Hi,
I have a PR4100 which I’ve had for a while (7ish years) with 4x4TB drives and was looking to expand size. I bought 4x14TB drives to replace them and tried to follow the steps outlined in the following guide: Upgrading to larger drives PR4100
Similar to a number of the other users I struggled to get the standard ‘expansion’ process to work (roughtly 5 attempts, each one failed). During this process, I experienced a drive failure (the drive was physically untouched), quite strange given it was trying to follow the standard expansion process. I also got an error that my brand new WD drive has degraded (not sure what this means but alarming as its brand new out the packaging).
I wanted then to cancel my expansion, however it doesn’t seem that this is possible - when I try to change back to RAID 5 (my default redundancy) I get a message that it will erase and reformat my drives. How can I cancel my expansion?
I’ve then tried to change tact and back up my drives to a friends NAS, which I’ll use to transfer data to my drives. I kicked off the copy a couple of days ago and just experiences another drive failure (panic! again an untouched drive). I’m a bit shocked that after 7 years of ticking over nice and steadily, I get my first 2 failures within a few days.
Note: the two failed drives seem to be fine when I restart the NAS but fail mid Copy. I’ve also run the System Test (everything is ticked) and Quick DiskTest and only one of the two drives shows an error (screenshot below) but my NAS is still saying a drive has failed in Bay 4 and on the dashboard the drive status is bad.
Does anyone have any suggestions of how I can get my drives up and running to at least copy my data over? Is it something to do with their physical positioning in the system or is is the drive just corrupt?
Thanks, I appreciated the guidance and I know not having a backup was risky even with redundancy…backing it up on a freinds NAS was the plan but just never got around to it…doh!