Re: Fastest Transfer setup - twin LAN cables or USB?
Thanks for the continued help on this now long thread - it long since lost the relevance to it's title! lol
I ran a disk check on the drive with the red light next to it. The lights are all now blue. However, on the logs page, the log page the top line has a yellow warning saying Volume: Disk test failed on disk in channel 4.
Everything still showing as healthy! Don't know whether to look into it further!?
My original task with buying this 316 was to expand my nas onto two more drives. it I add two new 8TB drives, can I just click extend, and make one of my volumes bigger, rather than have it showing as another drive?
Format both the new drives, in the NAS then use them to extend one of my 8TB RAID1 volumes into a 16TB RAID1 Volume? Is that how it works?
My original task with buying this 316 was to expand my nas onto two more drives. it I add two new 8TB drives, can I just click extend, and make one of my volumes bigger, rather than have it showing as another drive?
Format both the new drives, in the NAS then use them to extend one of my 8TB RAID1 volumes into a 16TB RAID1 Volume?
You can expand one of the volumes. But 4x8TB will give you a 24 TB volume RAID-5 volume, not a 16 TB RAID-1 volume.
Instructions are in the software manual - see page 40 "to horizontally expand a FLEX-Raid volume":
I ran a disk check on the drive with the red light next to it. The lights are all now blue. However, on the logs page, the log page the top line has a yellow warning saying Volume: Disk test failed on disk in channel 4.
The disk test is run from the volume settings wheel, and tests all the disks in that particular volume. One thing to double-check is whether you ran the test on the correct volume (or maybe both).
You definitely need to sort out your disk health (unfortunately the red/blue status on the volume page is not a reliable guide).
Download the full log zip file from the logs page. Look at volume.log. It will include a summary of key indicators of disk health for each disk at the beginning - for example,
Reallocation, Pending, and Uncorrectable sector counts and the Latest Self Test results are the most important things to look at.
Scroll down to the very bottom, and you will see some history of the maintenance tasks and resync. One of mine looks like this:
Data-2 scrub 2022-07-17 00:40:01 2022-07-17 10:00:35 pass
data disk test 2022-08-14 00:40:01 2022-08-14 23:23:59 pass
Data-2 defrag 2022-08-21 00:40:08 2022-08-21 00:46:11 completed
data balance 2022-09-11 00:40:01 2022-09-11 00:45:49 completed Done, had to relocate 156 out of 6523 chunks
Data-2 disk test 2022-09-18 00:40:01 2022-09-18 19:30:45 pass
data scrub 2022-10-09 00:40:01 2022-10-09 10:54:10 pass
data defrag 2022-11-13 00:40:07 2022-11-13 00:50:13 completed
Data-2 scrub 2022-11-20 00:40:01 2022-11-20 10:05:54 pass
Note these are tagged with the volume name (data and Data-2 in my case), and doesn't list the specific disks. But that will confirm what disks you tested.
FYI, my NAS are set to up automatically run one maintenance task each month on each volume - cycling through the four tasks 3x a year.
There is more info related to disks in other logs in the zip file, but this is a good place to start.
Re: Fastest Transfer setup - twin LAN cables or USB?
I've replied twice, but the message vanishes (Apologies if my reply shows several times!)
The drive does show as failed on 'latest self test' every time it appears, and again at the end:
=== maintenance history === device operation start_time end_time result details ---------- --------- ------------------- ------------------- --------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Older disk test 2022-12-09 12:57:37 2022-12-10 01:18:01 fail Channel=4 Model=ST8000NM0055-1RM112 Serial=ZA10BYG0
I guess I just replace the drive? No repair to be done?
Now I have two spare slots to play with, I was wondering. Can I turn off the RAID completely? Then remove two parity drives, then install 3 or 4 blank disks and start a fresh RAID 5 setup, then copy the data over, then finally expend it to fill all 6 drives? (That's the only way I can imagine changing these two, separate RAID1 volumes into one huge RAID 5 volume using all six slots!
Now I have two spare slots to play with, I was wondering. Can I turn off the RAID completely? Then remove two parity drives, then install 3 or 4 blank disks and start a fresh RAID 5 setup, then copy the data over, then finally expend it to fill all 6 drives? (That's the only way I can imagine changing these two, separate RAID1 volumes into one huge RAID 5 volume using all six slots!
Yes, that will work, but is probably not the fastest or safest way to accomplish what you want. Throughout your ordeal, I've lost track of your current configuration. I think you have two 2x8TB RAID1 volumes in the 316 that were moved for the 104, one of which has one bad drive. and two additional 8TB you want to add. The first question is which is the "primary" volume? It will typically be the first one you created, and will contain the home folders and apps. If the primary drive is the one with the bad drive, there is more at risk. Also, are you wanting to re-use the old drives that still work, or have you decided to replace them?
But I don't understand why you rejected expanding one of the existing RAID1 volumes, preferably the primary one, to RAID5 as the first step to get you to a single volume. After you've done that, you can copy data from the the second volume to the RAID5 one, destroy the second volume, and add the drives that were in the second volume to the other. If the bad drive is a part of the primary volume, then you'll want to get that fixed before you start the expansion. You may want to do the same even if the bad drive is in the secondary volume.
The condition of the older drives may be a consideration here. If they are very old and/or have some bad sectors and you are going to replace them all, then all the re-syncs that will be needed could result in a volume failure. In that case, your plan to start a third volume with new drives may be the best.
Re: Fastest Transfer setup - twin LAN cables or USB?
The primary drive (With Home Apps) Isn't the one with the issue, that's the other. I'm buying a new drive to replace that with and will let it resync.
You have everything completely right in your understanding of my setup, and your suggestion is absolutely what I'd like to do, but If I add my two new 8TB drives and expand my primary RAID1 onto there, how can I change it to a RAID5, I can't find a solution to that when I try and look it up.
Re: Fastest Transfer setup - twin LAN cables or USB?
You don't currently see a way because you can't create a 2-drive RAID5. Once you add another drive, you'll be able to select it to add to the primary volume, and as @StephenB says, that will re-configure it as RAID5.
Re: Fastest Transfer setup - twin LAN cables or USB?
OK, great. That's the way it's supposed to work, good that it did for you. Netgear did do a good job of making it pretty user friendly.
Did it allow you to add both drives in one re-sync, or is it going to take two? XRAID will only do one at a time, but I've not done it in OS6 FlexRAID.
Re: Fastest Transfer setup - twin LAN cables or USB?
Really user-friendly in that it does it all for you, not so much, in that I didn't know the effect clicking one button would have!
Both new drives were added to bays 5 & 6, formatted, they both appeared dark grey showing they were unused. As soon as I clicked 'Expand' on my first volume, without any options, confirmations etc, it immediately took over both the new drives, changed the Raid mode to RAID5 and started a re-sync that would apparently take 172 hours!!
I'll leave it to it, but it seems I've finally got my head around this NAS system working how I want it to. I regret setting up a 4-bay NAS as two RAID1 pairs! That was a really inefficient idea, but I guess I liked the simplicity of duplicated whole drives.
