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Ultra 6 - New drives will not format
I have a ReadyNAS Ultra 6 with 4 drives in one RaidX of 4 4TB drives that is running out of free space. So I want to add 2 3TB drives to fill out the 6 slots. I have physically inserted 2 drives into the remaining slots and they are recognized as 3TB drives. On the admin Volumes page whe I hover over those slots I see descriptive into on each drive.
After selecting one drive I click on Format and get a pop-up saying I must enter FORMAT to continue. So I do that and click Format button in the pop-up. A busy cursor appears for about 5 seconds and then goes away. Nothing else seems to be happening. I wait a few hours and still nothing. I do this for the second added drive and exactly the same behavior occurs.
I look at the log and there is nothing added. Nothing at all concerning formatiing but I see where the system recognized the insertion of the drives.
I wasn't sure where these added drives came from so I pulled them out and put them into a Windows 7 machine and used it to initialize them as GUID drives. Tried all above again and got same result.
Any ideas or tips? What SHOULD be happening after I start the formatting?
Ultra 6 is latest firmware 6.4.1. I updated just before starting this procedure. Maybe I should not have.
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Hello greymont1,
Adding new disks to an existing XRAID of 2 or more disks should be done one disk at a time. Can you still access the files without the new disks you have inserted? Do you have full backup of the data?
You might want to read this article: How do I horizontally expand an X-RAID 2 volume on my ReadyNAS OS 6 storage system?
Also, please check HCL when deciding to add disks for volume expansion.
These new disks should not have partitions.
Regards,
Thanks for responding, JennC.
I can still access the data and I'm in the process of making a complete backup. (This unit as actually the backup of another ReadYNAS unit, so making a backup of it is somewhat redundant, but nevertheless important.)
I tried adding the disks individually. I only added the second disk to see if the priginal problem was specific to the first disk. The disks are on the HCL list. The disks do not have any existing partitions. I just initialized them but did not create any partitions yet.
I'm still stumped.
Hello greymont1,
Best way here is have a full back up, once done, insert all disks you want to use with the NAS then factory reset. In this way, NAS will format all the disks to it file system format then it will allow you to select if XRAID or FlexRAID and create volume.
Regards,
I don't think you can add drives that are smaller than your existing drives.
If you have 4TB drives in the NAS you can't add 3TB drives. You'll have to backup, factory reset with the drives in place and then restore.
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