Issue with expanding storage in Netgear Ready NAS 4312S

You can send the zip file into me if you like (see the Sending Logs link in my sig for where to send it to).

Hello,

I have sent an email with the logs. The issue is that nothing happens when I click on 'Expand' button. Let me know if I am missing something. Thanks

You are running quite old firmware. Do you still see this on 6.9.3?

We haven't upgrade to it yet.. Is this a known bug in the older versions?

For me, it looks like this is a definite bug in the GUI as it does nothing while clicking Expand. Just curious, you found anything interesting in the log files?

The disk looks fine and has no partition table on it as one would expect a new disk to have that is not yet added to the array.

Okay, so should I format it outside the NAS then? (I was under the impression the Format button in the GUI should do this, no?)

Also, just checking, you found any relevant message in the logs?

Thanks for the inputs :).

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euhr wrote:

Okay, so should I format it outside the NAS then?

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The NAS needs to do the formatting.

What firmware are you running?

So, I did the formatting with the NAS.

We are running 6.8.0.

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euhr wrote:

We are running 6.8.0.

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Thx.  The current options for flexraid were introduced in 6.7 (a couple of months before 6.8.0 came out).

I'd wait for mdgm-ntgr's guidance on whether you should try upgrading firmware now.

If you aren't desperately in need of space, you might consider waiting until after you get the backup NAS set up before you do a lot of troubleshooting.

Okay, I will wait for his guidance then.

The backup NAS is going to take some time to catch up, so we might not be able to wait for that to finish and also the backup NAS is not actually a drop in replacement for this primary NAS (we have internal limitations). 

AFAICT, this should be a very straight forward thing that should work out of the box... The fact that it isn't working means that I am not doing something right or there is a software bug.

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euhr wrote:

AFAICT, this should be a very straight forward thing that should work out of the box... The fact that it isn't working means that I am not doing something right or there is a software bug.

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I agree it should have worked out of the box - it could be an already-fixed bug that wasn’t listed in the release notes.

However, I don’t think it’s wise to have a single volume span both chassis.  I’d have created two volumes, one for each.

>> I agree it should have worked out of the box - it could be an already-fixed bug that wasn’t listed in the release notes.
Agreed. I will check the feasablity of upgrading the firmware to the latest version (needs a bit of downtime and I will have to co-ordinate internally for the same).
In the meanwhile, is it possible to ask internally once if this is a known issue which is fixed in the newer firmware versions?

>> However, I don’t think it’s wise to have a single volume span both chassis. I’d have created two volumes, one for each.
I can't recollect why we decided against it. Couple of things that I could think of are:

- We thought separate RAID groups would give us a bit more high availablity (and I believe we didn't have a choice to expand RAID group 1 and hence we had to go for the RAID Group 2)
- Creating new volumes would mean creating new partitions and mount them on all machines (we are still using fstab...) and its an added overhead to manage.

Any disadvantages of a single volume?

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euhr wrote:

 

Any disadvantages of a single volume?

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Though your RAID groups don't span both chassis, concatenating them into one file system increases the chance of file system corruption - because the expansion raid group can get out of step with the main chassis raid group.  Lost writes are more likely to affect multiple disks in the expansion chassis. 

For instance, lost writes to the expansion disks could be the result of

• glitches on the SAS connection between the two chassis
• power loss that hits the expansion chassis first
• failure of the expansion unit but not the main chassis
• slower write speeds on the expansion chassis, due to bandwidth limitations on the SAS connection.

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euhr wrote:

>> I agree it should have worked out of the box - it could be an already-fixed bug that wasn’t listed in the release notes.
Agreed. I will check the feasablity of upgrading the firmware to the latest version (needs a bit of downtime and I will have to co-ordinate internally for the same).

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I'd recommend waiting on mdgm-ntgr or another Netgear mod for advice on whether to do the firmware upgrade now, or whether it should wait until your expansion issue is resolved.

Noted on your points on having separate volumes.

>> I'd recommend waiting on mdgm-ntgr or another Netgear mod for advice on whether to do the firmware upgrade now, or whether it should wait until your expansion issue is resolved.
I am planning to do the upgrade tomorrow. We have to debug this further if that doesn't help.

Over the weekend, upgraded to firmware 6.9.3 after which the Expand button worked.

The data sync is in progress and hopefully everything should be good once that is done.

Thanks everyone for your help.