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Forum Discussion
A2D2RAS
Sep 18, 2015Aspirant
ReadyNAS314 Individual Storage
We use a ReadyNAS 314 storage system here at the office, we use it mainly for backing up images of important pcs. Heres the issue. we want to put the old images on 500gb and 1tb hard drives, but we don't want to have to use 2 hard drives each time. Meaning we want to use each hard drive seperatly so we can fill one take it out replace it fill the other take it out replace it.. I know this has something to do with the raid setting.. but I am not sure how to do this.. Any help or guidance would be apprecaited!
Generally Netgear doesn't recommend pulling drives in/out routinely from the NAS (no matter what the RAID setting). The SATA connectors on the drives themselves are not designed for repeated removal/insertions. There is some risk of mechanical damage to the connectors, and the usual risk of electrostatic discharge. Personally I think off-loading older images to USB drives is a much better approach. (Or get a big enough NAS to hold them all of course).
It's pretty easy to set up the NAS so that each drive is its own volume. You simply switch to flexraid, destroy the current volume, and then you can recreate new ones.
I think you will run into issues when you start removing/reinserting volumes - I don't think the NAS will easily let you remount the volume (once removed), and the stale volumes you have removed will likely get in the way when you insert new drives. So be sure you test-drive this idea if you decide to stay with it.
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- StephenBGuru - Experienced User
Generally Netgear doesn't recommend pulling drives in/out routinely from the NAS (no matter what the RAID setting). The SATA connectors on the drives themselves are not designed for repeated removal/insertions. There is some risk of mechanical damage to the connectors, and the usual risk of electrostatic discharge. Personally I think off-loading older images to USB drives is a much better approach. (Or get a big enough NAS to hold them all of course).
It's pretty easy to set up the NAS so that each drive is its own volume. You simply switch to flexraid, destroy the current volume, and then you can recreate new ones.
I think you will run into issues when you start removing/reinserting volumes - I don't think the NAS will easily let you remount the volume (once removed), and the stale volumes you have removed will likely get in the way when you insert new drives. So be sure you test-drive this idea if you decide to stay with it.
- A2D2RASAspirant
We would be using different hard deives each time. (new ones not old existing ones) Flex raid was exactly what I needed to know. We would be doing this maybe twice a year so it's not going to be a lot.
Once again you come to the rescue thank you StephenB you ROCK!
- StephenBGuru - Experienced User
A2D2RAS wrote:
We would be using different hard deives each time. (new ones not old existing ones) Flex raid was exactly what I needed to know. We would be doing this maybe twice a year so it's not going to be a lot.
Definitely test removing a drive, creating a new volume with a new disk, then removing the new disk, and finally reinserting the old disk.
It's been a while since I tried that, but I am worried that you might get stuck with a "used disk" message on the last step and be unable to get the volume back on line.
If it does fail, an alternative might be booting up with only the old disk inserted (power down, remove all drives, then insert the old one, and power back up).
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