PR4100 - SWAP back drives

[francen]

I’ve been using the WD PR4100 w/4 8Tb NAS drives for over 2 years … I’m running the latest firmware (as of 10/11/2022) … this gives me 32Tb of storage configured in RAID-5 … so 27.1 Tb of usable space, of the which i consumed 24.5Tb … so I was running out of space.

i purchased 4 20Tb WD NAS Red Pro drives from WD directly. Before swapping the 8Tb’s for the 20Tb’s drives, I backed everything up. This took about a week but everything is backed up (or so I thought)

i powered down the PR4100, removed the 4 8Tb NAS drives, put the new 20Tb NAS drives in, powered up, rebuilt the array, and took a week to restore my 24Tb of data. Everything worked perfectly.

I however, forgot to backup 1 folder on the old 8Tb drives … an important one, but nonetheless, just 1 folder.

Q: Can I power down the PR4100, remove my newly configured 4-20Tb NAS drives, put back in the 4- 8Tb NAS drives, and have everything come up without hurting my 4-20Tb drive RAID-5 configuration?

[Keerti_01]

Hi @francen,

Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask

[The_Dog]

It was a couple of years back but I think I had a similar situation as yours. If I am reading this right you just was to pop the old array back into the PR4100 to retrieve 1 folder. From my experience, sure no problem. The PR4100 is pretty versatile, I was able to do exactly what you are asking with no problem at all. Not even sure it matters but number the new array and replace the new drives in the same slots the occupied before the removal and you should have zero problems.