I have a ReadyNAS Duo V1 running RAIDiator 4.1.14 and I bought 2 Western Digital WD20EFRX-68EUZNO 2TB NAS Drives to replace the original 500GB drives but one of them was DOA. I have already reset it to Factory Defaults so I'm working with a completely blank drive and a clean config.
So here's my question: I have a really old Western Digital My Book 500GB external HD that is currently running fine with no symptoms of impending failure but I expect it to fail any day now due to age (its probably close to 10yrs old) and the drive has some extremely important data on it and it is the only copy of that data but I don't have anything else to back it up to. Therefore I would like to know if I go ahead and set up this NAS with the 1 2TB drive in it and copy everything over to it while I send the DOA drive off for replacement, when I receive the replacement drive and install it will the NAS automatically set the 2nd drive up as a mirror and copy all the data from drive 1 to it or does the ReadyNAS have to be set up with 2 drives from the get go to have the NAS automatically mirror. Should I just put my My Book in a safe place and wait for the 2nd drive to come in, set it up with the 2 drives, and backup all the data then or should I set it all up now and just install the 2nd drive when I get it?
My concern is that if I set it all up now and copy over my data that whenever I get the 2nd drive in I'm going to have to find something somewhere large enough to copy the contents to, copy everything back off the NAS, install the 2nd drive, factory reset it, and copy all my data back to the NAS a second time which obviously would be a huge pain and a big waste of time.
Sorry for the long winded post but I didn't want to leave any details out. I'm IT by trade but I just don't have any experience yet with the ReadyNAS products. Thank you in advance for the info.
If the duo is using xraid (the default) you can use the 2 TB drive you have. Later on hot-insert the second 2 TB drive, and it will automatically sync.
But note that if the first 2TB disk was to fail e.g. during the resync when you add the second 2TB disk you would lose potentially all of your data. So I would advise you to backup your important data. No important data should be stored on just the one device.
