I have a EX4100, which was originally built with 3 X 3TB WD NAS Red Drives in RAID 5. I have bought an additional 3TB WD NAS Red Drive. With the new HDD installed the interface says that all disk are healthy. But the unit has gone into standby mode and the LED for the new drive is red. Shouldn’t the system just accept the new drive and rebuild the RAID 5 across it? Does the drive have to be formatted or something before it is installed?
Hello,
Have you tried resetting the unit and installing the drive again.
You should get the option on the dashboard to add the new drive to the RAID.
Tried rebooting and installing the drive again same issue.
Haven’t tried it. I’ll give it a go this evening.
Yeah I’ve tried ll the above.
To be honest I can’t believe how difficult an expensive bit of kit is!.
so much for plug and play and for feeling confident about backing up all my files on a system that i have to reset to even try to make work, fresh out of the box.
I spent over 4 hours with phone support not 3 weeks back and they struggled to work it out, then we finally figured it was good. i went away for break came back and tried again. same result.
pretty pathetic.
I’m trying to get online with them now.
Daryl,
I went from 2 drives (RAID 1) to 4 drives (RAID 5) and according to the WD doco, should have been able to convert the RAID and expand it. Yeah, that did not work, so ended up backing up all the data and rebuilding the Array as RAID 5 from scratch. Luckily I had another NAS to backup to for a short period of time.
When I was looking at the commands that were running in the backend, to me it looked like it was running the wrong commands when doing the conversion. Can’t remember exactly what it wa running at the time but do recall it looked wrong and is probably why I ended up somehow witha 4 drives RAID2 that was 3 TB usable (each drives is 3TB).
Good luck!!!
JediNite
In regards to your statement, “I went from 2 drives (RAID 1) to 4 drives (RAID 5) and according to the WD doco, should have been able to convert the RAID and expand it.” Where did you find documentation on expanding the capacity by adding drives? I have tried searching for this and have looked through the manual but haven’t found any instructions on how to do this.
@msmt25,
I think I only saw a one liner in a spec sheet or the like saying it was possible to do a RAID migrate from RAID 1 to RAID 5. To put it simply it does not work. When I did it, it did expand a two disk RAID 1 to a 4 disk RAID 1 (so did not convert it to a RAID 5) and also did not give me the options to expand the storage. You are best to still back up your NAS to another location and then build a new RAID from scratch.
Cheers,
JediNite
