Expanding space in 4 bay NAS from 1 10TB Drive

[Karl]

Hi all,

I've got an Asustor Nimbustor 4 which has 4 bays, and houses 1 10TB Seagate Ironwolf drive.

The data on there is currently backed up via some external drives connected via USB, and a scheduled cloud backup.

I'm nearly out of space, and need to get some more. I wondered if there was a suggested approach going forward in terms of approach to RAID redundancy.

I saw this space calculator which blew my mind: https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-hard-drives/raid-calculator/

Should I be thinking about a particular approach to RAID, or a particular number of drives:
(1 8tb + 1 2tb vs 1 10tb)

Cheers for your thoughts.

 

[Karl]

Thanks taking the time to explain all this. I'm leaning towards just buying 3 more 10tb drives and going with RAID 10, but the price of drives is going to have to come down a little before I do that, so hoping for some sort of Black Friday deal!

 

[Karl]

Update fwiw @Snapshot - I found 3 10TB WD reds for £549 delivered, so went with that in the end. When they arrive I'm thinking I'll plug them in and opt for RAID 10.

As an additional thought to this, I actually have 2 external USB drives connected to my NAS doing weekly backups of data, and everything on the 10TB drive I have currently fits on these drives.

Is there any merit (provided I can maintain this external backup) in just slotting the drives in RAID 0 and then if one dies, put a new drive in and copy it all back over from the external disks?

 

[Karl]

That's a damn good price for those Reds.
There are some potential problems with your possible use of RAID 0.
You won't gain any effective speed as a Nimbustor 4 with four drives in RAID 10 will use most of the 2.5Gb/s ethernet. If you're only using it at 1Gb/s then any speed increase is completely irrelevant.
All your data currently fit on your external HDDs but you must allow for growth.
Your NAS is dead if a drive fails until you source a replacement and copy all the data back. With RAID10 you just carry on working.

thanks for this.

I’m only using gigabit because I can’t find a switch faster for a reasonable price (or I couldn’t find one at the time), but that’s worth knowing.

RAID 10 it is!

 

[Karl]

There are now several 5-port 2.5Gb/s switches for well under the £150 mark. I went for a TP-Link TL-SG105-M2 at £130 and it's been problem-free.

Yes I did see this, its gigabit brother is £100 cheaper so not justifiable for me for the time being, but I'll bear in mind that you've had good experiences with it. Do you have a 2.5ghz port on the back of your motherboard on your PC out of interest? Mine does, but it's a fairly new board.

 

[Karl]

@Snapshot - When you got your drives, did you just plug them in and then choose to migrate your volume to RAID 10? I'm doing this, and the Nimbustor is saying it's migrating to RAID 10 (I went through the wizard of selecting the 3 new disks), and yet once it's gone to 100% (doesn't take longer than a minute), storage manager opens up again, and it displays as a single volume again, the other drives marked as inactive. Also, the RAID option is greyed out. No activity, no "migrating" message, nothing. Did you get this?

 

[Karl]

No, because I've always started from scratch. However, Asustor has a load of training documents available. https://www.asustor.com/online/College_topic?topic=251 is a general introduction to RAID and https://www.asustor.com/online/College_topic?topic=352 is the one about data migration.

Thanks, yeah I was following those guides, but unfortunately there is some confirmation messaging in the dialogue boxes in their guide that I don’t get. I don’t think it’s working properly, going to have to submit a ticket

 

[Karl]

I've managed to get things moving at least by selecting RAID 5 from the RAID menu, and picking 2 of the 3 new drives to migrate my existing volume over to, and it is migrating. Once that's done, hopefully I can move on from there.

Considering that NAS boxes have a very small handful of jobs, you'd think they could handle them...

 

[Karl]

Update: Wish I'd never bothered trying to be clever. Successfully migrated from single volume on 1 drive to 3 drives with RAID 5. I then clicked 'add an extra disk' button for the fourth drive, and the whole lot completely died on me, NAS inaccessible, and when turned off and on again, just beeped at me like I was a right **** for even trying.

Ended up removing all drives except the first two, which allowed it to boot, then while it was switched on and in the admin panel, plugged the other two drives in, and deleted the volume and recreated it afresh in RAID 10. Now restoring from my external backup disks, wishing I'd just done that in the first place.

My advice to all would be: If you have an Asustor device, just make sure your NAS is backed up, and wipe it if you're changing RAID status. Start again. It'll save a lot of pain, even if it costs you double the amount in backup disks!!!