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Forum Discussion
Upgrade Drives on NETGEAR READYNAS DUO v2
Hi I'm looking to upgrade my NETGEAR READYNAS DUO v2 hard drives. Currently they sit in a X-RAID 2. I want to know the procedure for doing this, and if it's possible to do it as a hot swap. ...
Get two new drives, and hot insert them (one at a time). It won't expand until the end (with both drives in place).
Be careful not to insert the second drive before the first one is fully synced.
It's also good to update your backup before you expand or upgrade firmware.
OK. I removed the 1 GB WD Green drive that came with it (while turned off), and installed a 4GB WD red. Then I turned it on, and left the nas on overnight, and everything appeared normal. Nothing blinking, all things Raidar 4 showing green, status says Firmware 5.3.11. Same with raidar 6. So, I then installed a second drive, same type, in the right drive slot, while hot. That was 5 days ago. In raidar 4, the green dot turned to blue, indicating an ongoing process, which I understood to mean the device was setting up the drive. Now five days later, the firmware area in raidar 4 still just says 'booting', it never lists the firmware anymore. In raidar 6, status says 'system starting up', and for the firmware section, it's just blank. That's been for five days now. The activity light will blink either once or twice, at what seem random 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 21 or 23 second intervals. Raidar also sees two drives, C and D, and indicates them as healthy. I tried Raidar v 6.1, my readynas duo v1's both read healthy and firmware appropriately, but the v2 still reads status: System starting up, and Firmware: is blank. When I go to the webpage of the v2, volumes are listed as raid 0 and not redundant. There appears no way to make this into raid 1 on the web page. ON the info web page, both disks have the green dot and say status OK with a grey 'i'. I have clicked on 'rescan' in both types of raidar, and it remains the same. There is no way to setup the v2 in raidar 4, the option is blanked out (but if I highlight the v1's the option to click setup is available). In Raidar 6 both drives have a green check on them. I don't want to interrupt some sort of synching process, but, 5 days? Seems a bit long. So I'm at a loss as to whether to resync this, reset it to default status, or leave it alone, forever wondering if it will somehow suddeny shut down and destroy my data. I have copied 60 GB of data to the device, and it has remained accessible and intact for 4 days. As the device only lists one volume, I cannot tell which disk it's written to.
Hi nightfly44,
Welcome to the community! :)
Kindly answer the questions below:
a. Do you have a back up of all the data stored in the NAS?
b. Kindly turn off the NAS then pull-out disk 2. Then, turn on the NAS with only disk 1 inside. Are you able to access the data stored in the NAS and able to navigate to the web-GUI of your NAS?
I look forward to your response.
Regards,
DaneA
NETGEAR Community Team
Yes, all my data is backed up to two seperate devices weekly. So I'm not at risk of losing anything. Learned my lesson about backups during the DOS 6 doublespace debacle.
The question about how long does it take for the drives to synch up refers to two blank drives. There was nothing on them when I inserted the second disk.
I copied the 60 gB of files as an experiment to see if the nas was really ready for data, as under raidar 6 both drives had a green check on them. Under the web interface, however, under overview>volumes, both drives are greyed out, listed as raid 0 non redundant, raid type listed as flex raid. When I initially chose the raid type, the second option only offered raid 0 or jbod, no raid one option in the pull down list.
on web interface, under system>info, both drives list as 3.726 GB, temmp 96F, write cache on, status ok.
The sync time is the same for a full volume as it is for an empty one (it is happening below the file system level).
Smallnetbuilder measured 4 1/4 hours to sync 1 TB drives. That would scale to 17 hours to sync 4 TB.
nightfly44 wrote:
I have copied 60 GB of data to the device, and it has remained accessible and intact for 4 days. As the device only lists one volume, I cannot tell which disk it's written to.
If you are using the normal xraid, it should have written the data to both drives (raid-1 mirroring).
1. Question, and this is the key to whether I will do anything just yet: How long does it take to sync the two 4gb drives? The first drive seemed to be ready for use very quickly, within an hour or so, but because of previous experience I left it alone overnight, and then it worked normally with the one drive. That was much faster than I remember the first drive being available with the duo v1. Then, I remember after installing the second drive on the duo v1 and it took about a day or more for the second 2GB drive to synch up. But that was several years ago, I thought the v2 might be faster, but perhaps slower? As I sit here, the activity light continues to blink at random times and intervals even though nothing is accessing the nas. If it can take a week or more for both drives to sync up, I don't want to interrupt the process just to start all over again.
2. If I turn it off, just use the power button on the front of the nas, or do it from the web interface? I've seen other posts where people seemed to have problems when using the wrong method.
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