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Using RN-214 storage device, the disks have been working without errors for a very long time. It working perfect, there is no problem with this device, I am sure that it will successfully work for another 100 years. But disks seem to become old. Already bought new ones to change, but they have a larger capacity. Installed HGST 4TB hdn726040ale614, only 2 pieces Raid_1, at once installed them on the unpacking day, 5 years ago, i installed them and never touched them again. No other options were configured, backup options were also not configured. i didn't even start setting up automatic backup, because i allocated the entire usable size for storing information. With total 3.8TB information - only 1TB of important data, i have backed up to my computer already. However, i don't want to lose any data (3.8TB - 1TB = 2.8TB non critical data, but don't want to loose it). I don't want to adjust or resize volume, because i'm afraid. Also afraid to make changes without realizing what need. Need replace disks ONLY. I bought two new Seagate 8TB ironwolf ST8000VN004 drives.
Can you please give me advice what sequence should i replace the disks and what should i do in the Web interface? When rn-214 sees a new single 8TB disk instead of 4TB, for example instead of the first disk, and this disc will be larger - what happens next? Raid_1 will automatically start recovery to a new drive? Or does it need to click something in the Web interface to start recover Raid_1?
Also puzzling is the question when I press the X-Raid button. A dialog box appears that suggests replacing X-Raid with Flex-Raid. I don't understand the difference of this options, can you please describe for my case what is more preferable case? Do i need perform a Flex-Raid?
Installed HGST 4TB hdn726040ale614, only 2 pieces Raid_1, at once installed them on the unpacking day, 5 years ago, i installed them and never touched them again.
I bought two new Seagate 8TB ironwolf ST8000VN004 drives.
First piece of advice is to test the two new drives in a Windows PC with Seatools. Either connect the disks with SATA or a USB adapter/dock. I always run both the long non-destructive test and the "advanced" erase test - because over the years I have found some drives that pass one of these tests, but fail the other. Though this will take a couple of days, it is far easier to deal with a bad out-of-the-box drive before you install it in the NAS.
As far as the upgrade goes, you have two options. One is to replace the two disks - that will give you an 8 TB RAID-1 volume size. The other is to use all four disks - that will give you a 16 TB RAID-5 array. If the HGST drives are healthy, I'd go with the second option myself. But totally up to you.
The upgrade process is simple. If you are replacing, then
hot-swap disk 1 with one of the new Seagates (NAS running)
wait for the NAS to tell you that the volume is resynced (check the logs page)
hot swap disk 2 with the second Seagate (NAS running)
wait for the NAS to tell you that the volume is resynced. Expansion will happen here.
If you are just expanding, similarly
hot-insert one of the new Seagates into bay 3 (NAS running)
wait for the NAS to tell you that the volume is resynced (check the logs page). Partial expansion will happen here.
hot insert the second Seagate in bay 4 (NAS running)
wait for the NAS to tell you that the volume is resynced. Full expansion will happen here (in two steps).
The resync will take a while (a day or longer), and the second resync will take longer than the first.
In both cases, expansion is automatic.
With either process, the data is unprotected during the RAID resync. So if a disk fails (or you have a power failure, etc) you could lose the volume. Netgear always recommends having a backup (and personally I do also). That said, the process is reasonably safe if you test the new disks first.
I don't want to adjust or resize volume, because i'm afraid.
Always good to check here first.
Both FlexRAID and XRAID will automatically expand your volume.
You should always have at least 10% free space on your volume, and ideally 15% or more.
The NAS will reports your current volume size as 3.6 TiB, so I am thinking you might not actually have as much data as you think. But if the volume is more than 90% full, then you really do need to expand the volume. If the NAS runs too low on free space, then you can lose your data very easily.
Installed HGST 4TB hdn726040ale614, only 2 pieces Raid_1, at once installed them on the unpacking day, 5 years ago, i installed them and never touched them again. No other options were configured, backup options were also not configured.
FWIW, a NAS is not a "set up and forget" kind of device. You do need to periodically check it. There are maitenance functions you can schedule that can give you warnings of trouble before your data is at risk. Ideally you should schedule those, and also make sure email alerts are functioning.
A NAS can fail at any time, and RAID is not enough to keep your data safe. So I also recommend putting a full backup plan in place. Many people use USB drives for this. You can connect the drive to a PC, and use something like FreeFileSync, or you can connect it to the NAS, and set up backup jobs.
A dialog box appears that suggests replacing X-Raid with Flex-Raid. I don't understand the difference of this options, can you please describe for my case what is more preferable case? Do i need perform a Flex-Raid?
It's not suggesting - it's just asking if you want to change it.
FlexRAID gives you more options in managing the RAID. X-RAID is a better option for you (like most users). So I recommend staying with that.
FlexRAID gives you more control over the RAID setup - which can sometimes be useful. But it is also quite a bit more complicated, and most users find it confusing. Personally I use X-RAID on most of my NAS (though I do run FlexRAID on an RN202).
Installed HGST 4TB hdn726040ale614, only 2 pieces Raid_1, at once installed them on the unpacking day, 5 years ago, i installed them and never touched them again.
I bought two new Seagate 8TB ironwolf ST8000VN004 drives.
First piece of advice is to test the two new drives in a Windows PC with Seatools. Either connect the disks with SATA or a USB adapter/dock. I always run both the long non-destructive test and the "advanced" erase test - because over the years I have found some drives that pass one of these tests, but fail the other. Though this will take a couple of days, it is far easier to deal with a bad out-of-the-box drive before you install it in the NAS.
