Forum Discussion

Aspirant

Jan 03, 2020

Upgrade of drives due to low space

Hi guys, So my system came up that I am running low on space, I have drives in the following order: 2TB, 3TB, 2TB, 2TB So I purchased a used 4TB WD Red drive, hotswapped it into bay 1 which did hav...

StephenB

Guru - Experienced User

Feb 16, 2020

MexicanPeso wrote:

Hi guys,

I just want to drop into this thread because it is eaxactly what I want to do. I have 4 4 gig drives right now and want to replace them with 10 gig drives, or at least one right now.

Obviously 4 TB -> 10 TB.

One consideration is that the data isn't protected by RAID redundancy when you expand the capacity. Since the expansion process involves reading or writing every sector on every disk, it can uncover any issues with disk health - and that will result in data loss if one of the existing disk fails. So it is a really good idea to back up your data first.

Another consideration is the total expansion time for the project. The fastest way to achieve your goal is to

document your current configuration (and optionally save your configuration files).
power down
replace all the disks (perhaps labeling the 4 TB ones by slot as you remove them)
power up the NAS (which will then do a factory install)
Restore the configuration (and check it - some settings aren't migrated when you restore the configuration zip).
Restore the data from the backup.

Of course your NAS isn't available while you are doing all this. One additional benefit of this method is that you end up with a clean file system and OS partition - that sometimes can increase performance.

The slower way is to replace each disk one by one:

Remove disk 1 with the NAS running
hot-insert the 10 TB replacement
wait for the NAS to completely resync
repeat with disk 2, 3, and 4

The NAS remains available during this process, and you don't need to replace all the disks. Performance will be slower during the resyncing and expansion. If you are using XRAID, the NAS will expand capacity when you replace the second disk. The overall capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest".

4x4TB -> 12 TB (or ~10.9 TiB)
2x4TB+2x10TB -> 18 TB (~16.3 TiB)
1x4TB+3x10TB -> 24 TB (~21.8 TiB)
4x10TB -> 30 TB (or ~27.2 TiB)

If you want to stop at step 2 for now, then the "slower" method won't take much longer than the full factory install. But if you are going all the way to step 4, the factory install will be quite a bit faster.

MexicanPeso wrote:

I am guessing I will lose most of my 4 TB availabiltiy at that time as it will need to set aside room for the 10 TB data?

I'm not sure what you mean, but the second expansion method doesn't set aside any space.

MexicanPeso wrote:

Should I get at least 2 10 TB in this scenario to ensure more disk space is available?

Yes. You'll need to start with at least two 10 TB drives.

MexicanPeso wrote:

Thanks in advance. It also looks like I should put it straight into the nas from factory - not preformatting?

Yes. You shouldn't format the disks.

It is a good idea to test them in a Windows PC with vendor tools (WD's Lifeguard, or Seagate's Seatools). If you test them, do the full non-destructive test, and optionally follow up with the destructive "erase" (write zeros) test. That will take a while with 10 TB drives, but in my opinion is worth the effort.

MexicanPeso

Aspirant

Feb 16, 2020

Thanks for the detailed reply.

Yes you are correct I should have been saying terabytes not gigabytes.

If I was to move directly to 4-10tb drives and take out all 4-4terabite drives and put into a serial ata four Bay expansion.

That would leave about 8ish TB to transfer back to the Nas once it has sorted itself out.

Am I able to connect removable storage directly to the Nas in order to transfer all the files back.

I understand that this might be tedious moving things to the specific folders.

But essentially, I’m assuming that the drives will be Accessible like a normal drive, but some of their capacity will be hidden in the raid partitions that I don’t need to worry about since I have a full data set across four drives.

I’m also guessing in the scenario that each of the drives will have a similar file structure with the same folders.

Is this correct? I am just assuming that there will be different files in each of the folders but across the four drives all files will be accessible.

