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I've been using a ReadyNAS NV+ v2 for a few years. Over the past few years, I had reached 3 x 4TB Seagate drives (ST4000VN000-1H4168) and 1 x 2TBWestern Digital Red (WD20EFRX) using X-RAID2 giving 9TB. Since I received a "90% capacity" alert, I decided to swap out the last 2TB for a 4TB drive.
Since the 4TB Seagate already in use is no longer made, I purchased a 4TB Seagate IronWolf (ST4000VN008-2DR166) to replace the 2TB WD Red drive. The new drive sync'd succesfully, but the front panel still showed '0.9/9.0T Free' so I suspected something wasn't right. The log reported "Volume expansion failed", followed a little while later by "Incomplete file system expansion detected. Resuming...". This was repeated a couple of times.
Can anyone help/advise what is happening and what I should try next?
But the sharing protocols and their settings have not restored to their previous setting, despite backing up everything except 'Everything' and 'Data Volumes'. Thankfully I took some screen captures of some of the protocol settings pages, but I would have thought these should have been restored?
Have I done anything daft?!
I've never owned a v2, so I don't have first-hand experience on what settings it saves. I've have also expected protocol settings to be saved/restored though. FWIW, I have seen that not all settings are carried over with OS-6 NAS too, so it is good that you took the screen captures.
As a side-note, I'd love to know what settings/permissions are recommended for NFS and SMB... I'm using the ReadyNAS purely to serve all music and videos to an Nvidia Shield and my Windows PC; all on the same network.
One challenge here is that the software manual doesn't say what settings 5.3.x firmware lets you change. But I'd start with the default settings for both protocols. They will be set to allow anyone on your local network to access the NAS (which sounds like it should be ok for your environment).
Do you recall the starting size of the data volume?
I'm asking because legacy NAS do have expansion limits - one being that the volume can't expand more than 8 TiB from it's starting point. If you started with a single 2 TB or 2x2TB volume, you might have hit this limit.
Netgear documentation is incomplete when it comes to expansion limits for OS5.x, but I believe it is still limited by the 8TiB max expansion of other legacy models. Depending on what drive configuration you started with all those years ago, you may be hitting that limit. If that is the problem, the only solution is backup, factory default with the new capacity in place, and restore.
Ahh, the 8TB 'expansion limit' could be the issue... I wasn't aware of that! Dissapointing. But this would explain why RAIDar (and the Dashboard) both show the drive 'green'/OK, but with no extra capacity (the total useable size is unchanged since the 2TB was swapped out for the 4TB).
I now have some decisions to make... factory re-set and install from backup (a huge amount of work, but yes... I do have backups of everything, thankfully) and hope that the unit is capable of using the 4 x 4TB drives.
Or,
Bite the bullet and upgrade to a new NAS. The second option would probably take marginally less time as I could transfer from the existing ReadyNAS to the new one without having to mount all the backup drives (spread over several smaller drives).
Unless there is a neat way to switch out the drives from my existing unit to a new one?
Do the newer ReadyNAS have any similar expansion limits?
Another quick thought... I assume it would be OK to take out the new 4TB drive and replace the 2TB drive since I am not gaining any capacity? This was I have a spare 4TB for use elsewhere (or in the same unit after re-configuring).
Bite the bullet and upgrade to a new NAS. The second option would probably take marginally less time as I could transfer from the existing ReadyNAS to the new one without having to mount all the backup drives (spread over several smaller drives).
You could set up backup jobs in either NAS to migrate the data directly. So this would be quite a bit easier.
Unless there is a neat way to switch out the drives from my existing unit to a new one?
No, there's no way to directly migrate. It is possible to temporarily mount the drives in a new NAS for offloading data - though that requires help from paid support, and would only make sense if your NV+ v2 wasn't working.
I assume it would be OK to take out the new 4TB drive and replace the 2TB drive since I am not gaining any capacity?
I don't own the v2, and am not sure. But my guess is that you would end up with a degraded volume if you tried this. The RAID volume did expand, but the file system didn't - so it is basically stuck in the middle of the process.
@StephenB Many thanks for replying again. It would probably be best not to take out the new 4TB drive then; and I can see why if the volume is reporting as having completed the expanion... that's a shame as I was hoping that I could use this drive in a new NAS. I think this 8TB limit 'issue' is going to end up costing me alot of money 😞
Right, now I need to justify to my wife the expense of a new NAS 'just to avoid having DVDs and Blurays lying around'! That's a discussion for a different forum!
I think this 8TB limit 'issue' is going to end up costing me alot of money 😞
You can back up the NAS, and then do a factory default (setting up the NAS again, and reloading the files from backup). That would give you a 12 TB volume. You should have a backup anyway, as RAID isn't enough.
A 10 TB WD Easystore should be enough to back up your current NAS.
