Upgrade 2150 Readynas Duo to 2 TB drives

nightfly wrote:
"Please note that treating RAID as a backup is a very bad idea." Yeah, I figured that out now. I thought that by simply taking out a disk and keeping it off site it would be a good backup idea. I had no idea that there was no way I could simply access that disk in anything other than a readynas or linux/sparc machine.

You can recover data in a Linux x86 machine or using a special app in Windows.

nightfly wrote:
Kind of an odd marketing decision I think. I had been recommending a readynas duo to other people thinking they could easily protect their data by simply swapping out a drive and keeping it safe.

That would be a bad idea with any NAS. RAID is not designed to be treated as a backup. It provides redundancy/high-availability in that if a disk fails you don't need to restore from backup and can continue working and replace the failed disk to restore redundancy. In fact treating RAID as if it were a backup can lead to data loss. When the disk is put back in the NAS it has to be wiped and there is a resync which puts heavy stress on all disks in the NAS. If a disk is failing a resync can finish it off. Not to mention that SATA connectors can be damaged through repeated use. A responsible IT manager wouldn't pull a drive out of a server and take it home and consider it a backup, they'd backup to tape, a USB disk, a NAS or some place else. The same principles apply with a home NAS.

nightfly wrote:
Now I have the unfortunate responsibility of telling them I was an idiot to assume a company marketing to a populace of 90% windows users that they would make the device use a system that made their back up copies completely incompatible with a windows pc. So, now that I know, how do I re re install the 2 tb disks so I have 4k block sizes instead of the incompatible 16k ones?(just in case!)

You can't. The Duo only ever shipped with RAIDiator 4.x which creates the data volume using the 16k block size. If you really need to read a disk using Windows (e.g. for data recovery) you can use a Windows program referred to in the "Mounting" article (or the comments on that article) I linked to in my previous post.