My 2 week ordeal to just expand my RAID

[tboooe]

I currently have an old Thecus N4100Pro RAID (aside: I have an even older, circa 2006 Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ for my backup) that I use as my primary NAS. It has 4 x 2TB drives which is almost at capacity so over the past few months I have been replacing the drives with 3TB ones. After replacing a drive it usually takes 2 days for the Thecus to rebuild the RAID so I thought that maybe it would take tops 3 days to rebuild the RAID then expand it to take advantage of the 4x 3TB drives when I replaced the last drive. Boy was I wrong!

 

First, since the Thecus is so old its filesystem was originally configured as EXT3 which does not support more than 8TB total. Of course I did not realize this until I waited 2 days for the RAID to rebuild and I tried to expand its capacity. 2 days wasted. With the Thecus the only way to migrate its filesystem from EXT3 to EXT4 is to completely nuke the RAID and start over. That means first backing up almost 6TB worth of data Luckily for me, I backup my Thecus to the aforementioned Infrant ReadyNAS weekly so I saved myself days not having to copy my data. OK 1 bit of good news.

 

Here comes the bad news:

 

After nuking my Thecus RAID it had to format all the drives - 1.5 days

Build RAID - 3 days

Copy data back to Thecus - 9 days(!) (because the source and destination NASs are so old and low powered the avg write rate I could achieve was 9-10 MB/sec

 

Total time: 15.5 days!

 

Man, I need to upgrade my NASs!!!

[Ben@Thecus]

15.5 days wow, the Thecus N4100Pro is definitely a dinosaur. If you looking for a new NAS, you could check out Thecus' new N4810 (only started shipping this month). The RRP is only $329, it's an affordable mid-range NAS, but you get plenty of power(Intel Celeron 3160 Quad-Core), plus you can use the new OS (ThecusOS7), it will be a dream compared to the OS5. Good luck mate. Cheers!

[tboooe]

15.5 days wow, the Thecus N4100Pro is definitely a dinosaur. If you looking for a new NAS, you could check out Thecus' new N4810 (only started shipping this month). The RRP is only $329, it's an affordable mid-range NAS, but you get plenty of power(Intel Celeron 3160 Quad-Core), plus you can use the new OS (ThecusOS7), it will be a dream compared to the OS5. Good luck mate. Cheers!

Thank you Ben. I will say that the N4100Pro has been pretty reliable over the years. I had to recently replace the power supply but overall I am satisfied with it. I will definitely check out the N4810. I want to get something with more power so that the user interface is more responsive and overall operation is faster. It would be nice to run some programs from the NAS as well, like Roon.

[Paul R]

Yeep- have you looked at using a CAPS server as your primary NAS?

 

A mere 6TB and it took *days* to move around? Oh my stars...

 

-Paul

[tboooe]

Yeep- have you looked at using a CAPS server as your primary NAS?

 

A mere 6TB and it took *days* to move around? Oh my stars...

 

-Paul

Paul, at this point I am looking at all options! However, aside from this little episode, my NAS is working fine for my purposes. Though old, the little Thecus can handle serving up movies and most importantly music to multiple PCs simultaneously in my house. I would love to either buy or build a more state of the art (and quicker) NAS, but that will take time and money. I think I will just deal with the Thecus until it either dies or some funds free up (not likely). Maybe one day large capacity SSD will become more affordable and I will just get that newly announced 60TB one from Seagate!