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I just purchased 2 more 4TB drives to replace the 1TB drives as I need more capacity.
I've swapped in a 4TB drive to replace the first 1TB drive and it took 24 hours to recover the data (orange to green status) but LED display now says "reshaping" (or "syncing" if you looking in admin portal) of the data is going to take another 32 hours. I'm presuming "reshaping" here means spreading the data more efficiently across the 4 drives?
Thing is though that I'm not done yet as still the other 1TB drive to replace.
QUESTION then; can I halt/ignore the reshaping and now swap in the other 4TB drive before reshaping has finished as seems more productive to me to have my full compliment of new drives installed before it does it's final reshaping rather than do this lengthy operation twice.
That is what I do. My main NAS is a pro-6 with a 15 TB RAID-5 volume. I have two backup NAS - an RN102 and an RN202, both with 6 TB + 8 TB jbod (two volumes on each). I learned pre-nas that it was wise to have 3 copies of everything I care about.
I also use crashplan cloud backup for disaster recovery, but I am not so confident in any cloud backup to rely on it completely. At some point I might drop one of the backup NAS and rely on crashplan (or amazon cloud) for the second copy.
I think another option is to use 8 TB usb drives (though you'd need two of course). If a lot of the data is archival, you could use a Seagate SMR drive for that.
Is there a way I can end up with just a single layer? Does having the 2 layers become a performance hit over what i would have had if i started with 4x4TB disks?
I think there would be a small performance hit from having multiple layers (more layers for the system to manage would take a little more effort) but the network connection would be more of a bottleneck most likely so you probably wouldn't notice any difference.
It can make data recovery (we sell contracts for data recovery attempts) a little more complicated (in the unlikely event a data recovery attempt is needed) if you have multiple RAID layers but we do have ways of trying to recover information about the partitions (in the unlikely event we need to do that as that shouldn't be lost). The logs zip download can be useful in such cases too if you happened to have downloaded that.
It would be best practice (though not essential) to download the logs and to download a fresh set after each disk replacement. It would be best to keep the logs zip download in a safe place other than the NAS.
Any I do backup my critcial data, just not all 16TB. A lot of what I store are Virtual Machines which if I lost wouldnt be as bad as losing important docs or pictures which much easier to backup.
Point here I'm making is to backup everything so I could factory reset and restore is not practical here.
Shame you cant combine them via util once you have added bigger disks and you know the fress space is there to move all data off of that layer to the larger one.
That is what I do. My main NAS is a pro-6 with a 15 TB RAID-5 volume. I have two backup NAS - an RN102 and an RN202, both with 6 TB + 8 TB jbod (two volumes on each). I learned pre-nas that it was wise to have 3 copies of everything I care about.
I also use crashplan cloud backup for disaster recovery, but I am not so confident in any cloud backup to rely on it completely. At some point I might drop one of the backup NAS and rely on crashplan (or amazon cloud) for the second copy.
I think another option is to use 8 TB usb drives (though you'd need two of course). If a lot of the data is archival, you could use a Seagate SMR drive for that.
