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Forum Discussion
Upgrade - replace with larger HDD, in RAID6, two at a time?
Anyone know if I replace two HDD at once in a RAID6, whether it will rebuild both at the same time? Whether that is quicker than two sequential upgrade swaps? (yes I know I expose it to risk from a...
Hi again,
Good to hear you are aware of what you are doing and that you have backups :)
The NAS uses a software raid (mdadm) and I think that it can only sync one disk at a time since it needs to calculate parity. It might be possible to sync in two disks to the same raid (using mdadm), but the NAS can't do that anyway I am almost sure. So, sync one disk at a time seems the way you gotta do it.
I have expanded more than one added drive at a time by disabling XRAID, selecting the drives, and selecting "Expand". It definately took less time than one at a time. But I don't know what you could select for replacement of two drives. Just trying it sounds like a plan. If nothing else, it should do one then the other. If you don't disable XRAID first, then put the drives in with power off so it sees them at the same time. If you put them in with power on, it will see the first and start re-sync before you get the second in. When replacing drives, it might even start with the first one if XRAID is disabled and power is on.
Let us know what you find out.
Inconclusive unfortunately.
I had two previously removed HDDs.
On Windows I deleted the three partitions & formatted as NTFS.
Updated my backups.
Powered down NAS.
Pulled two drives, replaced them with the NTFS drives.
Powered up, RAIDAR was very concerned.
Unfortunately, on the Volume page they came up as unknown RAID volumes.
So I had to DESTROY them, as soon as I did the first it started resyncing.
So I shutdown/restarted, hoping it would see both available.
But I assuming it found it already resyncing one, so just kept going.
Currently looks like this:
That's after clicking on the dark HDD slot, those buttons are greyed-out.
I should have deleted the NTFS partition I think, then they may have been recognised as available.
But reading between the lines above, I suspect the first thing it wants to do is just get in sync.
Mon Jul 17 2017 4:37:48 Volume: Resyncing started for Volume N316AR6. Mon Jul 17 2017 4:37:35 Disk: Disk in channel 4 (Internal) changed state from RESYNC to ONLINE.
Mon Jul 17 2017 4:37:32 Volume: The resync operation finished on volume N316AR6. However, the volume is still degraded.So it just goes to resync the extra parity disc. That's good.
The initial sync when creating a volume is faster than subsequent resyncs.
Some prefer to power down, remove disks (label order), insert higher capacity disks with equal capacity, create a new volume and restore from backup.
There is a small performance benefit from having a single RAID layer and should a data recovery attempt be necessary it does make it a little easier.
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