I am still tempted to add A 10 TB drive one at a time and start with two new 10 TB, but I really do like the idea of upgrading my back up removable storage array and taking out the 2 TB drives and replacing them with 4 TB drives there by doubling the capacity of the back up box.

I am unsure of which way to go but I will say that I am on five raid, am I able to convert it to x-raid?

Should I do this is there any benefit.

We still have about 2 TB available on the existing nas array. Not sure if that is relevant information but just wanted to throw it in there.

MexicanPeso
Aspirant
Feb 16, 2020
I actually did not ask but was just assuming that the 214 Nas will except 10 TB drives.

What is the maximum size of drives for this nas?
Sandshark
Sensei
Feb 16, 2020
The drives are Linux formatted, so your PC or Mac is not going to be able to read the drives that were put in the expansion. If you make sure the volume name of the volume on the new drives doesn't match the one on the old, you might be able to mount the volume on the NAS itself. You could also mount them from a Linux bootable system. But unless you have Linux experience, these are probably not your best plan. There is software you can run under Windows that'll do it. But it's designed for recovery and quite expensive. Since your volume is intact, it sems like a needless expense, better spent on a backup means.

Your assumptions on RAID are very wrong. You cannot think of a RAID array as individual drives. The data is spread across them as if they were one continuous larger drive, plus parity information for redundancy. That's why you need the whole set.

Unless you have a sudden need for that much extra space, you are better off only swapping two drives now, and the others as you need more. Besides the price likely dropping, you spread out the manufacture dates and operational hours of the drives, making simultaneous failure later less likely.

Anything you see regarding the space limits of an OS6 based ReadyNAS are simply based on the largest drives available at the time of release. The 214 will handle 10TB drives just fine, and should handle 100TB if they ever become available. Of course, with the limitations of the ARM processor and memory, four 100TB drives may not be practical.
StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Feb 16, 2020
MexicanPeso wrote:

I am unsure of which way to go but I will say that I am on five raid, am I able to convert it to x-raid? ...is there any benefit.

Look on the XRAID control on the volume page. If there is a green stripe across it, then you already are running XRAID. If there isn't, then click on it, and you will then be using XRAID.

XRAID will automatically expand your volume - if you aren't using it you would need to manually create RAID groups and add them to the volume. That can get pretty complicated - XRAID makes it much simpler.

MexicanPeso wrote:

But essentially, I’m assuming that the drives will be Accessible like a normal drive, but some of their capacity will be hidden in the raid partitions that I don’t need to worry about since I have a full data set across four drives.

I’m also guessing in the scenario that each of the drives will have a similar file structure with the same folders.

Is this correct?

The NAS doesn't have built-in support for this, and I think it might be tricky to do even if you were using linux commands with ssh. Sp I don't recommend that path. If you did start over with 4x10TB, you should still set the existing drives aside until everything is back on the NAS, since you could power down the NAS and reinsert them if something goes wrong.

Also if you don't have quite enough storage to back everything up, you could reinsert the old disks, and transfer some files to external storage in a second step.

MexicanPeso wrote:

I am still tempted to add A 10 TB drive one at a time and start with two new 10 TB, but I really do like the idea of upgrading my back up removable storage array and taking out the 2 TB drives and replacing them with 4 TB drives there by doubling the capacity of the back up box.

You should of course upgrade the backup array so it would keep up with your NAS storage. You could perhaps purchase two 10 TB and two additional 4 TB drives, and do both now.

MexicanPeso wrote:

We still have about 2 TB available on the existing nas array. Not sure if that is relevant information but just wanted to throw it in there.

Then you are about 85% full, so this is a good time to expand it. You don't want to go over 90% if you can help it. If you are using snapshots you can try deleting the oldest ones and doing a balance - that should free up some space.

MexicanPeso wrote:
What is the maximum size of drives for this nas?

As Sandshark says, there is no known limit at this point - it can handle the largest drives available (which is 16 TB at the moment).

Though bigger volumes will take longer to resync when a drive is replaced.