The needle on my Netgear ReadyNAS network storage unit has been in the red zone, metaphorically speaking, for a while.
Worried? Moi?
When I was an IT manager the needle for the whole organization was always within a couple of points, or three, of 97%. Available storage gets used up. It’s a law of nature.
It’s also a law of nature that people don’t like to delete stuff or to do backups. Even asking about such things can be a tricky business at times. Once, I asked a scientist whose laptop had crashed to floor from a table after he’d tripped over a power cable if he had a backup of his hard disk. He gave me a baleful look and said
Hah! So, it’s blame the victim time now, is it?
So, I did some research, ordered some new drives, and then found that the catches on the drive bays on my would no longer open!
Luckily, as always, it had happened to someone else already and the solution to a stuck drive tray could be found on the web (here).
Never panic.
Let me Google that for you (that’s a link)
(or… rude version)
Having spent some time weighing up different options (brand, capacity, cost, power consumption, seek times, nr of platters etc.) I opted for a set of Samsung Spinpoint F2 HD103SI 1Tb EcoGreen drives to replace a set of 4 Seagate 250Gb server grade drives (formatted down to 681Gb in a RAID configuration). The Seagates have been running almost continuously (24×7; when powered up) for 21,387 hours according to the logs, that’s almost two and half years.
Unfortunately, the Samsungs are not on the official compatible drives list, but there’s no way to know if that’s because there are any known issues or they have simply haven’t been tested; I suspect the latter. I’ve seen reports of higher capacity Samsung drives working without problem and I’ve taken a liking to the Spinpoints, which run cool and quiet, so I’m going to take my chances. I’ll use the Seagates to backup individual shares via USB.
It did cross my mind to just buy a ReadyNAS Duo (with two drive bays) and stick a couple of 2Tb drives in it. In the end, 4 drives for £53 each, plus £5 shipping, was a cheaper option — with the added benefits of being able to recycle the old drives for partial backups and of a lower electricity bill. A factor in favour of an upgrade was that I’d already upgraded the memory to 1Gb (from 256Mb) and put in a new (improved) power supply, so I had some spare parts already.
But… to have to get a paper clip to be able to release any of the old drive cradles — they were ALL stuck — was somehow absurd.
ReadyNAS upgrade message
Swapping in the first new drive took under a minute. I was warned by email that a drive had failed when the old one was removed, and alerted by email to a resync in progress when I slotted in the new one. All that was as expected. Then I read the following pop-up message from the web console:
Disk initialization started. The estimated time of completion is 8 hours and 49 minutes.
This has to be done four times, once for each drive. Even then it’s not finished. The 1Tb drives (actual formatted capacity, maximum, 931Gb) are first formatted at the capacity of the smallest drive installed (250Gb) and only when the last is replaced and formatted, and the system restarted, is the storage expanded. During this time the unit is offline for reorganization. That is going to take between 1 and 2 days!
After all that, I’ll again be able to withstand a drive failure with no downtime. At least there is none during the drive replacements.
I wish I’d kept a log of all the disk storage I’d purchased over the years. The highlights from memory are
- First hard drive: 10Mb Rodime (1986; $500+; upgrade for a Compaq portable)
- First gigabyte drive: 1Gb Digital Equipment Corp. (1995 approx. 30,000 Dutch guilders; for a Vax computer; my employer’s of course)
- First terabyte drive: 1Tb Samsung (2010; £53)
That’s from $50/Mb to $0.00008/Mb in 25 years, roughly. If only everything worked like this!<sigh> It’s a cliche by now, but it still amazes me.
Some good resources if want to upgrade a ReadyNAS: Ed Bott’s blog and this post at Meandering Passage.
Formatting of the first drive has just finished after 3 hours and 18 minutes. Synchronization now in progress.
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[...] the recent upgrade of my ReadyNAS storage unit I ended up with 4 spare 250Gb hard [...]
Update: the Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1Tb drives are now on the approved hardware list for the ReadyNAS. I’ve used the F2 drives, which I hope will be added before too long.