Possible?: Upgrading from Duo v1 to NV+ v2

While you can simply "pop in your old drives" into an NV+ v1, you cannot do so with an NV+ v2. There are currently three families of ReadyNAS units in existence. The three are differentiated by the processor. The original family that started in 2004 ended with the end of production with the NV+ v1 and Duo v1. This family has the Infrant Sparc processors. (Infrant was the originator of the ReadyNAS units). The second family are those powered by Intel x-86 chips and are referred to as x-86 units. This family started with the original Pro (6 bay unit) and followed with the NVX (4 bay unit). These units have been discontinued by were replaced by newer updated x-86 based units, the Ultra, Ultra Plus and Pro series and each series has a 2, 4, and 6 bay model. The third family is the newest and is based on Marvell's ARM processor and includes the Duo v2 and NV+ v2.

You cannot simply move the drives from one family to another without the new host completely wiping the drives of all data and reformatting. Nor, can you move them to another brand for the same reason.

Depending on how much data you have, you could purchase one drive for the NV+ v2, copy your data over and then add your old drives to expand the array. However, this is somewhat risky for if there is a problem, all of your data is in one location. Another way would be to not only purchase the new drive for the NV+ v2, but also to back up the data before you did remove the drives from the Duo. Before moving the old drives to the NV+ v2, you should check to make sure the drives are on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for the NV+ v2. If they are not, then you will have to purchase all new drives for the NV+ v2. However, you could then use the Duo as a backup target for the NV+. NAS to NAS backup is the fastest way to do a backup and can be scheduled so you don't have to worry about it.

But surely one could do a semi-destructive transfer...?

I'm thinking of upgrading from a Duo v1 to a Duo v2, mainly because it is becoming obvious that support (read: interest) for the sparc device is disappearing. I have been thinking of the upgrade mechanics as well. I have 2 disks running in X-Raid. Mirrored.

I'd have thought that you could:
1) Remove drive 2 from the Duo, and thus render it as a single-drive file server.
2) Put drive 2 in as drive 1 of the Duo v2. It would be formatted, and empty.
3) Perform a complete copy from the Duo v1 to the Duo v2
4) Turn off the Duo v1, and pull out disk 1
5) Put the disk in as disk 2 of the Duo v2. This should format it, and then begin to synch the two disks until they are mirrored again...

No? If you do that over 24-48 hours your period of risk is small. On top of that if you in fact have an off-site backup (as I do) you could do the file copy from the off-site disk into the Duo v2 before switching it off...

You can do that if you want

Quick question....

I'm in the process of upgrading from a Duo v1 to an Ultra RNDU2000. I am playing it conservatively and performing a backup to an external hard drive through the front USB port before I migrate disks to the new NAS Ultra. But the backup has been running for over 3 days now! :?

How long does it take to backup 540GB of data on a 1TB disk?!? :(

What filesystem is on the external USB disk? EXT3/FAT32/NTFS/something else?

Don't recall. I let the NAS format the drive when I set up the backup job.

The NAS doesn't format an external drive unless you specifically tell it to, I think.

You can check the filesytem of the drive under Volumes > USB Storage

OK, found it. It says EXT3. Speed is 480. (Is that bad?)

EXT3 should work well.

Under System > Performance have you enabled fast USB writes?

Yes, I have enabled that option. I actually got frustrated with the original backup job and cancelled it. I formatted the external drive as FAT32 and scheduled a small backup job to see if my results would fair better. The smaller job (~250MB) zipped through quickly. So I decided to continue with this method.

Thanks for your help!!