NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
Upgrading Disks and Reshaping Time
Hi My ReadyNAS has 2x1TB and 2x4TB drives in it. I just purchased 2 more 4TB drives to replace the 1TB drives as I need more capacity. I've swapped in a 4TB drive to replace the first 1TB...
juwi_uk wrote:
So what is your solution?
Only one I can see is to have 2 duplicate NAS's
That is what I do. My main NAS is a pro-6 with a 15 TB RAID-5 volume. I have two backup NAS - an RN102 and an RN202, both with 6 TB + 8 TB jbod (two volumes on each). I learned pre-nas that it was wise to have 3 copies of everything I care about.
I also use crashplan cloud backup for disaster recovery, but I am not so confident in any cloud backup to rely on it completely. At some point I might drop one of the backup NAS and rely on crashplan (or amazon cloud) for the second copy.
I think another option is to use 8 TB usb drives (though you'd need two of course). If a lot of the data is archival, you could use a Seagate SMR drive for that.
juwi_uk wrote:
And I do backup my critcial data, just not all 16TB.
If you have the ability/discipline to separate criticial and non-critical data, then that's a great way to reduce the impact.
I find its difficult to keep "critical" separate from "non-critical" myself. So I just back up everything.
Is there a way I can end up with just a single layer? Does having the 2 layers become a performance hit over what i would have had if i started with 4x4TB disks?
juwi_uk wrote:
Is there a way I can end up with just a single layer?Only if you do a factory reset with all disks in place (or destroy the volume and recreate it). Both methods destroy your data.
juwi_uk wrote:
Does having the 2 layers become a performance hit over what i would have had if i started with 4x4TB disks?I've never tried to measure it, but I don't think so.
I think there would be a small performance hit from having multiple layers (more layers for the system to manage would take a little more effort) but the network connection would be more of a bottleneck most likely so you probably wouldn't notice any difference.
It can make data recovery (we sell contracts for data recovery attempts) a little more complicated (in the unlikely event a data recovery attempt is needed) if you have multiple RAID layers but we do have ways of trying to recover information about the partitions (in the unlikely event we need to do that as that shouldn't be lost). The logs zip download can be useful in such cases too if you happened to have downloaded that.
It would be best practice (though not essential) to download the logs and to download a fresh set after each disk replacement. It would be best to keep the logs zip download in a safe place other than the NAS.
Also when updating the firmware it would be good to follow this: ReadyNAS OS 6: Firmware Upgrade Guide and Tips
If only I had a spare empty 16TB lying around that I could backup too and then factory reset and restore!
:0)
I think any performance hit is negligible, and I certainly won't do a reset just to get one RAID layer.
juwi_uk wrote:
If only I had a spare empty 16TB lying around that I could backup too and then factory reset and restore!
Honestly if you don't have a backup, then you are risking data loss. RAID alone is not enough to keep your data safe.
I understand the cost impact (I am an end-user, and I do maintain backups).
NETGEAR Academy
Boost your skills with the Netgear Academy - Get trained, certified and stay ahead with the latest Netgear technology!
Join Us!
