Re: RN Ultra2 upgrade from 5 to 4k

_ebm_ · ‎2012-10-06

Hi,

currently I have two Seagate 1.5TB 512 drives in my Ultra2. As I get out of space I want to upgrade to two WD green with 3TB. These drives are 4k drives. Is it possible to migrate by expanding or do I have to backup, setup and rebuild the NAS? The partitions are formatted with 4k. What I have heard is that the drives are copied sector by sector, not block by block so going through backup and restore is the only way? I have an old Duo (the Seagate drives came with it) so I can do that but it will take a pretty long time to copy back and forth.

Is there anything else I have to take into account with the WD drives? I have chosen them as I have read they are almost dead silent.

Best regards
Carsten

mdgm-ntgr · ‎2012-10-06

Expansion would work. Need to make sure on 4.2.16 or later before you add the 3TB disks. Also go with WD Red disks rather than WD Green.

_ebm_ · ‎2012-10-06

Great, thank you for your fast response!

Greez Carsten

_ebm_ · ‎2012-10-14

I've got two of the Red and installed them yesterday. Expansion worked well. Just to make sure everything went OK. blockdev reports a sector size of 512 on all devices:


hagen:~#  blockdev --getss /dev/c/c
512
hagen:~#  blockdev --getss /dev/md1
512
hagen:~#  blockdev --getss /dev/md2
512
hagen:~#  blockdev --getss /dev/md3
512
hagen:~#

Is this normal?

Best regards
Carsten

StephenB · ‎2012-10-14

_ebm_ wrote:
blockdev reports a sector size of 512 on all devices... Is this normal?

Yes. At least I see the same value on my Pro. (BTW, on my duo v1 I see 1024).

mdgm-ntgr · ‎2012-10-14

The command to check for 4k sector partition alignment on 4.2.16 or later would be
e.g.


# sgdisk -p /dev/sda

Alternatively you could download the logs (Status > Logs > Download all logs), extract the zip contents and look in partition.log

What you'd want to see is described here: Why you might want to factory reset a x86 ReadyNAS

Basically you want the Start sectors to divisible by 8.

StephenB · ‎2012-10-14

mdgm wrote:
The command to check for 4k sector partition alignment on 4.2.16 or later would be
e.g.
# sgdisk -p /dev/sda
Alternatively you could download the logs (Status > Logs > Download all logs), extract the zip contents and look in partition.log

What you'd want to see is described here: Why you might want to factory reset a x86 ReadyNAS

Basically you want the Start sectors to divisible by 8.

You will still see a 512 byte logical sector size reported by sgdisk. That is way you need start sectors to be divisible by 8 (8x512 =4K, so that indicates 4K alignment).

Etz · ‎2012-10-14

Wondering why mine show 4 partitions?

14:02:29-root@NAS:~$ sgdisk -p /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 5860533168 sectors, 2.7 TiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 21B9A762-7D3C-4F14-A7B3-2B946AA1EA8B
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 5860533134
Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries
Total free space is 4133 sectors (2.0 MiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1              64         8388671   4.0 GiB     FD00
   2         8388672         9437247   512.0 MiB   FD00
   3         9437248      1953521072   927.0 GiB   FD00
   4      1953521080      5860529038   1.8 TiB     FD00
14:02:31-root@NAS:~$ sgdisk -p /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 5860533168 sectors, 2.7 TiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): D59EC0EF-F77E-4704-949A-E3E8F66367A9
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 5860533134
Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries
Total free space is 4133 sectors (2.0 MiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1              64         8388671   4.0 GiB     FD00
   2         8388672         9437247   512.0 MiB   FD00
   3         9437248      1953521072   927.0 GiB   FD00
   4      1953521080      5860529038   1.8 TiB     FD00

Partition 3 is the exact size of my usable data volume before expansion... :roll:

mdgm-ntgr · ‎2012-10-14

#1 - OS partition (this stores the OS and the NAS configuration)
#2 - Swap
#3 - 1TB layer from before expansion
#4 - 2TB layer added from expansion

You have 4k sector partition alignment.

Etz · ‎2012-10-14

mdgm wrote:
You have 4k sector partition alignment.

That I already knew, but thx for confirmation anyway 😉
Only wondered why I now had 4 partitions instead of 3...

mdgm-ntgr · ‎2012-10-14

Well e.g. with an Ultra 4 say there was 4x1TB disks, 2x3TB disks could be added (replacing 2x1TB disks) to get expansion. With that configuration you'd have a RAID-5 layer of 4x1TB with a RAID-1 layer of 2x2TB.

X-RAID2 was actually originally designed for 6-bay units and it makes sense to have expansion work the same way on all units.

wobegone · ‎2012-10-17

Sorry to piggyback on this thread but I have a somewhat related question since I don't fully understand the Sector by Sector/Block by Block topic....

I have an Ultra Pro 2 Plus with 2 WD Green 2TB disks in it and want to upgrade to 2 new WD Red 3TB disks. I ran the sgdisk command and it shows "Partitions will be aligned on 64-sector boundaries" instead of 8-sector boundaries:

:~# sgdisk -p /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 3907029168 sectors, 1.8 TiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 97FA1C02-51EC-41C1-BDE9-88E30EB57748
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 3907029134
Partitions will be aligned on 64-sector boundaries
Total free space is 4092 sectors (2.0 MiB)

Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 64 8388671 4.0 GiB FD00
2 8388672 9437247 512.0 MiB FD00
3 9437248 3907025072 1.8 TiB FD00

My initrd.log file shows the following:

[2011/10/28 01:27:36] Factory default initiated by Frontview!
[2011/10/28 01:39:59] Defaulting to X-RAID2 mode, 10GB snapshot, RAID level 5
[2011/10/28 01:41:16] Factory default initiated on RAIDiator 4.2.19.
[2012/01/24 05:24:38] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.19 to 4.2.19.
[2012/04/28 20:39:32] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.19 to 4.2.20.
[2012/06/18 00:35:41] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.20 to 4.2.21.
[2012/10/17 18:56:18] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.21 to 4.2.22.

I am not sure how I ended up with 64-sector boundaries or RAID level 5 since this is only a 2 Disk unit. Could this cause problems? Should I go ahead and do the Disk Expansion or should I run Factory Default and redo my Config before adding my new 3 TB drives? Everything has been working fine and I have everything backed up to a USB disk, so I can copy it all back after the upgrade...

Thanks In Advance!

StephenB · ‎2012-10-18

64 is a multiple of 8, so this is not a problem.

wobegone · ‎2012-10-18

Thank you StephenB!