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Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

cpdp
Aspirant

Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

Hi,

I'd like to upgrade my ReadyNAS Duo with 1TB capacity with new HDDs. I see in the hardware compatibility list there's only disks with max 2TB of storage, but I need more for all my HD movies. I'm sure this topic has been discussed much, but are there any drives with 3TB or 4TB that work with the ReadNAS Duo?

thx a lot
c.
Message 1 of 13
PapaBear1
Guide

Re: Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

No. The sparc based Duo (and NV+) are incapable of supporting drives > 2TB because of the OS/CPU combination. If you need more space, you can either move to an NV+ and move your drives over and add two more, or move to an X-86 based unit. Since you apparently are saving HD movies, and even DVD movies eat up disk space rapidly, you should try to go to an Ultra 4/Ultra 4 Plus or Pro 4. They are much faster and offer a larger future volume size.

The NV+ will allow you to go from your current 930GB volume to one of 5.4TB which will buy you some time, but by going to the x-86 4 bay series, you can eventually move to a volume of > 8TB. (That is based on the current 3TB drives, it would be more if the drives keep getting larger).
Message 2 of 13
cpdp
Aspirant

Re: Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

okay I guess I'm gonna do that. But the Ultr has space for 4 disks and I thought with the RAID system it would backup the primary disk to 3 more disks..Is that correct?
Message 3 of 13
TeknoJnky
Hero

Re: Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

no. Raid is not a backup

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

with 3 or more disks, the amount of usable space increases, while 1 disk worth of space is also used for 'redundancy'. Redundancy means that if ONE disks fails, your data is still safe, you can replace the bad disk with a new one, and it will resync the necessary data to the new disk behind the scenes.

if 2 disks fail, then all your data will be lost.

larger models can use 'dual redundancy', these provide extra safety at the expense of losing a second disk worth of space.

in any case, if you got an ultra 4 and 4x 1 tb drives, this would give you approx 2.8tb of space (3x ~950gigs).
Message 4 of 13
mdntblu
Aspirant

Re: Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

I have a ReadyNAS Duo with 2 1TB hard drives and would like to install 2 2TB hard drives.
What is the best way to do this? Take out one of the drives, install the 2TB one and let it copy all the data to the 2TB, then remove the other 1TB and put in the 2nd new 2TB drive?
What checks do I need to do in order to make sure this works.
Thanks
Brad
Message 5 of 13
TeknoJnky
Hero

Re: Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

mdntblu wrote:
I have a ReadyNAS Duo with 2 1TB hard drives and would like to install 2 2TB hard drives.
What is the best way to do this? Take out one of the drives, install the 2TB one and let it copy all the data to the 2TB, then remove the other 1TB and put in the 2nd new 2TB drive?


essentially, yes.

What checks do I need to do in order to make sure this works.


well you should always have a backup of important data. Raid is not a substitute for backups.

one potential issue is, if you get 2tb drive with 4k sectors (aka 'advanced format'), you may need to factory default with 4.1.7 or higher in order to properly support these drives.

The the procedure would be something like:

put one of the new 2tb drives in an external usb case or hook it up to a PC and backup all your existing data across the network to the 2tb drive.

upgrade to 4.1.7 if you haven't already, then power down and remove and label your old 1tb drives.

put the other new 2tb drive in the device, power up and let it get initialized and re-configure it however you wanted.

restore the backed up data from usb or pc to the nas, once all data has been restored, you can then hot-add that 2tb drive from the usb/PC into the nas and it will initialize and resync.

once resync is complete and your volume status shows redundant, your all done.
Message 6 of 13
knutal
Aspirant

Re: Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

I might be mistaken here, but if you remove one of the 1TB drives and replace it with a 2TB while leaving the other 1TB disk in, wont the new 2TB disk mirror the 1TB drive, and end up with a 1TB partition and the remaining space of the 2TB unavailable?

