NAS Drive Full - what's best

Simply add another NAS, promote it to a Music Store and ensure it is allocated to Store Priority 1, then all future rips will head its way. HDX will then create library from both NAS drives.

Hope this helps.

Tony

Is your current ReadyNas setup for mirroring?

If so I would be tempted to buy a 4 bay NAS next time, put 4 (identical) disks in and configure for RAID 5. With RAID 5 you lose less capacity with the redundancy, i.e. with 4 disks you get 3 disks worth of capacity.

Once you have copied the files over I would break the RAID array on the old NAS and use as a backup drive. 

The new 4 port ReadyNas drives are pretty good, the firmware is very different and was rather flakey when they came out but now seem nice and solid. It has a backup facility built in which can run to a schedule.

Richard

Richard, does that mean I can take the two discs out of my current ReadyNAS Duo and put them in two of the four slots in the 4 bay one?  Or do I have to copy all the stuff from the old Duo to the 4 bay?

I have put an ebay bid in on a second-hand Duo as it happens but I'll go check out the 4 bay model. 

I'm no technophobe but I might struggle working out what breaking the RAID array means.  Can you point me to the right website which will teach me?

Peter

No, when the NAS is setup the disks are initialised and the operating system is copied to disk. This will wipe them.

If the NAS drive is identical and on the same version of the firmware you can get away with it, but I would always prefer to have at least 1 backup and mot do this; you do backup I hope?

Richard

I think so.  I thought the setup was that the Duo was so that the two drives are identical copies of one another so that in the event of failure you have a backup.  Or am I supposed to do something different?  I probably need to study this subject more. 

Hi,

I take it you didn't change the raid settings out of the box? It should default to using Raid-x, Netgear's own version of Raid. This should allow you to 'hot swap' your hdd's for larger ones. I would recommend getting 2x Western digital WD RED WD30EFRX drives. That's 3tb, should hold a few more albums.

I believe you can hot swap the drives, meaning that if you remove 1 of the drives and slot a new one in, it will re-mirror everything off the 2nd older drive still in the NAS. The procedure would go as follows.

1. With the NAS still powered up, remove drive no1.

2. Replace that drive in the cradle with a new 3tb drive.

3. Slot the new drive back in to the NAS, wait for the NAS to finish mirroring from the 2nd drive.

4. Remove and replace 2nd drive with new 3tb drive

5. wait for it to mirror again

6. Done!

Peter

It sounds like you are not doing backups but relying on the mirroring in the Duo?

If so then whilst J Saville is correct that you can normally swap drives in and they will build onto the larger disk I have worked in IT for long enough to learn that you don't do such things without a separate backup.

OK, you can argue that the disk you take out is a backup but I would still err on the side of caution and start afresh and use the old NAS drive as a backup drive once you have moved over.

Re-ripping 2150 would not be fun!

Richard

The original Ready NAS Duo will only take disks up to 2TB. A more modern NAS would allow 4TB disk to be fitted.

If the OP only has 1TB disks at the moment he could change to 2TB disks but copying the music would be a challenge.

I keep 4 copies of my music. Two on separate non mirrored disks in my Ready NAS Duo and two on separate disks in my PC. One of the drives in my NAS failed. Fortunately I got various warnings so I managed to get a free replacement before I lost any data.

I have about 1000cds and thats about 500gb. I suspect the op is running 1tb disks, in which case the easiest upgrade is to buy some 2tb disks, and swap them one at a time. The readynas will then increase its capacity. I did that with mine and it worked a treat. you put the first disk in and everything is copied across, and then you put the second disk in, and again everything copies, and then the size is increased. Everything being automatic and pretty foolproof.

Steven, I am planning on buying two
Seagate ST2000DM001 Barracuda 2TB 3.5" Hard Disk Drive 7200rpm SATA 6Gb/s

Does that look about right for what I need to do and will those disks go into a ReadyNAS Duo? 

Does anyone know if I can set  up to use the two 2TB drives for my music and back it all up once on the pair of old 1TB drives?  Is that straightforward to do?

Those drives appear on the Netgear compatibility list so presumably OK:

http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/20641

It if was me, I would copy the data to another drive via my network as the first move.  That much data will take a while to copy, but you could do it in stages. 

Another vote for copying everything on a third drive first.

Then I'd proceed with J Saville's procedure.

Lately I've been buying Seagate disc as well - good performance and quite silent. Nothing wrong with WD Red either.

I'd hot swap to a larger drive, having established compatibility. It's quick and painless. But if you opt for a second NAS, go for more bays and HDD capacity than you think you will ever need. And watch them fill up!

its just a case of removing one disk and putting in a new one. Waiting for a few hours until it says the disks are redundant, and then putting in the other one. Once the have sync'd, the capacity increases. I made a backup onto a portable drive first as a backup. This is easy to do by plugging in the portable drive into the usb port on the readynas and configuring a backup.

its definitely worth making a backup. If you've ripped 2000 CDs you definitely don't want to be doing that again.

What am I doing wrong?  I bought the 3tb discs you suggested and replaced one of the ones already in but it isn't recognised by the RAIDAR software.  Can you tell me what I should be doing differently?