I have a ReadyNAS 104 with one 3TB drive (up to now). It's configured as X-RAID and I wish to remove Disc 1 and replace with with another identical drive (I want to return Disc 1).
I inserted the new drive as Disc 2 and it's currently Rebuilding Raid 1. Once this is completed should I power down and...
- Remove Disc 1 and reboot leaving Disc 2 as is? - Remove Disc 1 and move Disc 2 into the Disc 1 slot?
I am going to run for a while with only one drive. However I will eventually add the second, third, etc. I need to know how best to configure the NAS once the rebuilding has completed.
You can remove disk 1 and leave disk 2 as is. It's reasonable to reboot, but it isn't strictly necessary.
The volume will be shown as degraded until you put in a replacement drive. The system will still work, but you are losing raid redundancy when you go back to one disk.
When you do add drives, hot-insert them (NAS running). There is no need to format them first.
Thanks. I know I'm running without any redundancy and that's fine... the important data is backed up elsewhere. I read about the hot-insert on their support pages and that's how I added the second drive. I wish there was a take the NAS offline and do a turbo rebuilding option. 🙂 1.5TB of data is estimated at 9 hours or so including a 640GB iSCSI empty drive if it comes into play.
OK. The rebuilding finished and I powered down and removed Disc 1. After a boot it obviously states data: DEGRATED. Is there any way I can turn off the flashing message on the LCD display and the flashing power button? I presume I could downgrade the drive from X-RAID to Flex-RAID?... and perhaps upgrade back to X-RAID from Flex-RAID?
I don't know of any way to suppress the lights and messages. Support might be able to to help though. What you actually want is to finesse the system so that it treats the volume as jbod (as it was before).
You could try switching to flexraid. I don't think that will help,but am not sure. That's not a downgrade btw, just a different approach to managing the raid volumes.
You might need to do a factory reset and rebuild the NAS. You'd need to reload your data from a backup to do that.
For future reference, it would have been better in this case to clone the old disk drive, and insert the clone with the NAS powered down.
I don't know of any way to suppress the lights and messages. Support might be able to to help though. What you actually want is to finesse the system so that it treats the volume as jbod (as it was before).
You could try switching to flexraid. I don't think that will help,but am not sure. That's not a downgrade btw, just a different approach to managing the raid volumes.
You might need to do a factory reset and rebuild the NAS. You'd need to reload your data from a backup to do that.
For future reference, it would have been better in this case to clone the old disk drive, and insert the clone with the NAS powered down.
I meant downgrade as in Netgear touts X-RAID as being one of its benefits compared to other NAS devices. I switched to Flex-RAID and it was still reported as Degraded. It switched instantly... switched back to X-RAID and nothing changed.
Yeah - normally I would copy the data to another drive and re-install. I thought this way would be an easier path and it was outside of the flashing light show. I have cloned quite a few Windows drives and yes that would be been the best way and probably the fastest.
I couldn't just re-install the OS without wiping the data from the drive?
At this point the system configuration "knows" that this is a RAID-1 volume with a missing disk. An OS reinstall won't change that. Support (and possibly some others here) might know how to finesse the system so it no longer thinks that, but it is new territory for me - I'm not sure I'd find all the relevant settings.
XRAID is definitely a benefit. Overall it is a bit like the automatic vs manual transmission in an automobile. The automatic transmission is simpler to use, but it has its drawbacks too.
I figured as much. I thought of powering down and moving it to the first slot but again it's probably flagged as #2. Then converting to Flex-RAID and seeing if it was happy with just one disk in slot one. It won't be the first time... the important data is backed up elsewhere... but I'll probably just copy the data to an external drive and factory reset with the drive in slot one.
