Replacing All Your Disks For Even More Capacity; Changing Between X-Raid And Flex-Raid Modes; Snapshot - Infrant Technologies Readynas User Manual

During the boot process, your data volume is expanded. This process typically takes about 15-30
minutes per disk, perhaps more, depending on the size of your disks. A 250GB disk takes
approximately 30 minutes. Access to the ReadyNAS is not permitted during this time. You will be
notified by email when the process is complete.
After you receive your email, the ReadyNAS will have been expanded with the capacity from your
new disk(s).
► R E P L A C I N G A L L Y O U R D I S K S F O R E V E N M O R E C A P A C I T Y
A couple years down the line, you find the need more disk space, and 600GB disks are available at
an attractive price. Again, you can expand your volume capacity quite easily, although you will need
to power down several times to replace out your old disks.
First, power down the ReadyNAS, replace the first disk with the larger capacity disk, and boot. The
ReadyNAS will detect that a new disk was put in place and will resync the disk with data from the
removed disk. This process will take several hours, depending on disk capacity. The disk will be
initialized and scanned for bad sectors first before the resync is started. The total time from the start
of initialization to the end of resync can be around 5 hours or more, depending on disk capacity.
You will be notified when this resync process is complete.
nd
Upon completion, power down, replace the 2 disk with another larger capacity disk, and boot. The
st rd th
process will be the same as the 1 disk. You will do this also for the 3 and 4 disk.
th
Once you get the completion notification for the 4 disk, reboot the ReadyNAS. During boot,
volume capacity is expanded with the additional capacity from each disk. For instance, if you had
replaced four 250GB disks with four 600GB disks, the capacity of the volume will increase by
approximately 350GB x 3 (the fourth disk is reserved for parity). The expansion process will take
several hours depending on the capacity expanded, and you will be notified by email when the
process is complete. There is no access to the ReadyNAS during this time.

Changing Between X-RAID and Flex-RAID Modes

You can switch between X-RAID and Flex-X-RAID modes. The process involves setting the
ReadyNAS to factory default and using RAIDar to configure the volume during a 10-minute delay
window during boot. Please see Chapter 4 – System Reset Switch for more information.

Snapshot

The Volume page offers the ability to schedule and take snapshots. You can visualize a snapshot as
a frozen image of a volume at the time you take the snapshot. Snapshots are typically used for
backups during which time the original volume can continue to operate normally. As primary
storage becomes larger, offline backups tend to become increasingly difficult as backup time
increases beyond offline hours. Snapshots allow backups to occur without taking systems offline.
Snapshots also can be used as temporary backups as well, perhaps as a means to backup data against
viruses. As an example, if a file becomes infected with a virus on the NAS device, the uninfected file
can be restored from a prior snapshot taken before the attack.
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