RN102 XRaid Question

What firmware are you on.
Do you have a backup of the data on disk 1?
Have you rebooted the NAS since adding the disk?
How did you add the new disk, was the NAS on or off? It should have been on.
Was the new disk formatted before you put it in? It should not have been.

Apart from the noise, what else makes you believe the disk is bad. There are no ATA errors, is the other smart info ok?

I notice that the xraid mode is now on - have you just done this or was the initial setup xraid?


Using xraid, assuming you can get the disks to sync, would indeed copy the data onto disk 2. What is not sensible is then to remove disk 1. You are in this position because you are not using raid 1. If you had a raid 1 array then replacing a bad disk is easy, you just replace it.

What firmware are you on- Firmware - 6.1.6
Do you have a backup of the data on disk 1? NAS is just couple of months old, most of data is from my PC and external HD. So I think I have backup
Have you rebooted the NAS since adding the disk? No, should I?
How did you add the new disk, was the NAS on or off? It should have been on. NAS was off, when I added it? Is that a problem?
Was the new disk formatted before you put it in? It should not have been. Nope, its brand new hard disk as-is

Apart from the noise, what else makes you believe the disk is bad. There are no ATA errors, is the other smart info ok? Where do I see SMART status for a NAS drive? I called WD support and they said disk has to be replaced if there is too much noise.

I notice that the xraid mode is now on - have you just done this or was the initial setup xraid? XRaid has been on always.

Using xraid, assuming you can get the disks to sync, would indeed copy the data onto disk 2. What is not sensible is then to remove disk 1. You are in this position because you are not using raid 1. If you had a raid 1 array then replacing a bad disk is easy, you just replace it. Not sure if I follow, if I need to replace disk1 with disk2 what do I need to do? Just manually copy all the contents from disk1 to disk2? I thought adding disk2 will switch NAS to RAID1 and once I remove disk1, it switches off RAID. To clarify, I'm not going to add soon, may be few months later. So right now I'm just replacing old disk with new one, by-2 will be empty afterwards.

You should have put the disk in with the NAS on. Try a reboot, otherwise remove disk 2, wait a few minutes then reinsert it with the NAS on.
Xraid will add the disk, and after the resync which will take several hours,you will then have a 2 disk raid1 array.
You cannot go back to JBOD. If you remove disk 1 the NAS will tell you that you have a degraded volume.
If you really do not want to have redundancy, then you would need to copy all your data to another location, put the new disk in slot 1, create a new volume , then copy the data back on.

I would strongly recommend using redundancy, as I pointed out, you are in this awkward situation because you are not using redundancy

Really appreciate your time in helping me out.

I'll follow your recommendation, I'd buy another NAS drive and swap the old one out.
Is it a good idea to mix NAS drives? I mean I currently have WD Red 3tb, I'm thinking I would go for Seagate 3tb for disk2?
(Compatibility list site is blank for me though - https://www.readynas.com/?page_id=82)

Thanks again

New hard drives should always be inserted with the NAS in on state, as to make the OS understand that the a new HDD is inserted. Once inserted it will re-build the file system with xraid2 and make it RAID1, as explained by "vandermerwe".

You may try this link for HDD compatibility... http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/20641

You can mix drive makes and models.
Go for the seagate Nas drive, the Wd Nas drive have the load cycle count issue.

Just wanted to provide an update. After troubleshooting with Netgear and WD, I realized that WD Red that I'd received was corrupt/failed. I got the replacement disk and synchronization went fine.

As recommended, I'm going to go with Seagate ST3000VN000 for 2nd drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178392

Thanks vandermerwe and saketb for help

Volume 2 Rebuild in progress


Volume 2 Rebuild complete