Netgear ReadyNAS 4312V2 - Replacing older hard disks with new and larger hard disks

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pnrkumareo wrote:

We have a NetGear ReadyNAS 4312V2 running on Firmware version 6.10.6. The NAS box has 1TB x 6 Seagate Hardisk configured with RAID 5. These disks were installed during the initial setup in 2020. Now we are running out of space. We have already procured 4TB x 4 Seagate Harddisk, would be using them on RAID 5. I would like to achieve the below objectives without data loss:

 

1) Replace the old 1TB hard drives with New 4TB hard drives.

2) Retain all the data on the existing Volume. (which is currently running on 1TB drives, but want them all on the New 4TB drives once the upgrade process is complete.

3) Remove the older 1TB hard disks completely.

 

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Shrinking a volume from 6 to 4 drives requires use of SSH, and is risky.  It'd be best to avoid that.

If X-RAID is enabled and the current drives are healthy, then the easiest path is leave two of the 1 TB drives in place (ending up with 4x4TB+2x1TB).  You'd have a 14 TB (~12.7 TiB) volume.  You'd hot-swap one drive at a time (waiting for the resync to complete before replacing the next).  There wouldn't be downtime unless one of the current disks fails during the resync process.

Netgear recommends ensuring you have an up-to-date backup before handling disks.  I agree with them.

Also, I recommend testing the new Seagates in a Windows PC with Seatools.  I always run the full non-destructive diags, and then follow that with the "advanced" write zeros test (single overwrite).  I have had some out-of-the-box disks that passed one of these tests, but failed the other.