I have a ReadyNAS 214 running 6.4.2 that is about 10 days old. I started with 2 6TB drives (WD Red on the compatability list) and I've been busy backing up systems in my home office and started to run out of space already. So I got two more of the same drives.
When I started the system the first time, it paired the two drives into RAID 1 automatically, which was good. The drive display said "RAID (RAID 1) under the image of the chasis. The X-RAID button has the green bar on the right. It doesn't say X-RAID-2 anywhere, but all the documentaiton for OS 6 refers to X-RAID-2 so I assume it's that.
According to NetGear's documentation, if you have X-RAID enabled, you should be able to just pop a drive in and it will add it to the volume, in this case increasing the formatted capacity from 5.5 TB to 11 TB. However, that didn't happen. The 3rd drive is dark and the tool tip says "Disk State: UNKNOWN". The drive is brand new and I shut down the system, checked the drive in Disk Manager in Windows and it is in fact a clean drive, no partition. I rebooted the system with the new drive in with no change.
I've looked at a number of people who had problems installing new drives, but I'm none of their problems appear to apply here.
Did the X-Raid go and paint me into a corner with RAID 1 and now I'm going to have to start over to get all these disks to work together correctly? I hope not. A lot of the data is duplicated since it was just moved from other drives, but this is going to be a major mess to make sure all the data is backed up. I don't want to do that for 4 TB of data!
XRAID should have expanded to RAID-5 when you inserted the new disk. You should still be entitled to phone support, so I suggest contacting Netgear at support.netgear.com.
It would take a while to expand btw, and performance will be significantly reduced while that is happening.
I wish they would tell you in the instructions what to expect as far as notices when the new drive is inserted. There was a warning about it taking a while, but it took a while for the Raid-1 pair to get set too. I think it was about 18 hours. However, there is no notice of anything and there was no degredation of performance. As far as the operation of the system went, it was like they 3rd drive wasn't there.
I e-mailed for support but got back an ambiguous message that both seemed to indicate that my problem wasn't covered by support, but also asked for more information. I sent the requested information, but so far no response. At least your response is the first actual confirmation something isn't working right.
Re: Problem Adding 3rd Disk in ReadyNAS 214 #26473764
You have 90 phone support for a new purchase, so I would try chat or phone instead of email.
The expansion process requires either reading or writing every sector in the data volume, so it slows down as you add more disks.
The expansion is lower priority than normal file access, but the disks are still used heavily, and seek time of course increases, since the heads are moving around a lot more..
Re: Problem Adding 3rd Disk in ReadyNAS 214 #26473764
I see support has now reviewed your logs and responded to you on your case.
Something a bit unusual has happened but it does come up sometimes. Your new 6TB disk has a slightly smaller number of sectors compared with your other disks.
We can only expand volumes with disks of equal or greater capacity to existing disks. As your new 6TB disk has a marginally smaller capacity it is considered to be a smaller disk. It can't fit a large enough data volume partition for expansion of your volume to take place.
So unless WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics can repair the disk to have the same number of sectors as the other disks you options are to try another disk instead or to backup your data, do a factory reset (wipes all data, settings, everything) with the new disk in place and restore your data from backup.
Also support was reminding you of the warranty status and your options to extend the software support beyond the basic support for 90 days (from purchase date) should you wish to. Clearly the unit is well within 90 days from the date of purchase.
Re: Problem Adding 3rd Disk in ReadyNAS 214 #26473764
I had to wipe the system and start over. It's very frustrating when drives of the same make and model have differing numbers of sectors. The first two drives were slightly bigger than the newer two. The difference in sector count was 65535 (2^16-1 which is interesting). Because of that small difference out of over 11 billion sectors, I had to wipe the system and start over. It's now says it will take 46 hours to finish resyncing.
Re: Problem Adding 3rd Disk in ReadyNAS 214 #26473764
Yes, this is frustrating.
For the RAID to be setup, the disks have to be synced sector by sector. This is at a lower level than the filesystem. It is important to note that the initial sync is a special case where the volume is redundant throughout the sync.
You can start putting your data back on but performance for the resync would be slower than otherwise, and performance copying your data on would be slower than after the resync completes.
