Forum Discussion

Aspirant

Jan 20, 2016

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...

Adding Disks

greymont1

Aspirant

Jan 20, 2016

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.

JennC

NETGEAR Employee Retired

Jan 20, 2016

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,

greymont1
Aspirant
Jan 20, 2016
Yeah, that's pretty much where we got when thinking it through.Luckily we planned for complete duplication of everything so we can take the factory reset route without much risk.

Yes, it IS legacy hardware that is no longer supported and, yes, this unit was never suposed to run OS6 anyway, but still it is annoying that there is no way to peek into what is happening and see why the single drive formatting is just failing with no logging at all.
- BrianL2
  NETGEAR Employee Retired
  Jan 20, 2016
  Hi greymont1,
  
  Before you go that route, there are some helpful tips found on this article. I hope you can have a look.
  
  Kind regards,
  
  BrianL
  NETGEAR Community Team
  - mdgm-ntgr
    NETGEAR Employee Retired
    Jan 20, 2016
    The problem here is that the drives you added are smaller than the existing disks in the system. X-RAID will accept disks that are at least as large as the existing disks in the system. Smaller capacity disks cannot be used to expand the system.
    
    So if getting 4TB disks instead is not an option you could backup your data, do a factory default (wipes all data, settings, everything) and restore from backup. Or you could switch to Flex-RAID and create a RAID-1 volume using the two 3TB disks.