2x JBOD Drive Upgrades in ReadyNAS 212 -- How do I do it?

[nbuubu]

I have a ReadyNAS 212 with two 8TB drives, both as separate volumes in JBOD mode. Use them mostly for home media sharing and they're both almost full.

I've purchased two 10TB drives to upgrade the existing NAS, and had figured I could just swap one drive in at a time and copy over the data. But it seems that won't work.

Any suggestions? I have USB enclosures that will work for both, but don't know if I should clone the drives using my PC and expand the volumes, or if there's a way to simply put in one unformatted 10TB drive, alongside an existing 8TB JBOD drive, and initialize the 10TB and copy. Is there any way to do that?

Many thanks for any help.

[nbuubu]

I've tried connecting the 8TB drives formatted by ReadyNAS (as btrfs) to my PC, and even with Linux File Systems by Paragon (which claims to read btrfs), I cannot access the data. Was hoping there was a way to just plug in the existing 8TB drives and transfer back to the 212, which I'd set up new with the two 10TB drives.

[nbuubu]

Short of installing Ubuntu, running mdadm to mount the drives in my PC, and transferring all the data over the network (which seems like my only option), I'm wondering if anyone's been able to do the following in order to upgrade drives in a ReadyNAS:

1. Remove two working btrfs JBOD drives with data from the NAS (in my case two 8TB hdds). Set aside. Calling them A1 and A2.

2. Install two new drives (in my case two 10TB hdds) in the same ReadyNAS 212. Make sure everyone's running with two new clean drives, calling them B1 and B2.

3. Remove B2, and replace it with A1. Reboot the ReadyNAS 212 so that it has A1 and B1 at the same time (in my case an empty 10TB drive with a full 8TB drive).

4. Copy data from A1 to B1.

5. Repeat with A2 and B2.

I'm just wondering, before I go through it all, if step 3 is even possible. If there's some tie between the two existing JBOD volumes that will make the system unstable or introduce future problems.

I tried putting one new 10TB drive in the 212 next to an existing 8TB drive, and it didn't want to format the 10TB drive or set it up for a data transfer. I tried connecting one of the btrfs-formatted drives to the ReadyNAS via a USB enclosure, and it simply wouldn't read.

Just hoping there's a solution that doesn't involve a lengthy PC/Linux data recovery/transfer option.

[Sandshark]

What problems were you having when booting from one drive and then installing one new one and initializing it?  Aside from not being able to use the same volume and share names, I think that should work.  Then power down and boot with just the new one.  You can then re-name the shares on the new drive, but not the volume.

Repeat with other drive, then boot with both new ones.

If you use home shares, that may create an issue since you cannot manually rename shares to be the same as user names.

[nbuubu]

Thanks for the reply. I was having problems where the new drive simply wouldn't initialize alongside one of the already-installed ones.

I found a way to make it all work, at least so far as I'm transferring data right now. I did the above plan where I removed both 8TB drives, and did a fresh OS install of both 10TB drives with the same static IP and NAS settings. The 8TB volumes had been named "one" and "two" and I named the 10TB drives "alpha" and "prime" (apologies to the Counterpart series). So the volumes don't overlap.

Also had to establish shares with the new 10TB drives installed together before mixing and matching as a mixed set also wouldn't allow me to set up a share for some reason. NAS reboots between every step.

Right now I have the "one" drive installed alongside the "alpha" drive and am transferring about 7TB of data, so it'll be a while before I get to "two" and "prime" for the rest. It's all just media shares for my home network and I backup the important files to an external, so I'm not particularly worried about redundancy right now. Seems to be working so far but I'm going to make sure it's all done and stable before clicking solved.