back up. I am thinking that if possible, I could then rotate the dics around periodically so that should anything disastrous happen and both of the the discs in the ReadyNAS fail, I always have a 3rd disc witha recent copy of the data?
Or would it be more sensible to just utilise the 3rd disk as a USB drive and copy the data from the ReadyNAS to the USB drive periodically?
Cheers.
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