I have reached the unthinkable, maxed out at RAID 5 with 4 x WD-Red-8TB HD’s.
I want to upgrade one drive at a time. I want to swap each 8TB HDD to a 12TB HDD.
My only question for this post is, can the WD NAS DL4100 handle the increase?
I already know that my capacity will stay at 8TB on each drive until all 4 drives are swapped, but after all swaps, will my capacity be noticed by the NAS I have? I understand I don’t get 32TB, but 16TB in RAID-5 currently, but that’s not my point here.
Hardware for me is very difficult. I remember 20 years ago I swapped my Hugt 2.6GB HDD for a Whopping Humongous 10GB HDD and my PC did not know what it was. So I partitioned my drive into 4 drive allocated letters. Today I can’t even do that with my Win 7 with a single 8GB HDD, the PC will totally ignore my 8TB. So, in short, will my NAS also freak out and not know what’s in it?
Yes, OS3 allows you to do this. You can migrate 1 disk at a time and after the final disk is in place, a button becomes available in the RAID setup menu in the WD web interface to expand the RAID to maximum size.
However personally I strongly recommend against doing this without a backup of your important data + a backup power supply.
Each drive will take 48 hours to repair.
This procedure is a stress test on all the disks of 8 whole days in degraded state (no parity disk for 8 days). A single disk failure during this time frame causes you to lose all data.
Any power drop during these 8 days is likely to cause data loss too.
All that risk for a measly 50% increase (24TB → 36TB) in storage space.
I recommend to put the 4 new disks in another enclosure (e.g. PR4100), copy the important data to it and mount the old NAS on this new NAS over NFS to keep access to all data on both sides. This gives you way more storage (24TB → 60TB) and an actual backup target (the DL2100) for the critical data.
I plan on doing this tomorrow, as I have a delivery of 4 x 18TB EXOS coming tomorrow, with a 5th 1 x 18TB EXOS backup drive on standby for any future-failures. But with one change. I bought an External Drive Cloner a while back, they are really cheap. I will (1) Power off WD PR4100, clone each drive to the larger drive. 2) Place all NEW drives in the same order and boot. I will report if this works. Last time a clone took just a few minutes (6TB clone).
