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RN104 Capacity does not increase when swapping out to larger disks
I had 4 disks with varying capacities in running Raid5 (appears to have defaulted to that). I have changed out a failed drive to a 4TB and thought whilst I'm at it I will swap out the 1.5TB to another 4TB.
The other disks are 3TB and 2TB.
I swapped out systematically allowing each to synchronise and the whole things reports as healthy, no problem there, however I have seen no total volume increase to the array. I have tried rebooting the system and am in the process of doing a back up to allow me to do a factory reset but would prefer to avod if at all possible.
Do I need to let it complete its "Resync Data" process before I log in and start the setup wizard and configuration restoration? Judging by the current progress it looks like it will take about 20 to 30 hours.
Again if there's any risk I can wait.
Thanks.
It's building the RAID groups and computing the parity blocks for each of them now - that requires either reading or writing every block on every disk. With your particular combination of disk sizes, there are three different groups that need to be built (4x2TB, 3x1TB, 2x1TB). The completion time is hard to estimate - usually the NAS is reporting the percentage completion of the group it is currently working on, and not the whole set.
You can start the setup wizard, then reinstall any apps, and finally restore the configuration before the resync completes. While you could also start restoring the data, it usually works out faster if you wait for the resync to finish (doing both at the same time causes a lot of disk thrashing).
Re: RN104 Capacity does not increase when swapping out to larger disks
It looks like you are running flexraid - is that the case? (If you are running XRAID there will be a green stripe across the XRAID control on the volume page).
If you are running flexraid, then you need to expand manually - creating more RAID groups, and concatenating them to the volume.
Can you download the log zip file, and post mdstat.log here (copy/paste it into a reply).
Re: RN104 Capacity does not increase when swapping out to larger disks
Thanks for replying so quickly.
I am running flexraid, I can't use Xraid because I "have expanded volumes".
I'm not sure how to expand volumes manually. I have had a look and cannot amend the Raid volumes as noted in some previous posts.
After a couple of goes managed to attach the log file (didn't realise I had to unzip then find the specific file), again thanks for any help you can give me.
Re: RN104 Capacity does not increase when swapping out to larger disks
Was the first drive you removed 1TB? It looks like you must have started with at least one 1TB at some point.
You currently have one layer with 4x1TB, one with 3x.5TB and one with 2 x .5TB. That sounds like what you'd get from 1TB + 1.5TB +2TB + 3TB. You'd also have 1TB of the 3TB unused at that point.
When you swapped in the first 4TB, you had an opportunity to create another 1TB group from that unused portion of the 3TB and 1TB of the 4TB. You'd still have 1TB of the 4TB unused. But you didn't do that, and that may be the rub Now that you have a second 4TB in, you need to create a 3x1TB layer from the 3TB and 4TB drives, then another 1TB from the two 4TB. I'm not sure the GUI is smart enough to let you do that. One of the complicating factors is that going to a fifth partition on some drives mandates using logical partitions since there can only be four primary ones.
Can you also paste in the contents of partitions.log?
Are you comfortable using SSH and the command line? If so, there are commands you can use from there to do the expansion. But if the partitions are not already created, I'm not sure how to accomplish that and stay consistent with the way the OS normally does it.
If you have or can create a backup and can accept the down time, a factory default will clean things up a lot and let you go back to XRAID. That is what I recommend.
Re: RN104 Capacity does not increase when swapping out to larger disks
Thinking I'll do back up and factory default. The downtime doesn't bother me. As it appears that others have had this issue I will keep the thread going.
You currently have one layer with 4x1TB, one with 3x.5TB and one with 2 x .5TB. That sounds like what you'd get from 1TB + 1.5TB +2TB + 3TB. You'd also have 1TB of the 3TB unused at that point.
Right. Likely at that point you ( @Basso6054 ) switched to flexraid, which probably was a mistake.
I'm not sure the GUI is smart enough to let you do that.
I'm using XRAID myself, so it's not something I've tried. But I think you should be able to expand the existing RAID groups and make one more from the GUI. Whether you can make two more depends on the logical partition issue that @Sandshark brought up.
