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Forum Discussion
novice ReadyNAS user: "volume expansion failed", how to address this problem?
Hi all, I'm very much a novice when it comes to this machine (I just have put in drives and used it) and I'm having a problem, really hope someone can help. I've just added a WD 6TB drive to my l...
HI chasg,
The HDD you wont to insert in the ReadyNAS NV+ v2 is not supported. The max size of the HDDs for this model are 4 TB.
http://kb.netgear.de/app/answers/detail/a_id/20641/~/readynas-hard-disk-compatibility-list
Second the Max capacity that you can use for your NAS is 12 TB
http://www.netgear.de/images/ReadyNAS_Duov2_NV_deut22-40014.pdf
You are running your NAS system with different size HDDs in X-RAID2. You are losing right now 2 TB of space. Should change the X- RAID to flex RAID. But to do this, you need to save your data external and do a Factory Reset. ( By change the RAID the data will be lost)
Thanks very much for the reply BlueScreen101.
Ok, so as I understand your reply (thanks for the links):
1) I can't use the 6TB WD Red drive in my ReadyNAS because
a) my ReadyNAS can use 4TB drives max
b) my ReadyNAS is already close to 12TB (it already has 10TB)
2) I can gain an extra 2TB by changing from X-RAID2 to flex RAID. Could you point me to a way to do this, please? (I'm such a novice that I don't even know how to do a factory reset!). Does Flex RAID offer all of the benefits that X-RAID2 does? (for me, it's using different sized drives will full redundancy). I have an 8TB drive on order that I was going to use as an archive drive, so I can safely offload all the data from my NAS to do a factory reset.
Cheers!
Chas
chasg wrote:
Thanks very much for the reply BlueScreen101.
Ok, so as I understand your reply (thanks for the links):
1) I can't use the 6TB WD Red drive in my ReadyNAS because
a) my ReadyNAS can use 4TB drives max
b) my ReadyNAS is already close to 12TB (it already has 10TB)
2) I can gain an extra 2TB by changing from X-RAID2 to flex RAID. Could you point me to a way to do this, please? (I'm such a novice that I don't even know how to do a factory reset!). Does Flex RAID offer all of the benefits that X-RAID2 does? (for me, it's using different sized drives will full redundancy). I have an 8TB drive on order that I was going to use as an archive drive, so I can safely offload all the data from my NAS to do a factory reset.
Well he said both (a) and (b) but both are incorrect. The 12 TB ceiling he quotes is assuming RAID-5/xraid with 4x4TB installed. It is just a consequence of the 4 TB max size on the HCL. The actual volume size ceiling on the v2 NAS is 16 TiB.
If you want full redundancy, you either need a second 6 TB drive or you need to waste 2 TB. There's no way to get both (flexraid won't get you there).
So if I am understanding correctly, I've got two choices here:
1) I pull one small drive (the 3TB seems logical), get a second 6TB drive and put the two 6TB drives in? Leaving me with 2 x 4TB and 2 x 6TB
2) I get a 4TB drive and fill the last slot with that (leaving me with 1 x 3TB and 3 x 4TB).
Choice 2 is the cheapest solution (assuming I can get Amazon to take the 6TB drive back).
As an aside, given that the 6TB drive should have worked (even though I'd waste 2TB), how come I had a "volume expansion fail"? (which has turned out to be a good thing, now that I know that I would have been wasting 2TB!).
chasg wrote:
So if I am understanding correctly, I've got two choices here:
1) I pull one small drive (the 3TB seems logical), get a second 6TB drive and put the two 6TB drives in? Leaving me with 2 x 4TB and 2 x 6TB
That should work, and you'd end up near the max capacity for XRAID (14 TB volume size). But if you want do this, I'd make a backup first, and do a factory reset with all drives in place. Then you'd rebuild the configuration and restore the data from the backup.
chasg wrote:
2) I get a 4TB drive and fill the last slot with that (leaving me with 1 x 3TB and 3 x 4TB).
That should also work, and give you an 11 TB volume size. Though I'd wait for the 8 TB drive to arrive, and make a backup before actually doing it. There is a chance here too that you will need a reset (depending on exactly where you ended up with the failed volume expansion).
Also, don't remove the 6 TB drive until you get the replacement. We don't know at this point if the expansion totally failed - it is possible that the drive is in the array.
In your case there were two RAID layers on your exising disks (a 3x3TB layer RAID-5 layer and a 4x2TB RAID-1 layer). These are transparently merged into a single volume. The expansion required creating a 3 TB and a 1 TB partition on the 6 TB drive. The 3 TB partition needed to be added the RAID-5 layer. The 1 TB partition needed to be added to the RAID-1 layer (also requiring the RAID-1 layer to be converted to RAID-5). One of those steps might have succeeded. If one did succeed, than removing the drive would destroy the redundancy.
chasg wrote:
As an aside, given that the 6TB drive should have worked (even though I'd waste 2TB), how come I had a "volume expansion fail"? (which has turned out to be a good thing, now that I know that I would have been wasting 2TB!).
Hopefully someone from Netgear will offer to analyze the logs. That is the most direct path to figuring out what happened.
Can you provide a little more information in the meantime? (a) what volume size is the NAS actually reporting? (b) What is the volume status? "redundant", "degraded", or something else?
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