Hi Everyone. I purchased and setup my Readynas Pro Pioneer around Jan 2010. Aside from one disk issue (increasing errors, which Seagate replaced under warranty) it has been a nice experience. I am now running out of space (less than 20% capacity remaining) and would like some advice on expansion.Here is are details around my setup.4 Seagate 1TB's (ST331000528AS)X-RAID2, 4 disks with dual redundancyFirmware: 4.2.12I would like advice on how best to INCREMENTALLY increase my capacity over time - with the immediate need to upgrade at least another 1TB-2TB (which should at least last me through the end of 2015). Any explanations/advice even simple explanations like increase one disk (1TB) to immediately increase storage by 1TB or upgrade to larger drive now to make future upgrades easier would be greatly appreciated.I have forgotten with my 4 disk dual redundancy setup, what happens when I simply add one disk of same capacity or one disk of higher capacity.Is there a known maximum storage for this unit? (while keeping X-RAID2 w/ dual redundancy) ?Also, any recommendations of disks would be great (and vendors to buy from). I am thinking of spending more for the enterprise versions which have longer warranties. I have reviewed the current HCL and at least for the Hitachi and Seagate 2TB enterprise disks, but cannot find them at Tiger Direct or Directron (places I ordered things from before).Thanks!

I am thinking the 17:30:19 "Disk failure detected." is a consequence of the removal. winger13 wrote: What do you mean 'I hope Netgear will comment' ? I haven't sent them this question, only posted here for the wonderful user's community! The 18:00:27 "The disk on channel 1 has failed. Shutting down the system to prevent possible data loss resulting from additional failed drives." happens well after the disk insertion. It'd be useful if Netgear could identify what triggered this error. Several Netgear employees are active in this forum. It does sound like your system is behaving normally now.

With dual redundancy, you will need to upgrade all four of your disks to get more storage space. So small steps probably don't make much sense. For NAS drives (seagate NAS or WDC Red) 4x2TB would cost ~$400 US and gain you 2 TB of storage. 4x3TB would cost ~$550 but gain you 4 TB - twice as big an increase. As far as drive choices, I suggest the WD30EFRX (3 TB drives). They aren't enterprise, but they are intended for NAS, and have 3 year warranties (much better than the 1 year that the desktop drives have). They are also the newest 3 TB drive on the HCL. I use them in my pro-6 and my RN102, and have had no issues with them at all.If you go off the HCL, Netgear will likely deny support - and you do have about a year of warranty left.There are two expansion limits (a)you can't exceed 16 TiB total volume size. That wouldn't apply to you until someone makes > 8 TB drives.(b) You can't grow a volume more than 8 TiB over its lifetime. If you started with this configuration, you could expand up to 4x5TB. So you have plenty of headroom.

Thanks StephenB. I vaguely remembering when I first purchased (and I am looking at my my hand-written notes now, which are shabby at best) I can fill up current empty slots 5 and 6 to increase capacity and maintain dual redundancy. This is why I left two empty slots. Like, maybe adding one 2TB into slots 5 and 6 will add at least 1TB capacity over what I have now (or is that 2TB ) ? Later, I can replace the existing 1TB's in pairs (like, if I replaced 2 more 1TB's with 2TB's I gain another 1TB). Am I misunderstanding something?

I was assuming you had a four slot unit. You can get more space by using your two empty slots. If you add 2 more disks ( 1 TB or greater) then your array will expand by 2 TB, and any extra will be wasted for now, until you upgrade the second pair to the larger size. You are still subject to the 8 TiB growth limit, so you couldn't expand the volume beyond 10 TiB unless you do a factory reset.So then the question becomes how big you want the larger drive size to be. It is more cost-effective to use bigger drives if you look at GB/dollar. But of course the drives do cost more. Also, your storage needs appear to be pretty small, since the 2 TB volume you have now has lasted you 4 years.So options are likely 2 TB drives or 3 TB drives. At current pricing if you use WDC Red drives:(1) adding 2x2TB will cost $220 (Amazon). You gain 2 TB of space - double what you have now.(2) Upgrading 1 pair costs another $220. You can another 2 TB of space.(3) upgrading the last pair costs another $220. You gain 2 TB of space.So the total project is $660 for 6 TB.Doing the same with 3 TB drives gives you(1) Adding 2x3TB costs you $260. You gain 2 TB of space(2) upgrading another pair costs you another $260. But you gain 4 TB of space.(3) upgrading the final pair costs you another $260. You gain another 4 TB, but you need to do a factory reset.(3a) upgrading just one of the final drives costs $130, and gains you 2 TB without the reset.Stopping at step (2) gives you 6 TB of growth for only $520 - $140 cheaper than going with 2 TB.Basically the price difference between 2TB and 3TB drives is small enough ($20 at the moment) that you might as well go with 3 TB.If you want to stick with enterprise drives, you can do the same math easily enough with whatever models you want to use.

Also, you should update your firmware, 4.2.12 is very old.

Ready for expansion (RN Pro Pioneer Edition)-Seeking Advice

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mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired
Aug 28, 2014
Disk scrubbing does a resync to make sure the disks are still synced sector by sector, that the parity distributed amongst the disks is fixed if there is a problem with it.