If you want to go forward with flexraid, then you'd add the second 4 TB drive. Then after resync you'd
expand the second RAID group from 3x.5TB RAID-5 to 4x.5TB RAID-5.
expand the third RAID group from 2x.5TB RAID-1 to 4x.5TB RAID-5.
That would increase your volume from 4.5 TB to 6 TB (5.46 TiB).
I'd then create a 2x2TB RAID-1 RAID group with the two 4TB drives, and add that to the existing volume. That would bring it up to 8 TB (7.28 TiB). That wastes 1 TB of space on the 3 TB drive, but avoids the risk that you can't create two more RAID groups. Then later on you can upgrade the two remaining drives to 4 TB, which would give you a 12 TB volume (using all the space on all the disks).
If you have or can create a backup and can accept the down time, a factory default will clean things up a lot and let you go back to XRAID. That is what I recommend.
Yes, I agree. You'd end up with simpler disk structure (removing two unnecessary partitions/RAID groups), and you wouldn't be wasting any space.
Though if you have no backup now, I strongly recommend making one. RAID isn't enough to keep your data safe - many folks here have learned that the hard way.
Re: RN104 Capacity does not increase when swapping out to larger disks
Okay so I've taken a data and configuration back up and running a restore to default. Will I need to move all the data back on or should it recover that itself?
Will my configuration back up return the array to Flex-Raid or allow me to use XRaid?
I don't mind starting from scratch, would rather patiently build this from ground up if necessary than try to short cut anything.
The NAS display is currently showing "Resync data 35.65%" and progressing slowly (which is fine). I can log in using the original factory password but have not run the set up wizard as I do not want to overwrite any recovery process it is working on.
Re: RN104 Capacity does not increase when swapping out to larger disks
If you have any apps installed, make sure you re-install them before restoring the configuration backup. I don't think the configuration restoration will change you to FlexRAID. But if it does, you should be able to switch back to XRAID since you now have a more simple volume.
Then, yes, the last thng you will need to do is restore all the data.
Re: RN104 Capacity does not increase when swapping out to larger disks
Do I need to let it complete its "Resync Data" process before I log in and start the setup wizard and configuration restoration? Judging by the current progress it looks like it will take about 20 to 30 hours.
Do I need to let it complete its "Resync Data" process before I log in and start the setup wizard and configuration restoration? Judging by the current progress it looks like it will take about 20 to 30 hours.
Again if there's any risk I can wait.
Thanks.
It's building the RAID groups and computing the parity blocks for each of them now - that requires either reading or writing every block on every disk. With your particular combination of disk sizes, there are three different groups that need to be built (4x2TB, 3x1TB, 2x1TB). The completion time is hard to estimate - usually the NAS is reporting the percentage completion of the group it is currently working on, and not the whole set.
You can start the setup wizard, then reinstall any apps, and finally restore the configuration before the resync completes. While you could also start restoring the data, it usually works out faster if you wait for the resync to finish (doing both at the same time causes a lot of disk thrashing).
Re: RN104 Capacity does not increase when swapping out to larger disks
Okay so I have restored the RN104, gain full capacity from 4TB to over 8TB.
Some lessons learnt:
Don't forget to back up you configuration file.
Keep a full back up (obviously).
Keep a note of the exact share names, helps with any paths you may have established on computers mapped drives.
Have patience, let each step take its course, it took a few days to let the drives retore then reload the configuration files and all the back up data.
Cloud accounts need to be reestablished, not hard just something to be aware of.
Any automatic back up jobs you have to USB connected drives set up in your old configuration will likely remap the USB drive references, you will need to delete them and reload them.
Check any automatice computer back ups you have through the computer application.
Finally thanks to StephenB for his advice, it was much appreciated.
Re: RN104 Capacity does not increase when swapping out to larger disks
In step 4, if appropriate, add that you need to restore any apps before you restore the configuration file so you don't end up with something in the configuration that points to a phantom app.