Moving 1TB of data in the network takes a while, so if this works and I get all of the space on the new 2TB drive available by swapping drives a couple of times, that would be great.
Message 7 of 13
TeknoJnky
Hero

Re: Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

knutal wrote:
I might be mistaken here, but if you remove one of the 1TB drives and replace it with a 2TB while leaving the other 1TB disk in, wont the new 2TB disk mirror the 1TB drive, and end up with a 1TB partition and the remaining space of the 2TB unavailable?


yes, the 2tb drive will have 1tb usable space, after the resync completes (volume is redundant), replacing the other 1tb with another 2tb will expand.

so, mixed sized drives = smallest drives usable space.

adding 2 same size drives = expansion

Moving 1TB of data in the network takes a while, so if this works and I get all of the space on the new 2TB drive available by swapping drives a couple of times, that would be great.


yea it takes alot of time to move alot data, thats just the nature of the beast.

moving 4+ tb takes even longer... like a few days worth
Message 8 of 13
dfurdog
Aspirant

Re: Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

Hi I am about to commit to buying a diskless Readynas Duo and do not seem to be able to find a straight answer to this simple question: Can I put 2x2TB drives (from the recommended drives list) in the ReadyNas and and configure for Raid1 thereby having an effective capacity of 2TB with the second drive for failure redundancy?
Also has anyone compared the ReadyNas Duo with the Synology DS211J which is considerably more expensive?
thanks dfurdog
Message 9 of 13
Ruben_cc
Aspirant

Re: Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

TeknoJnky wrote:
...adding 2 same size drives = expansion...


Sounds nice, but did anyone actually ever do this and succeed?

A few months ago I tried "upgrading" a ReadyNAS Duo this way from 2x500GB to 2x1TB and failed. After replacing the second drive with one of the new 1TB drive it replicated like expected. When it was finished it replaced the first drive with the other new 1TB drive and in the end I just ended up with two brand new 500GB drives with 500GB lost space. In practice, it didn't work at all and I ended up copying the whole NAS to an external drive, do a factory reset and set up everything from scratch again, which kinda pissed me off.

Now I have a ReadyNAS Duo of my own and want to swap the 1TB drives with 2TB models, I don't want to make the same mistake again. Anyone can confirm this to actually work in the current Radiator version?
Message 10 of 13
InTheShires
Tutor

Re: Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

Ruben.cc wrote:
TeknoJnky wrote:
...adding 2 same size drives = expansion...


Sounds nice, but did anyone actually ever do this and succeed?


Yes, it worked fine for me. I replaced 2x 1tb drives with 2x 2tb hard drives.

I removed one of the 1tb drives and dropped in a 2tb, allowed it to resync, then once it had completed I added the second 2tb drive which eventually gave me 2tb of space. (With XRaid) There is a guide here somewhere which lays out the instructions, I followed the guide and all went well. I remember at the time of being unsure if I should "hot add" the new 2tb drive or not.
Message 11 of 13
InTheShires
Tutor

Re: Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

dfurdog wrote:
Hi I am about to commit to buying a diskless Readynas Duo and do not seem to be able to find a straight answer to this simple question: Can I put 2x2TB drives (from the recommended drives list) in the ReadyNas and and configure for Raid1 thereby having an effective capacity of 2TB with the second drive for failure redundancy?
thanks dfurdog


The ReadyNAS Duo uses Netgear's own RAID system called XRAID, or FlexRAID. But to answer your question, yes you can put 2x 2tb drives in the Duo, and have one of the 2tb drives using redundancy. There will be info and guides in the FAQ regarding this subject I should imagine.

Welcome to the forum.
Message 12 of 13
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: Upgrade ReadyNAS Duo with HDDs > 2TB

Flex-RAID allows you to use standard RAID levels e.g. RAID-0 (no redundancy), RAID-1 (two disks, with single disk redundancy). You can choose to use this following the guide here: Configuring Your ReadyNAS for Flex-RAID

Using Flex-RAID is more complicated and I wouldn't recommend it. The default X-RAID will suit you fine. The filesystem used isn't proprietary. The ReadyNAS uses Linux LVM RAID. What's proprietary about X-RAID is the scripts etc. used to automate the expansion process.
Message 13 of 13
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