Buffalo Terastation Disk Swap

[IAmATeaf]

Anybody out there done a disk swap on one these 4 bay NAS. Currently have 4 x 2Tb drives in there and I've gone out on a limb and purchased 4 x 6Tb drives to replace them with. Seemed easier to buy new drives then to sit down and work out what I should delete on the NAS to free up some space.

I've previously learnt the hard way that these types of NAS drives actually store their loader/firmware on the drives, had a Lacie before where I tried to swap the drives out for larger which turned into a bit of a mess in the end.

So reading on the internet, it's a case of backing up, breaking the current RAID, remove all but 1 disk using the Web GUI, shutdown, swap 3 of the drives, boot back up, wait for the NAS to go mental and then again use the Web GUI to rediscover and format the disks. If you've got this far then recreated the RAID and restore from backup.

Going to give this a go today but am looking for any pointers which might save me any brown trouser moments.

 

[IAmATeaf]

Just in case helps others, it's all gone pretty smoothly.

I've replaced 3 of the drives with 6Tb drives and the NAS although beeped like crazy for a while and showed red lights it's happily discovered and formatted the drives and they are now avialable for use.

Just need to free up 1 of the 6Tb drives as I used it to backup the contents of the NAS, so I'm now juggling the data around off the 6Tb onto the 2Tb drives that have come out in order to free the 6Tb so I can shove it in and recreate a RAID5 array.

The slow task of restoring all the data back to the NAS

 

[IAmATeaf]

Another update, from smoothly, it quickly went to getting dragged over cobbled stones in your undies.

Although the disks were picked up with no issues, I couldn't create a RAID5 array, it would create the array but then fail to load it. So I did some googling, managed to open up the SSH port of the NAS and connect to it using Putty. I then did some more reading and found out that v2.6 of Unix on the NAS only supports xfs RAID arrays up to a max size of 16TiB, so 17,592,186,044,416 bytes.

Having SSH access, I then proceeded to work out exactly what the NAS does when it creates an array. In the end what I ended up doing was letting the NAS format each disk and then using 'parted' to delete and recreate the 6th partition which is the data partition, reducing the size. Had to do this a number of times and then retry the creation of the array. Checking /var/logs/messages would show the actual size of the array created so after a few attempts I managed to get it below the above magical figure and the array was successfully created and mounted. I now have an array which is 16381.4GB in size. Another option was to just use 3 disks in RAID5 or all 4 disks in RAID10 but this would only have got me around 11.xGb and I wanted more

Not going to actively start using the NAS in case it throws up any other unknowns and will also wait until it's performed an array check which it's currently doing and does on the 1st of each month. Only real issue with the above is that you can't use some of the GUI tools to manage the array, will have to do that from the command line in the future but that's not an issue for me as I started off in IT working on Unix systems.