Increasing storage Space PR4100

My Cloud OS 5 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud Pro Series
1

Hi everyone. I tried to browse the intructions of the products, then the web and I surprisingly didn’t find my answer. So I searched here, but I’ve only found old messages, and I can’t understand If I’m just plain dumb or what :sweat_smile:

I have a PR4100, firmware 5.24.108.
I used to have 4 x 4 Tb drives in RAID5, and I wanted to upgrade to 4 x 8 Tb.

I read somewhere that the easiest way was to swap drives one by one, letting the NAS to automatically rebuild the volume.

After the first drive swap, I had a doubt. if it “rebuilds a volume”, won’t it rebuild a volume of just 12 Tb + parity like it used to be? :thinking:

And it seems it was a reasonable doubt, since now I have 4 x 8 Tb drives in RAID5 but just a 12Tb volume…

Isn’t there a way to increase the space of the volume without starting from scratch or making a second volume?

I also have a secondary question…
After EVERY rebuilt I had the following notifications:

  1. rebuild complete
  2. Caution, Volume 1 is faulty - please scan disk
  3. Everything is fine

When I got rid of that caution notification, I checked all the diagnostics and everything was fine. I also performed a deep disk scan, which didn’t show any problem.

What could be the reason of the transitory “faulty” alert, then?

Thank you for your valuable help
Pino

2

somewhere in the utilities (or raid setup) - - - look for “Raid expand”.

3

I can only find “change RAID mode” or “add a new volume”.

If I type “raid expand” in the search box of the online manual, I don’t get any result.

4

I assume that you will first rebuild the RAID5 after swapping each drive one-by-one.

And after you have finished swapping all drives and rebuilding each time you will get the option to expand.

Not sure though, I have never done this and I don’t trust the WD Utilities.

5

Yep.

Nope.

6

I found that a FULL USB backup and restore took less time when I did a 4x2 to a 4x4 upgrade
to all 4 TB red NAS disks.

You need a backup anyway

1 Like
7

Yeah, I’m preparing the second back up while still looking for a solution, you never know. If I won’t find a solution by the end of the backup I’ll erase the nas and fill it up again. What bugs me the most is rebuilding my Plex index

8

Is the “raid expand” option “under” the “change raid mode” button?

Take a gander at this page: My Cloud: Upgrade the Drives on a Device (RAID Expansion) (wd.com)

BTW: I trust this procedure as far as I can throw it. If it works. . .it will take 3 seconds. If it doesn’t work. . .all your data might be gone in 3 seconds.

1 Like
9

Thanks! This is what I was looking for, I wish I had found it earlier. I don’t understand why it is so well hidden :sweat_smile:

Anyway, I don’t have the “Expand” option, so I guess my RAID5 is one of the RAID5 modes that “don’t support expansion”… I don’t know why.
I’m afraid I’ll have to format everything and fill the NAS from scratch.

EDIT: oh that’s it…

RAID Volume Encryption is not Supported.

Darn.

1 Like
10

Thanks for sharing your experience with this. Good to know that encryption will not be supported but without it it should work. In any case, it might be easier to create a new NAS and transfer the data through external drives and thus also have backups.

11

Not supporting raid expand for an encrypted volume is troubling.

What happens if the NAS box (i.e motherboard) fails? Can you “migrate” the 4 encrypted drives to a new PR4100 and have it work?

(this presumes you can still buy a PR4100 going forward - - what if you can’t?)

(This is why drive encryption terrifies me)

12

You can use a new NAS enclosure. As long as you can find one new or used.

13

I also tried one by one changing my four 2Tbs to 4Tbs, but it didn’t expand the storage as i thought it would.

Then I found this post.

From what I understand i should have to have gone with the expand storage option every time I changed a disk right?

Should I go back to my 2Tbs and rebuild everyone again, and start over with the 4Tbs. Or do you think I could go with expand storage, take out the disk with red LED as described and just put in the same drive again? Since in theory it’s a 4Tb disk but just registered as a 2TB.