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RN212 disk replacement - both at once
RN212 with filled-up 2TB Toshiba drives. Purchased two Seagate Ironwolf ST12000VNZ008 12TB replacement drives.
Backed up the RN212, powered down, and removed the 2 2TB drives. Installed the 2 12TB replacement drives.
Powered on, about 20 minutes ago. Expected system to recognize new drives, load the OS from flash, and be back online pretty quick.
Instead, 20 minutes later, after a lot of initial noise (first 5 minutes or so), the ACT LED is blinking rapidly, pausing for a second every 5-10 seconds or so. Both HDD LED's are lit solid (no blinking), and power button LED is solid. I cannot reach the NAS over ETH using the previously assigned IP's, and my router just continues to show these same IP's for this device (no new IP's showing).
I can't tell if this system is working or not. With 12TB does it take many minutes or even hours to "configure" itself?
Of course I read the manual after all this... I see a Factory Reset option where the Reset button is held in while powering on, then toggling the Backup button to get to the right LED combo representing Factory Reset. I would just bite the bullet and do this now, but I'm unclear if the device is already doing what it's supposed to...? Without being able to log in, it's just a mysterious black box with blinking lights.
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Nevermind... of course 5 minutes after sending the email, the device logged in successfully.
With 2 x 12TB new drives, system says it will take over 24 hours to "re-sync". This is without any data, just new empty drives. Yikes.
Seems this isn't much better than just hot-swapping one at a time when you consider the time it took to back up the original 2TB. With 4 drives I can understand the logic of backing up and then copying back (see RN314 post), but with 2 drives I'm now questioning the wisdom of this path. Crazy how long these things take to register all their blocks.
The Ironwolf 12TB's are pretty noisy. There was a stretch during initial boot-up/config where the drives sounded like a screeching chalkboard. Unnerving. Even in quieter times, like now during re-syncing, they click away and are significantly noisier than the WD Red 4TB's I just installed in another NAS. I wouldn't recommend Ironwolf's in an office setting if noise is an issue. They aren't as bad as my old Toshiba 1TB enterprise drives (those were the loudest drives I've ever used, by far - like hammers to a nail all day long), but if you're moving data around they will become annoying, fast.
jimk1963 wrote:
With 2 x 12TB new drives, system says it will take over 24 hours to "re-sync". This is without any data, just new empty drives. Yikes.
RAID operates "below" the file system to provide a virtual disk of block storage. So it takes about the same amount of time whether the drive is empty or full.
In your specific case, the NAS is copying every block in disk 1 to disk 2 (to create the mirror). That will take a while.
jimk1963 wrote:
Seems this isn't much better than just hot-swapping one at a time when you consider the time it took to back up the original 2TB. With 4 drives I can understand the logic of backing up and then copying back (see RN314 post), but with 2 drives I'm now questioning the wisdom of this path.
As far as speed goes, it is a wash in your case. Resyncing via hot-swapping would sync 14 TB of data, not just 12. But if it went well, you'd avoid the copy back. Note you should do the backup anyway.
However, there is still some benefit in starting clean. One benefit is that if something goes wrong you can power down the NAS, reinsert your original disks, and then start over.
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