Replacing 3 of my drives, how do I format them?

Legacy Products G-Technology G-SPEED
1

I have two G-Speed Q towers with 4, 2 TB drives in each and I’m needing to replace two drives in one tower and one in the other. Is it as simple as taking the drives out and replacing them with the new drives or do I need to format them differently? Both are RAID 5 configurations.

Thank you.

2

Hello,

With regards to the Q, just replacing them with the same part # drive should kick in the auto-rebuild. However the unit with 2 bad drives will need to be reconfigured with our configuration utility most likely. As a RAID5 only supports 1 drive going down at a time.

3

Where is the “configuration utility” found???

Thank you.

4

Also, I noticed when I opened Disc Utility here on my Mac, one tower says “6 TB External RAID Media” and the other tower says “6TB G-Speed Q - RAID Protected Storage” BUT when I originally configured the drives 4 years ago, I wanted both to be RAID 5 drives so I can have the back-up.

So what does RAID Media mean???

Thanks.

5

The configurator you need is on our site here:

We have two options one for the USB 2.0 interface on the back and one if you have the USB 3.0 interface.

USB 3.0 Configuration Utility

USB 2.0 Configuration Utility

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. There are many types of RAID. The most common RAID is 0 and that is a stripe that means 2 or more drives are striped together to make a large, fast drive. The 2nd most common RAID is 1 which is a mirror. It mirrors one drive to another at all times as you are writing data to both simultaneously. RAID 5 is a more advanced RAID that came later and it allows a setup of 3 or more drives to work together and create a parity disk in the event a drive fails the unit will continue working with little to no downtime. You can then replace the bad drive and it will rebuild itself.

6

Thanks for the config utility link.

So how do I find out if I configured the drives as RAID 5? Is one being labeled differently because I have one plugged in as USB 2 and the other FW 800? My one drive that is hooked up via FW 800 is labeled RAID protected storage and the USB 2 tower is labeled RAID media.

Just not sure what RAID media means?

Thanks.

7

Out of the box all of our G-Speed units are RAID5. So if you never changed it then it would be still in RAID5.

The Disk Utility is just labeling them different based on the generation of Q that was made. It doesn’t mean anything different they are still both the same type of drives. The way you have it connected can sometimes change the way the system sees it. Since one is on USB it might be read as media and the FW800 connection will show it as something else, they are still the same configuration. Disk Utility cannot tell how the RAID is configured. Only the software I provided links to can.

At this point I would suggest calling in for further support if you need more assistance. (888) 426-5214

8

perfect. Thanks for your input!:slight_smile: