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Forum Discussion
wdolson
Feb 16, 2016Guide
Problem Adding 3rd Disk in ReadyNAS 214 #26473764
I have a ReadyNAS 214 running 6.4.2 that is about 10 days old. I started with 2 6TB drives (WD Red on the compatability list) and I've been busy backing up systems in my home office and started to r...
StephenB
Feb 16, 2016Guru - Experienced User
XRAID should have expanded to RAID-5 when you inserted the new disk. You should still be entitled to phone support, so I suggest contacting Netgear at support.netgear.com.
It would take a while to expand btw, and performance will be significantly reduced while that is happening.
wdolson
Feb 16, 2016Guide
I wish they would tell you in the instructions what to expect as far as notices when the new drive is inserted. There was a warning about it taking a while, but it took a while for the Raid-1 pair to get set too. I think it was about 18 hours. However, there is no notice of anything and there was no degredation of performance. As far as the operation of the system went, it was like they 3rd drive wasn't there.
I e-mailed for support but got back an ambiguous message that both seemed to indicate that my problem wasn't covered by support, but also asked for more information. I sent the requested information, but so far no response. At least your response is the first actual confirmation something isn't working right.
- StephenBFeb 16, 2016Guru - Experienced User
You have 90 phone support for a new purchase, so I would try chat or phone instead of email.
The expansion process requires either reading or writing every sector in the data volume, so it slows down as you add more disks.
The expansion is lower priority than normal file access, but the disks are still used heavily, and seek time of course increases, since the heads are moving around a lot more..
- mdgm-ntgrFeb 17, 2016NETGEAR Employee Retired
I see support has now reviewed your logs and responded to you on your case.
Something a bit unusual has happened but it does come up sometimes. Your new 6TB disk has a slightly smaller number of sectors compared with your other disks.We can only expand volumes with disks of equal or greater capacity to existing disks. As your new 6TB disk has a marginally smaller capacity it is considered to be a smaller disk. It can't fit a large enough data volume partition for expansion of your volume to take place.
So unless WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics can repair the disk to have the same number of sectors as the other disks you options are to try another disk instead or to backup your data, do a factory reset (wipes all data, settings, everything) with the new disk in place and restore your data from backup.Also support was reminding you of the warranty status and your options to extend the software support beyond the basic support for 90 days (from purchase date) should you wish to. Clearly the unit is well within 90 days from the date of purchase.
- wdolsonFeb 18, 2016Guide
I had to wipe the system and start over. It's very frustrating when drives of the same make and model have differing numbers of sectors. The first two drives were slightly bigger than the newer two. The difference in sector count was 65535 (2^16-1 which is interesting). Because of that small difference out of over 11 billion sectors, I had to wipe the system and start over. It's now says it will take 46 hours to finish resyncing.
This has not been pleasant!
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