It's not going to reduce your error count, that will stay for that disk. However it will make sure the disks are in sync.

It runs an online read-only filesystem check to see if there are issues with the filesystem (e.g. with the files or directories on there). If there are issues then the offline volume check may help but you might wish to ask support about that first if the need arises.

winger13

Guide

Aug 28, 2014

mdgm wrote:
Disk scrubbing does a resync to make sure the disks are still synced sector by sector, that the parity distributed amongst the disks is fixed if there is a problem with it.

It's not going to reduce your error count, that will stay for that disk. However it will make sure the disks are in sync.....

mdgm wrote:
Disk scrubbing does a resync to make sure the disks are still synced sector by sector, that the parity distributed amongst the disks is fixed if there is a problem with it. It's not going to reduce your error count, that will stay for that disk. However it will make sure the disks are in sync.....

Please tell me if I am understanding this correctly.

First ATA error, this is one explanation of what I found:

ATA error: The SATA controller on the ReadyNAS was unable to communicate with the hard drive.

Does this (ATA error) mean a portion of the disk could not be read? And scrubbing ensures all my data is intact across all my six disks, even if this involves "moving" data from the portion of the disk not readable to another location (NAS knows what this 'unreadable' data based on my dual-redundancy setup.

StephenB

Guru - Experienced User

Aug 29, 2014

winger13 wrote:
ATA error: The SATA controller on the ReadyNAS was unable to communicate with the hard drive.

Does this (ATA error) mean a portion of the disk could not be read?

No. It is more basic than that. The ReadyNAS and the disks communicate over the SATA interface, using ATA commands. An ATA error means that communication failed. An ATA command could have been garbled somehow (due to a problem in the NAS controller, the SATA backplane or the drive controller). Or the drive might be returning an error for some other reason. It could be related to a disk read/write error, but often isn't.

What happens when that failure occurs depends on the command, and what the NAS (and drive) do when they detect an error. It is not possible to give a general answer. Though I haven't seen data loss on my systems due to ATA errors.

winger13 wrote:
And scrubbing ensures all my data is intact across all my six disks, even if this involves "moving" data from the portion of the disk not readable to another location (NAS knows what this 'unreadable' data based on my dual-redundancy setup.

winger13 wrote:
And scrubbing ensures all my data is intact across all my six disks, even if this involves "moving" data from the portion of the disk not readable to another location (NAS knows what this 'unreadable' data based on my dual-redundancy setup.

Close enough probably. It verifies that all the data can be read, and it will reconstruct blocks that it cannot read from the dual-redundancy setup. As I tried to say above, there are cases where it doesn't help, and some where it can actually make things worse. Although those cases are rare, it does make me cautious about running a scrub when I have suspect disks. That was why I wanted to see the SMART stats first.

I agree with mdgm that you should run both the on-line file system check, and the scrub periodically. And maintain at least one backup on another device.

winger13
Guide
Aug 29, 2014
OK, I ran a scrub last night, took over 3 1/2 hrs. No status was given, other than the start and stop log messages. Should I expect to see some confirmation of the status, like how many errors were found?

This morning I ran the Online File System Consistency Check and I did receive a message that the check successfully completed with no errors found.

Does it look like I can rest easy now and just monitor the ATA error count on my disk 2?

How often would you guys recommend I run the Scrub and File System scan? Unfortunately, schedule wise we have to do special planning to run the scans/checks because the unit is only normally on about 3-4 days per week, and gets turned on when someone needs it on during the day when someone wants to use the unit. The last person using the NAS that day turns it off before going to bed.
StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Aug 29, 2014
I run the on-line consistency check weekly and the scrub every 16 weeks.

winger13

Guide

Sep 12, 2014

StephenB wrote:
I was assuming you had a four slot unit. You can get more space by using your two empty slots. If you add 2 more disks ( 1 TB or greater) then your array will expand by 2 TB, and any extra will be wasted for now, until you upgrade the second pair to the larger size. You are still subject to the 8 TiB growth limit, so you couldn't expand the volume beyond 10 TiB unless you do a factory reset.

So then the question becomes how big you want the larger drive size to be. It is more cost-effective to use bigger drives if you look at GB/dollar. But of course the drives do cost more. Also, your storage needs appear to be pretty small, since the 2 TB volume you have now has lasted you 4 years.

...

Doing the same with 3 TB drives gives you
(1) Adding 2x3TB costs you $260. You gain 2 TB of space
(2) upgrading another pair costs you another $260. But you gain 4 TB of space.
(3) upgrading the final pair costs you another $260. You gain another 4 TB, but you need to do a factory reset.
(3a) upgrading just one of the final drives costs $130, and gains you 2 TB without the reset.

Stopping at step (2) gives you 6 TB of growth for only $520 - $140 cheaper than going with 2 TB...