As far as the upgrade goes, you have two options. One is to replace the two disks - that will give you an 8 TB RAID-1 volume size. The other is to use all four disks - that will give you a 16 TB RAID-5 array. If the HGST drives are healthy, I'd go with the second option myself. But totally up to you.
The upgrade process is simple. If you are replacing, then
hot-swap disk 1 with one of the new Seagates (NAS running)
wait for the NAS to tell you that the volume is resynced (check the logs page)
hot swap disk 2 with the second Seagate (NAS running)
wait for the NAS to tell you that the volume is resynced. Expansion will happen here.
If you are just expanding, similarly
hot-insert one of the new Seagates into bay 3 (NAS running)
wait for the NAS to tell you that the volume is resynced (check the logs page). Partial expansion will happen here.
hot insert the second Seagate in bay 4 (NAS running)
wait for the NAS to tell you that the volume is resynced. Full expansion will happen here (in two steps).
The resync will take a while (a day or longer), and the second resync will take longer than the first.
In both cases, expansion is automatic.
With either process, the data is unprotected during the RAID resync. So if a disk fails (or you have a power failure, etc) you could lose the volume. Netgear always recommends having a backup (and personally I do also). That said, the process is reasonably safe if you test the new disks first.
I don't want to adjust or resize volume, because i'm afraid.
Always good to check here first.
Both FlexRAID and XRAID will automatically expand your volume.
You should always have at least 10% free space on your volume, and ideally 15% or more.
The NAS will reports your current volume size as 3.6 TiB, so I am thinking you might not actually have as much data as you think. But if the volume is more than 90% full, then you really do need to expand the volume. If the NAS runs too low on free space, then you can lose your data very easily.
Installed HGST 4TB hdn726040ale614, only 2 pieces Raid_1, at once installed them on the unpacking day, 5 years ago, i installed them and never touched them again. No other options were configured, backup options were also not configured.
FWIW, a NAS is not a "set up and forget" kind of device. You do need to periodically check it. There are maitenance functions you can schedule that can give you warnings of trouble before your data is at risk. Ideally you should schedule those, and also make sure email alerts are functioning.
A NAS can fail at any time, and RAID is not enough to keep your data safe. So I also recommend putting a full backup plan in place. Many people use USB drives for this. You can connect the drive to a PC, and use something like FreeFileSync, or you can connect it to the NAS, and set up backup jobs.
A dialog box appears that suggests replacing X-Raid with Flex-Raid. I don't understand the difference of this options, can you please describe for my case what is more preferable case? Do i need perform a Flex-Raid?
It's not suggesting - it's just asking if you want to change it.
FlexRAID gives you more options in managing the RAID. X-RAID is a better option for you (like most users). So I recommend staying with that.
FlexRAID gives you more control over the RAID setup - which can sometimes be useful. But it is also quite a bit more complicated, and most users find it confusing. Personally I use X-RAID on most of my NAS (though I do run FlexRAID on an RN202).
Re: RN214 replacing good hard disks to more capacity
Note that if you use XRAID expansion to go to 4 drives, you will not later be able to simply remove the old ones if you don't need that space, even if one fails, You'll have to replace with a drive at least as large. So keep that in mind when you choose your expansion path.
Got trouble - Re: RN214 replacing good hard disks to more capacity
hi.
i got some trouble after replacing disk.
i performed replace a first drive, volume degraded and rebuild was started automaticelly.
next morning a new drive changed its state to failure.
volume degraded. but storage files and shares accessible.
new drive device name become /dev/sdc, after reboot device name become /dev/sda
smartctl command shows bad results:
===cut===
root@nas:/# smartctl -a /dev/sda smartctl 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594 [armv7l-linux-4.4.218.alpine.1] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Device Model: ST8000VN004 Serial Number: WWY03J30 LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 0ed4e72c4 Firmware Version: SC60 User Capacity: 8,001,563,222,016 bytes [8.00 TB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall] ATA Version is: ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4 SATA Version is: SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s Local Time is: Thu May 4 12:23:37 2023 MSK SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled
Read SMART Data failed: scsi error badly formed scsi parameters
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART Status command failed: scsi error badly formed scsi parameters SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: UNKNOWN! SMART Status, Attributes and Thresholds cannot be read.
I expected that in case of a disk failure, it would cause the usual errors like "reallocation sector conts" more 0 and others error. But in this SMART results i don't see a normal SMART parametrs listing, like for example:
===cut===
root@nas:/# smartctl -a /dev/sdb smartctl 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594 [armv7l-linux-4.4.218.alpine.1] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Device Model: HGST HDN726040ALE614 Serial Number: K7J0T4EB LU WWN Device Id: 5 000cca 269dc89a3 Firmware Version: APGNW7JH User Capacity: 4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB] Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm Form Factor: 3.5 inches Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall] ATA Version is: ACS-2, ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4 SATA Version is: SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s) Local Time is: Thu May 4 12:29:03 2023 MSK SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x80) Offline data collection activity was never started. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status: ( 25) The self-test routine was aborted by the host. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 113) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x5b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. No Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 571) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x003d) SCT Status supported. SCT Error Recovery Control supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported.
does it mean that the new disk failure and need return to shop ?
Likely yes, so I would exchange it. You could confirm the failure by putting the drive in a Windows PC (connecting either with SATA or a USB adapter/dock) and testing it with Seatools.
FWIW, I do use an ST8000VN004 disk in one of NAS, and haven't had any issues.
