Adding 2 new hard drives into a QNAP TS412

You don't even need to power down. If the new drives are going into a pair of empty bays that have never been used before, the discs will just initialise (will take a few hours) and when they are ready the control panel will tell you. You can then run them separately or as a mirrored pair, part of a stripe, etc.

(The following may be relevant or maybe not. I've just spent a week trying to expand the capacity of a mirrored pair of 1TB drives to 2TB on my 410. I thought WD Red HDDs were compatible and while they will work on my QNAP they have limited functionality and are not really suitable. They went straight into an older ReadyNAS and expanded just fine. )

I certainly hope it's not relevant as that's exactly the hard drives I have got also!

Thanks for the tip on not having to power down, will make life a bit easier.

any thoughts on what RAID configuration is best for homed media streaming and back-up?

SJB

Not quite what you were asking SJB, but I recently replaced all four of my seagate 1.5tb drives with four WD Red 2tb disks in a TS-412U. I have it configured as RAID5 and hot-swapped each disk one at a time, allowing the raid to rebuild itself before moving on to the next drive. It took me four days in total as each disk took 15 hours (left it run overnight after the first one), and then expanded the array to take advantage of the extra space.

The disk are working perfectly in the QNAP. One unexpected plus point is that the WD disks run at 32C whereas the seagate a ran at 39C.

Cheers.

Take it steady. The current drives, if they have stuff on will need to be left. You can raid the two new drives you have put in, but on the basis its only two drives you may as well mirror them.

If you put the two current drives into the mix, all data on them will be wiped.

I'm running a 410 which is not an up to date box and I expect Red HDDs will work more seamlessly with newer boxes. There is a compatibility chart on line, although it is misleading because they are supposed to be compatible with mine. It was only after the fact that I looked at some support forums and identified issues. They worked well enough but would not resize, which defeated the object. I know how to replace and resize HDDs and I'm confident that at least for the 410, there are issues with Red HDDs. Newer firmware might have helped but that can cause even more problems elsewhere.

I've got two mirrored 1TB pairs, one for ripped music and one for HiRes material, mostly downloaded but some ripped. It all works seamlessly. If I was looking at more AV orientated storage I would use one Raid 1 pair for music and the other for video. I really should look into this. It strikes me as complicated but I expect it isn't really.

QNAP has a process called online RAID migration which unless I'm really being dumb is meant to save the data on the original drives and spread them across a RAID 5 or RAID 10 array?

SJB

I wouldn't trust a qnap with yours.

Make sure all the data is backed up, or don't do it.

You have been warned.

Given that my recent QNAP experiences have left me somewhat jaded and I have good backups of my music collection elsewhere, any suggestions for a good, solid NAS please?

Or is it just the migration that's dodgy?

For me an hp proliant and OpenMediaVault.

You get a heck of a lot of bang for your buck.

Harry, I use a Netgear NAS Duo and I have found over the last couple of years it is totally reliable. I ensure I have a little UPS protecting it... I lost my previous  NAS in a power spike and outage... And I keep it doing weekly incremental backups to a seperate archive elsewhere in the house.. all in all hassle and worry free, and if it does need to tell you something, like UPS battery needs changing  or discs are above 80% full,then it simply sends you a little email.. Perfect and simple.

Simon

Thanks Gary.

An update.................

well when I went to put the 2 new 2TB WD drives into the NAS I found I hadn't kept (or at least can't find) the screws to attach the drives to their "ports". Presuming they were just standard "computer screws" I went and bought a pack (on Amazon - sad state of affairs for local shops- but that's another story) but found they were not correct, sticking out slightly. A lot of googling showed me that they are quite an uncommon type, but I came up with an email address. I sent an email away one night, expecting a long delay, but the next morning I had this email forwarded to a colleague in Holland who posted me spare screws. (I had to cover postage).

So when the disks were finally in situ I ran a migration process which changed my 2 disk array into a RAID 5 array. ( I did a back-up as advised). Well it wasn't quick, 3 days actually, but just now it hit 100% migration and now I have 4TB available and a capacity of 5.8TB and all my data safe and secure.

I can now start the mission of ripping the remaining 75% of my collection.

QNAP gets very bad press here so I thought I'd just add my 2c worth of a positive experience.

SJB

Thanks for that. I'm encouraged. Which WD HDDs did you use?

WD Red Drive,

WD 2TB 3.5" SATA-600 IntelliPower 64MB to give it's full title.

SJB

Many thanks.