StephenB wrote:
I was assuming you had a four slot unit. You can get more space by using your two empty slots. If you add 2 more disks ( 1 TB or greater) then your array will expand by 2 TB, and any extra will be wasted for now, until you upgrade the second pair to the larger size. You are still subject to the 8 TiB growth limit, so you couldn't expand the volume beyond 10 TiB unless you do a factory reset. So then the question becomes how big you want the larger drive size to be. It is more cost-effective to use bigger drives if you look at GB/dollar. But of course the drives do cost more. Also, your storage needs appear to be pretty small, since the 2 TB volume you have now has lasted you 4 years. ... Doing the same with 3 TB drives gives you (1) Adding 2x3TB costs you $260. You gain 2 TB of space (2) upgrading another pair costs you another $260. But you gain 4 TB of space. (3) upgrading the final pair costs you another $260. You gain another 4 TB, but you need to do a factory reset. (3a) upgrading just one of the final drives costs $130, and gains you 2 TB without the reset. Stopping at step (2) gives you 6 TB of growth for only $520 - $140 cheaper than going with 2 TB...

I have a question following the 'upgrade' path as described above.

First, I have basically completed step (1), adding a pair of 3TB's into Bays 5 and 6 and gaining 2 TB of space, giving me a total of 4 TB storage. Recall, Bays 1,2,3,4 each currently house 1TB's, and my RNPP is setup as Dual Redundancy X-RAID2 .

What happens if for step (2), instead of upgrading both Bay 1 and Bay 2's 1TB's with 3TB's, I only replaced Bay 1's (leaving Bay 2 with the 1TB) with a 3TB ? I believe I will NOT gain any space over what I have now...that it is not until both Bay 1 and Bay 2 are replaced with 3TB that I will gain any space, that is 4TB as noted in (2) above.

I am asking this question in case I see more errors with Bay 2's 1TB and I wish to replace it.

Thanks.

mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired
Sep 12, 2014
Yes, you need four 3TB disks installed to get vertical expansion. Each RAID-6 layer requires a minimum of four disks.

winger13

Guide

Sep 18, 2014

OK, I just got another error today for Disk 2. Below is how Disk 2's SMART+ looked a couple of weeks ago. Today the following line increased:

Reallocated Sector Count 13

Does this tell me my data has not been corrupted but something had to be moved from one part of the disk to another?

winger13 wrote:

Firmware: CC37

SMART Attribute

Spin Up Time 0
Start Stop Count 4193
Reallocated Sector Count 0
Power On Hours 13539
Spin Retry Count 0
Power Cycle Count 1336
Runtime Bad Block 0
End-to-End Error 0
Reported Uncorrect 12
Command Timeout 0
High Fly Writes 0
Airflow Temperature Cel 24
Temperature Celsius 24
Current Pending Sector 0
Offline Uncorrectable 0
UDMA CRC Error Count 0
Head Flying Hours 145595096385947
Total LBAs Written 2567096699
Total LBAs Read 1162628944
ATA Error Count 12

StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Sep 19, 2014
A reallocated sector occurs after a failed write request. The disk has some spare sectors that it can substitute for the failed ones. Data is not lost, because it is a write request that failed (so the data was available to be rewritten).

Pending sectors are similar, but occur after a failed read request. Those need RAID to repair.

Normally I suggest replacing drives before the reallocated sectors + current pending sectors reaches 50. Usually once the counts start increasing they start going up very quickly.
- winger13
  Guide
  Nov 30, 2015
  To recap, I started a 6-bay device with four 1-TB ST31000528AS's. I then did the following per consulting folks on this thread:
  1) added two WD 3TB Reds into the two empty bays .... one month later
  2) replaced one failing ST31000528AS w/ another 3TB WD Red
  
  Now I am at three original ST31000528AS's and three WD 3TB Reds
  
  Yesterday, I noticed another original ST31000528AS throwing errors so I ordered another WD 3TB Red today.
  
  Question - Looking at the following SMART scan stats, is this latest ST31000528AS issue occurring prematurely?   Note - this disk has been in the RN for about five years, but I only turn on the unit for a few hours per week:
  
  Model:    ST31000528AS
  Serial:    9VP2PAZ7
  Firmware:    CC37
  
  SMART Attribute
  
  Spin Up Time   0
  Start Stop Count   4916
  Reallocated Sector Count   296
  Power On Hours   16669
  Spin Retry Count   0
  Power Cycle Count   1519
  Runtime Bad Block   0
  End-to-End Error   0
  Reported Uncorrect   654
  Command Timeout   0
  High Fly Writes   7
  Airflow Temperature Cel   30
  Temperature Celsius   30
  Current Pending Sector   0
  Offline Uncorrectable   0
  UDMA CRC Error Count   0
  Head Flying Hours   141622251640319
  Total LBAs Written   3921397046
  Total LBAs Read   3373346045
  
  ATA Error Count   248
  - StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User
    Dec 01, 2015
    RAID presents near-identical loads to all the drives (and of course they are in the same chassis). So it is not unusual to see a succession of failures, esp. when all the drives are identical and were installed at the same time. It doesn't always happen that way of course, but it is reasonably common.
    
    Do you know when the reallocated sector count and ATA count started to rise? BTW, if you don't have email alerts configured, you should should set them up.

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Ready for expansion (RN Pro Pioneer Edition)-Seeking Advice

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