Need to swap out with larger HDD in my NAS running RAID5. Is it plug and play?

Raymond Lin · 19 Dec 2024 at 19:35

My ancient Netgear ReadyNAS 104 has 4 HDD in it, it has 4 x 3TB drives and it is running out of space.

I want to replace them with larger drives and the latest firmware suggest it doesn't have a limit but my bank balance does so going to do it slowly, perhaps 2 drives at a time with

It is running RAID 5. I forgot what that means, I set it up over a decade ago, so my question is can I remove one of the drive when it is powered on and replace with a larger on. Wait a few days for it to rebuild, then replace another?

Or do I turn it power it down first and swap?

EDIT - It is running X-RAID.

What is X-RAID and how does it work with my ReadyNAS OS 6 storage system?

kb.netgear.com

Snapshot · Friday at 09:58

Although hot-swap is probably supported, I would power the NAS down to swap disks. This is purely personal preference so check if hot-swap is supported and do whichever you please.

Yes, you can replace one drive at a time but, in terms of disk usage X-RAID seems very similar to RAID5 so rebuilding after a drive swap will put quite a lot of strain on the drives. If they are ten+ years old I would worry about one failing during the rebuilds which would probably mean losing the data. I would strongly recommend backing up your data to an external device, replacing all the drives at once then copying it back.

Raymond Lin · Friday at 10:23

Snapshot said:
Although hot-swap is probably supported, I would power the NAS down to swap disks. This is purely personal preference so check if hot-swap is supported and do whichever you please.

Yes, you can replace one drive at a time but, in terms of disk usage X-RAID seems very similar to RAID5 so rebuilding after a drive swap will put quite a lot of strain on the drives. If they are ten+ years old I would worry about one failing during the rebuilds which would probably mean losing the data. I would strongly recommend backing up your data to an external device, replacing all the drives at once then copying it back.

I don't have enough spare storage externally to fit the 8TB in this NAS, I have the 4TB SSD that I am going to use for my new Mac Mini that is currently empty.

I think the plan is

1 - Delete as much junk first as possible
2 - Move the rest into my Drobo
3 - Back up the remaining data into an external SSD temporarily.
4 - Remove all the drives
5 - Put in Two 8TB drives
6 - Move the data from the SSD back in
7 - Add 2 more 8TB drives later down the line.

Also separately do a clean up in my Drobo too.

Or new plan.....

1 - Clean up, free space for now, enough to save up to...Point 2..
2 - Get new NAS with 4 bay, 2 x 16TB drives first.

The price differences will just be the NAS....and I get to get a faster connection too.

Snapshot · Friday at 23:02

Old plan would have worked but new plan is certainly better as NAS technology has come a long way in the last decade. If you're not planning to run loads of apps then I suggest the Asustor DRIVESTOR 4 Pro Gen2 (AS3304T v2) would be a good choice otherwise moving up to the Nimbustor 4 Gen2 (AS5404T) would be my pick. I admit I'm an Asustor fanrinkli but it really does offer the best value hardware of the three major NAS brands.

Raymond Lin · Friday at 23:29

Snapshot said:
Old plan would have worked but new plan is certainly better as NAS technology has come a long way in the last decade. If you're not planning to run loads of apps then I suggest the Asustor DRIVESTOR 4 Pro Gen2 (AS3304T v2) would be a good choice otherwise moving up to the Nimbustor 4 Gen2 (AS5404T) would be my pick. I admit I'm an Asustor fanrinkli but it really does offer the best value hardware of the three major NAS brands.

I don't plan to run any apps at all, might be a cloud server or a Plex server at most.

DragonQ · Monday at 10:05

I have 4x 10TB WD Reds that I want to sell soon. Would they be of interest? Details here:

6 years old so no warranty but no issues with any of them so far
CMR
Start/stop counts: ~12k
Power on hours: ~55k
All error/sector/retry counts: 0
ZFS scrubbed once a month with 0 errors

P.S. I would also agree that copying the pool over to new disks is a better plan than replacing one drive at a time: much less strain on the drives and lower risk of failure. I did this recently and used my desktop to hold the new disks temporarily for the data transfer before swapping them out. Just about had enough SATA ports!

Raymond Lin · Monday at 10:08

DragonQ said:
I have 4x 10TB WD Reds that I want to sell soon. Would they be of interest? Details here:

6 years old so no warranty but no issues with any of them so far

CMR

Start/stop counts: ~12k

Power on hours: ~55k

All error/sector/retry counts: 0

ZFS scrubbed once a month with 0 errors

P.S. I would also agree that copying the pool over to new disks is a better plan than replacing one drive at a time: much less strain on the drives and lower risk of failure. I did this recently and used my desktop to hold the new disks temporarily for the data transfer before swapping them out. Just about had enough SATA ports!

Thanks but I’ve managed to clear out 2.5TB over the weekend so I’m okay for a year or 2 now.