Forum Discussion

Aspirant

Feb 10, 2020

Swapping out old drives for new

I have an Ultra 6 with the most current firmware and 6.10.2. i have another old 1TB drive(2013) dying. I decided to just order all new drives, and bought 2TB NAS drives. I am currently running X-RAID...

StephenB

Guru - Experienced User

Feb 10, 2020

bstuke wrote:

Can I replace the old drives with the new drives one at a time and have the added space that comes with the 2TB drives?

My plan was to replace the failing drive, let it rebuild, and then replace another until all the new drives are in.

Thanks for any feedback on the best way to go forward with this process.

That will work. It would be wise to make a backup of your data first.

bstuke

Aspirant

Feb 10, 2020

Yep. Backup working good. Will make a full before starting the swap and not add data until after all the swaps.

Sandshark
Sensei
Feb 11, 2020
It will take a lot longer than just putting in the new drives and starting over, then restoring from backup. And, there is the chance that one of the other drives will fail, forcing you to do that, anyway.

But, you retain access to your data (though at a slightly reduced throughput) throughout.

So, choose which works best for you.
- bstuke
  Aspirant
  Feb 11, 2020
  Understood. I'm OK letting it rebuild. The drive that is failing is the last old 1TB drive. The rest have very few hours on them.
  - bstuke
    Aspirant
    Mar 01, 2020
    Thanks for all the feedback.
    
    What ended up happening is that on the replacement of the third drive, the system locked up.
    
    I could not get it to recover so I went to plan B. I swapped out all the drives with the new 2TB drives, and restored from files based backup.
    
    I am back to 100%, have more space, and the backup is once again performing as it should.
    
    I am thankful that this system has been good to me since 2013, and when I get back to the states I will start looking into replacing it completely with a new 8 drive system.