I have a ReadyNAS Ultra 6 with 4 drives in one RaidX of 4 4TB drives that is running out of free space. So I want to add 2 3TB drives to fill out the 6 slots. I have physically inserted 2 drives into the remaining slots and they are recognized as 3TB drives. On the admin Volumes page whe I hover over those slots I see descriptive into on each drive.
After selecting one drive I click on Format and get a pop-up saying I must enter FORMAT to continue. So I do that and click Format button in the pop-up. A busy cursor appears for about 5 seconds and then goes away. Nothing else seems to be happening. I wait a few hours and still nothing. I do this for the second added drive and exactly the same behavior occurs.
I look at the log and there is nothing added. Nothing at all concerning formatiing but I see where the system recognized the insertion of the drives.
I wasn't sure where these added drives came from so I pulled them out and put them into a Windows 7 machine and used it to initialize them as GUID drives. Tried all above again and got same result.
Any ideas or tips? What SHOULD be happening after I start the formatting?
Ultra 6 is latest firmware 6.4.1. I updated just before starting this procedure. Maybe I should not have.
Adding new disks to an existing XRAID of 2 or more disks should be done one disk at a time. Can you still access the files without the new disks you have inserted? Do you have full backup of the data?
I can still access the data and I'm in the process of making a complete backup. (This unit as actually the backup of another ReadYNAS unit, so making a backup of it is somewhat redundant, but nevertheless important.)
I tried adding the disks individually. I only added the second disk to see if the priginal problem was specific to the first disk. The disks are on the HCL list. The disks do not have any existing partitions. I just initialized them but did not create any partitions yet.
Best way here is have a full back up, once done, insert all disks you want to use with the NAS then factory reset. In this way, NAS will format all the disks to it file system format then it will allow you to select if XRAID or FlexRAID and create volume.
Yeah, that's pretty much where we got when thinking it through.Luckily we planned for complete duplication of everything so we can take the factory reset route without much risk.
Yes, it IS legacy hardware that is no longer supported and, yes, this unit was never suposed to run OS6 anyway, but still it is annoying that there is no way to peek into what is happening and see why the single drive formatting is just failing with no logging at all.
The problem here is that the drives you added are smaller than the existing disks in the system. X-RAID will accept disks that are at least as large as the existing disks in the system. Smaller capacity disks cannot be used to expand the system.
So if getting 4TB disks instead is not an option you could backup your data, do a factory default (wipes all data, settings, everything) and restore from backup. Or you could switch to Flex-RAID and create a RAID-1 volume using the two 3TB disks.
Curious that despite researching, aquiring and using 4 different ReadyNAS units over several years, this piece of information never reached my brain. Should the documentation emphasize this more? I say yes.
Also, curious that the failure happens during the formatting of the drives and not later. Also, that the failure just happens with no notification or explanation to the user. Please enhance the admin pages so that this is explained when it happens.
I will try a 4TB drive and report back before closing this thread.
Maybe to some of us this has always seemed intuitive.
The X-RAID2 in action graphic showed equal capacity disks being added then larger disks. It has always been implied in our explanations whether or not it is explicitly stated.
We can expand a volume not shrink it using X-RAID. Expanding is much safer than shrinking a volume.
To add 3TB disks to a volume with 4TB disks you would need to shrink some partitions. This would involve doing a defrag, shrinking the volume, resizing the partitions to make it smaller, adding the 3TB disk in and then adding an additional partition for the extra space on the 4TB disks and expanding again. Quite complicated and with much more potential for things to go wrong.
When expanding a volume redundancy is no longer there or reduced (if using a dual-redundant volume) until the sync completes. So it is advisable to update your regular backup before adding disks to expand your volume.
But what I remember most of all was the fact that you did not need to closely match the drives in the raid array when using X-RAID. In fact, they did not have to be all the same size in the same array. This was a real selling point. I do not remember any restrictions on it.
They don't all have to be the same size. With 4TB disks installed now you could add e.g. 6TB disks instead of 4TB disks, but the smallest capacity disks must be put in the NAS first.
Using X-RAID2 (single-redundancy) if you had say 6x4TB disks installed you would need to replace at least two of them (one at a time of course, wait for resync to complete before replacing the next disk) with higher capacity disks e.g. 6TB disks to get vertical expansion. The volume will only expand when redundant space can be added.
So I added a 4TB disk and it immediately showed a green light on the Volumes admin page. No chance to format it. it looks exactly like the other disks in the X-RAID array.
However, the total space and free space have not changed. I left it overnight and still no changes in the totals.
I cannot see anything else I can do. Back to being frustrated again.
Maybe to some of us this has always seemed intuitive.
The X-RAID2 in action graphic showed equal capacity disks being added then larger disks. It has always been implied in our explanations whether or not it is explicitly stated.
Clearly the expansion constraints do confuse many people. We've had 2-3 threads from people who were tripped up on this over the past couple of days, and it comes up all the time.
Though upgrading the documentation on an eol platform doesn't make sense, it would be a good KB article (likely we'd need one for each of the three firmware familes, since the constraints are somewhat different for each).
Linking a KB article like that to the RAID calculator might also help users avoid the traps (before they purchase disks that can't be used).
So I added a 4TB disk and it immediately showed a green light on the Volumes admin page. No chance to format it. it looks exactly like the other disks in the X-RAID array.
However, the total space and free space have not changed. I left it overnight and still no changes in the totals.
Do you know the original configuration of the NAS?
The other constraints on expansion with OS 4.2:
-a volume cannot expand over 16 TiB
-a volume cannot expand more than 8 TiB from its initial size.
You might be running into the second constraint. Are you seeing any expansion failures in the log?
If someone from Netgear offers to take a look at the logs, then that would be the best next step.
You could also try removing the drive, unformat it on a PC (not format it), and then reinsert the drive.
In Windows, you can unformat the drive by opening opening "manage PC", and scrolling down to the disk section. Then select each "volume" on the disk and delete it.
Another way is to zero the drive with the vendor diagnostic (likely WDC's lifeguard in your case, since HGST is owned by WDC). Lifeguard as a "quick zeroing" text, which does zero the partition information on the drive.
