RAID - failed drive

[MatthewL]

One of the four disks in my NAS at home has failed or is on its way out. They are 2 TB WD drives (none NAS).

 

My plan is to replace with WD red's, if I put in a 4TB and let it rebuild and then 1 by 1 swap them out for 4's can you see any issue?

[Davit2005]

I know this works in Synology with SHR Synology Hybrid Raid but not sure what NAS you are using and the type of RAID you have setup.

 

Personally had too many issues with WD Red Drives jus my personal preference due to own experience now is Seagate Ironwolf for NAS and that is what I am replacing drives with. Of course RAID is no backup so make sure to have copies of important or treasured info i.e. photos etc. backed up.

Edited February 23, 2022 by Davit2005

[Norphy]

Am I missing something? You could swap all the drives out for 4TB drives, sure, but surely you'd still have a volume on the array for 4/6/8TB, depending on RAID level? If you wanted a 8/12/16TB volume, you'd have to recreate the volume to use all of its space. Unless you're using something like ZFS or Storage Spaces?

[Davit2005]

Am I missing something? You could swap all the drives out for 4TB drives, sure, but surely you'd still have a volume on the array for 4/6/8TB, depending on RAID level? If you wanted a 8/12/16TB volume, you'd have to recreate the volume to use all of its space. Unless you're using something like ZFS or Storage Spaces?

 

With Synology if using SHR you can increase by adding bigger drives one by one. I've done before and perfectly feasible.

 

https://kb.synology.com/en-br/DSM/tutorial/What_is_Synology_Hybrid_RAID_SHR

[Simcfc73]

I did something similar but had an issue with QNAP as it only allowed 15.8Tb I think so when I replaced my bigger drives the only way I could do it was to kill the raid and start again. 3 days of copying back and forth.

[MatthewL]

I have a QNAP TS-420, had it a few years but serves the purpose I need. The 4 drives are in RAID 5, so 8TB in total (give or take) but 5.43TB useable.

 

I could replace all 4 drives at once and spend days copying data back but plan would be to do 1 at a time.

[DrBeaker]

Synology have SHR and SHR2 RAID where if you pop in a new drive, it will rebuild/expand the array to that capacity. Rinse and repeat until you've increased capacity.

[msi_school]

I used to use WD reds but they started to use shingled data tracks https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-recording/ these can be used in RAID arrays but the technology is inherently slower and can case issues especially when rebuilding data

[MatthewL]

Thanks for that post @msi_school, interesting read.

 

Going to use these drives they are the replacement to what is recommended and they are cheaper.

[3s-gtech]

Avoid the WD Red SMR drives. They're...poor. And they may be incompatible with other drives in an array.

[MatthewL]

Noticed the WD reds are 5400 in speed when I was looking. I have bought some CMR ones recommended product on a newer product code for what I need.

 

Luckily my NAS is only for backup purposes and not intense data access, have noticed some prices have started to drop for hardware now but these will tide me over for whats needed.