TS 509 pro Changing disks question

[Tight_wad]

I have 5 x 1 tb hard drives in my Qnap at this time. I want to switch to 5 x 2tb hard drives. But at the moment I don't have the ability to back that much storage up on anything else. I am using Raid 5, with 90 percent used on my hard drives.

So here is my questions. If I remove one drive and replace it with a new drive, and let it do its thing, am I at high risk of loosing my data? If it does not work out, can I put the original disk back in and have everything work still?

How long does it take to go from 1 tb to 2 tb harddrive?

Any help would be appreciated!

 

[dje007]

If you keep swapping out the drives one at a time, until the raid is synced up then the next one.

About 7 days.

Dave

 

[Tight_wad]

If you keep swapping out the drives one at a time, until the raid is synced up then the next one.

About 7 days.

Dave

Wow that really bites. But then it to me 14.5 hours to set up the 5 x 1tbs the first time, with no data.

Thanks for the reply!

 

[Tight_wad]

Thanks for the advice.

I decided to go about it this way. I have ordered a Esata dock and 2 more 1 tb hard drives plus I have 3 x 1tb hard drives already not in use. And I will use that to make copies of my Nas. At least this will give me a total of 10 tb's that I can use as a back up of all of my files after I replace the 5 in my Nas with 5 x 2tb.

Hey new question, wouldn't it be faster to pull all 5 discs out at once and install the new ones? Then I could just download the data from my backup discs. And until I use the 5 that I pulled out, the could always be put back in, in the same order the came out, if I have any problems with the install of the new drives.

I also have a question about the Esata dock. Is it faster (or easier) to hook it directly to the Nas, or to my computer when I download the files? I was planning to use Total Commander file manager to do all of my file copies.

 

[thiggins]

Hey new question, wouldn't it be faster to pull all 5 discs out at once and install the new ones? Then I could just download the data from my backup discs. And until I use the 5 that I pulled out, the could always be put back in, in the same order the came out, if I have any problems with the install of the new drives.

Yes. If you already have the data backed up, it will be much faster to just create a new array.

I also have a question about the Esata dock. Is it faster (or easier) to hook it directly to the Nas, or to my computer when I download the files?

Direct attach will be faster. I measured it ~53 MB/s with the eSATA drive FAT or EXT3 formatted.

 

[Tight_wad]

I have all my data backup on to 4 separate 1 tb hard drives using an esata dock. Speed was really good at 76 to 88 MB/s.

Now I have to decide how I am going to setup the new 2tb drives. I was thinking that since I am going to be keeping backups, that I might setup for more capacity by doing either single or linear volume.

My understanding is that Single volumes would be each disk as it own volume. And would require a share on each disk to access the information. Also that if any disk failed, only that disks data would be lost.

And that Linear volume is one volume spread out over all of the disks. One share to access the data, similar to access to my Raid 5 setup. And if you have a drive failure, all data would be lost?

Are there any other advantage or disadvantages to these choices?

 

[thiggins]

The "linear" volume is also commonly known as JBOD (just a bunch of disks). The drives included in the volume are logically treated as one drive. If a drive fails, only the data on the disk is lost. But since you can't control which drive your data is stored on in a linear/JBOD volume, you won't know what data is lost until you go to access it.