I decided to do a vertical expansion on my RN104. I had two 3TB and two 4TB drives. I wanted to replace the two 3TB drives with two 6TB drives. I put in one of the 6TB drives and thought it would begin rebuilding the RAID to use the drive. Instead, it showed up as black and the admin console just said that the RAID was degraded and it never did anything with the 6TB drive. I tried formatting it and it still didn't do anything. I finally gave up and put the original 3TB drive back in and let it resync everything.
After that finished, I took the second 6TB drive I had and inserted it. It saw it and began rebuilding the volume. After several days, it finally finished. So, I was ready to add the first 6TB drive that gave me problems, hoping that it was a fluke and that it would go ahead and start integrating it into the RAID. Instead, it showed up as black again and nothing is happening. I tried formatting it again and it again didn't help.
I haven't removed the drive to test it individually yet although I plan to tonight. Could I be doing something wrong that's causing it to show up black? It sees it as the correct size and doesn't give any sort of error when I try formatting it. The drive is the exact same model as the second drive that was recognized and began rebuilding automatically.
Re: RN104 Won't use new drive for vertical expansion
If the disk was formatted outside of the NAS, you need to format it (again) in the NAS before it will add it to the array.
If you formatted it inside the NAS and that didn't happen, then testing the disk in a Windows PC is the next step. Use Lifeguard for Western Digital; Seatools for Seagate.