Well, just to update, I have started the laborious process of transferring the 9TB of data from the ReadyNAS to an external WD Elements drive. I will then perform a factory reset of the ReadyNAS with the 4 x 4TB drives in it. Then I shall copy it all back to the ReadyNAS! I decided to do this rather than use the myriad of smaller backup HDDs I have.
I understand that the ReadyNAS will revert too its factory status, but I cannot see a way of backing up the settings (services, DNS settings, ethernet addresses etc). So I have taken screen caps of most of the settings pages from the web interface... unless anyone has any brighter suggestions?
Thanks again for the help. I'll post back when I (hopefully) complete the switch-over.
1) I backed up all my data to an external WD Elements drive connected to the rear USB on the ReadyNAS. The other option would have been to use the myriad of smaller drives that house my backups but this would have taken even longer. I used Teracopy with verification.
2) Factory reset to X-RAID 2 with the three original 4TB drives and the new 4TB. After the normal factory reset wait while the drives and firmware were checked, I was pleased to see that the ReadyNAS was given the IP address I had set up originally (I think I must have reserved this address for this MAC address on my R7000). The front panel also reported looked normal; '10.9/10.9 TB' available... as expected!
But...
3) I tried to sign in using the ReadyNAS Dashboard (web interface) and it reported that the 'Device is offline. Please wait'. I wasn't expecting this so I had a look using RAIDar. This reports that the volume is in recovery... the first three discs are all solid green, but the fourth is flashing and predicting 20 hours before it's finished 'recovery'. After some time, the LCD front panel is now showing 'Resync C: 2.5%', so I hope everything is proceeding as normal? I'm just a bit surprised that the fourth disc needed this, as it appeared to have done this after installing it initially - perhaps the 8TB expansion limit 'feature' means that the new drive wasn't actually sync'd at all.
Thanks again to you all... I'll update again when things proceed - maybe this will be useful for others in the same boat!
Assuming (hoping!) that this all works as predicted, does this mean that my ReadyNAS is starting with 12TB and can therefore be expanded by another 8TB to 20TB before I need to go though another factory reset?
After some time, the LCD front panel is now showing 'Resync C: 2.5%', so I hope everything is proceeding as normal? I'm just a bit surprised that the fourth disc needed this, as it appeared to have done this after installing it initially - perhaps the 8TB expansion limit 'feature' means that the new drive wasn't actually sync'd at all.
The volume does need to be re-created when you do a factory reset - and that takes some time. The process involves reading or writing every sector on every disk (it's not just about disk 4). It's normal for the front panel to call this a resync. I'm not sure why RAIDar is labeling this as "recovery" though. Either way, just wait for it to complete.
Assuming (hoping!) that this all works as predicted, does this mean that my ReadyNAS is starting with 12TB and can therefore be expanded by another 8TB to 20TB before I need to go though another factory reset?
The NAS is starting at 12 TB - but there are two expansion limits. The NAS can't expand over 16 TB total volume size either.
So the max capacity of your NAS is 16 TB. You could get there by upgrading two of the drives to 8 TB Ironwolf later on. After that, you should replace the NAS with a newer OS-6 model that doesn't have these expansion limits.
The re-build/sync or whatever it was doing to disk 4 has now complated after ~24 hours.
I can log in to the web interface now using the default login details. I went straight to the backup/restore section and navigated to the zipped folder that the device saved. After a re-boot I was able to login using the changed login and password, so this part seems to have worked OK. But the sharing protocols and their settings have not restored to their previous setting, despite backing up everything except 'Everything' and 'Data Volumes'. Thankfully I took some screen captures of some of the protocol settings pages, but I would have thought these should have been restored?
Have I done anything daft?!
As a side-note, I'd love to know what settings/permissions are recommended for NFS and SMB... I'm using the ReadyNAS purely to serve all music and videos to an Nvidia Shield and my Windows PC; all on the same network.
But the sharing protocols and their settings have not restored to their previous setting, despite backing up everything except 'Everything' and 'Data Volumes'. Thankfully I took some screen captures of some of the protocol settings pages, but I would have thought these should have been restored?
Have I done anything daft?!
I've never owned a v2, so I don't have first-hand experience on what settings it saves. I've have also expected protocol settings to be saved/restored though. FWIW, I have seen that not all settings are carried over with OS-6 NAS too, so it is good that you took the screen captures.
As a side-note, I'd love to know what settings/permissions are recommended for NFS and SMB... I'm using the ReadyNAS purely to serve all music and videos to an Nvidia Shield and my Windows PC; all on the same network.
One challenge here is that the software manual doesn't say what settings 5.3.x firmware lets you change. But I'd start with the default settings for both protocols. They will be set to allow anyone on your local network to access the NAS (which sounds like it should be ok for your environment).
