I have a RN-716 with 3 EDA-500 expansions mounted as network drives on my computer. I've had no issues up until this past weekend with one of them, EDA2. EDA1 and EDA3 are working fine. I was using a program to edit some video files on both EDA1 at first and then EDA2, the program was to shrink the file sizes by removing extra audio tracks/subtitles. After running it on EDA1, I gained HDD space as intended but after running it on EDA2, I lost HDD space and the HDD showed as full although the files themselves actually shrank. When I used Windows Explorer to check the folder sizes it added up to about 2TB less than the total capacity of the drives. Both the ReadyNAS Admin page and Windows Explorer showed the drive as having about 128kb free, if I remember correctly. I checked for hidden folders/files but couldn't find any, also tried restarting the computer, ReadyNAS and EDA2 but that didn't change anything. I ran Balance, Scrub, Defrag, and Disk test but had same results. Today I tried to have the HDDs resync by removing them from the chassis and then readding them. Upon readding them, all the drives show as red with the error replace inactive volumes to use the disk, disk #1-5. The chassis also shows as EDA2-0 with EDA2 as a seperate volume. Any help would be appreciated.
Today I tried to have the HDDs resync by removing them from the chassis and then readding them. Upon readding them, all the drives show as red with the error replace inactive volumes to use the disk, disk #1-5. The chassis also shows as EDA2-0 with EDA2 as a seperate volume. Any help would be appreciated.
I don't know what made you think that was an option, but you killed your volume by doing so. Resync is completely unrelated to space allocation. EDA2-0 is the name of the first (perhaps only) layer of your RAID and EDA2 is the name of the BTRFS volume that it (and any other layers) contains. When the system sees any part of the -0 (or -1, -2, etc.) layer separately, it generally means it's out of sync with the rest. That sounds right for your ill-advised "forced re-sync".
If you have any Linux skills, you can take a look at this and see if any of it will help: How-to-recover-from-Remove-inactive-volumes-error . But each case is different, and anything you do (especially if you are not familiar with the Linux command prompt) could make things worse. Since your volume is also way too full, it may be too late to do anything like this.
Beyond that, you have a couple options: Netgear paid support (probably including data recovery, which cost extra and is not guaranteed), or ReclaiMe software. Since the drives are in an EDA500, you can use an eSATA card that supports port expansion in your PC to access the drives with ReclaiMe. Note that the PC cannot natively read the drives, so don't even try.
As for how this happened, it's probably because of snapshots. When you "reduce" file size on a snapshot-enabled CoW file system, you aren't overwriting the old data, you are adding data while the old remains in a snapshot. Even if you don't have snapshots enabled, the old data is initially still there, though time (or the balance you ran) will normally free it up. But with the volume over-full, there may be no room for that to occur. The process needs working space, which is why Netgear recommends keepng used space below 80%. Personally, I've used 90% as the limit and have even gone a bit above that for short durations, but only 128KB free on a multi-TB volume is way past safe.
