I have a ReadyNAS 214 set up with 4 x 4tb drives, set to RAID 5, providing 10.9TB of space.
When it comes to wanting more storage space, I will obviously have to replace the drives.
How can I replace the drives without loosing the data on the existing drives? is there a way to backup the entire server so i can reinstall into the new drives?
I am worried that i will nee something with the same storage space as the data i require backing up and i dont know where i would be able to do that. is the backup compressed?
Cheers,
James
Model: RN21400|ReadyNAS 214 Series 4- Bay (Diskless)
I am worried that i will nee something with the same storage space as the data i require backing up and i dont know where i would be able to do that. is the backup compressed?
The built-in backup methods for the NAS are not compressed. But you can get 12 TB USB drives for about $200 (US pricing), and 16 TB USB drives for about $300. Before you expand, I suggest investing in backup, and putting a backup plan in place.
RAID is not enough to protect your data, many people here have learned that the hard way.
How can I replace the drives without losing the data on the existing drives?
If you are running the default XRAID, then you don't have to replace all four to get more space - you can upgrade just two with a larger size, and upgrade the others later on as your space needs to continue to grow. (If there is a green stripe on the XRAID control on the volume page, then you are running XRAID).
You hot-swap one drive with a larger one (with the NAS running). For instance, 10 TB. The NAS will resync (which will take a day or so), but capacity will not increase at that step.
Then hot-swap a second drive with another 10 TB drive. The NAS will resync again, and at the end of the process it will expand from 12 TB (~10.9 TiB) to 18 TB (~16.3 TiB).
If you hot-swap the third drive, you'd end up with 24 TB (~21.8 TiB); hotswapping the last would bring you up to 30 TB (~27.2 TiB).
The capacity rule is "sum the drives and subtract the largest".
Netgear does recommend that you do a backup first (advice I agree with). If one of the drives already in the array fails during the resyncs, you will lose all your data.
You mention 'the built in backup is not compressed'. is there something available that is not built in that i can use that will compress the backup?
Not sure what you mean by "available". I don't know of anything from Netgear or in the third party app store. The NAS runs linux, if you use ssh you'd find that zip is installed. Other linux tools could in principle be installed that can create a compressed archive. But there is nothing I know of for sale (or freeware) that explicitly supports ReadyNAS.
Also, you should be aware that most media (mp3, flac, mp4, mkv, avi, jpg, etc), is already compressed - and trying to compress it again generally won't save much (if any) space.
