On this page, you can perform online RAID capacity expansion (RAID 1, 5, 6, 10) and online RAID level migration (single disk, RAID 1, 5, 10), add a hard drive member to a RAID 5, 6, or 10 configuration, configure a spare hard drive (RAID 5, 6, 10) with the data retained, enable Bitmap, recover a RAID configuration, and set a global spare.

 

To expand the storage capacity of a RAID 10 volume, you can perform online RAID capacity expansion or add an even number of hard disk drives to the volume.

 

Topics covered in this chapter:

 

 

Expanding Capacity (Online RAID Capacity Expansion)

 

Scenario

You bought three 250GB hard drives for initial setup of a TS-509 Pro NAS and configured RAID 5 disk configuration with the three hard drives.

A half year later, the data size of the department has largely increased to 1.5TB. In other words, the storage capacity of the NAS is running out of use. At the same time, the price of 1TB hard drives has dropped to a large extent.

 

Operation procedure

In "Storage Manager" > "RAID Management", select the disk volume for expansion and click "Action" > "Expand Capacity".

Click "Change" for the first hard drive to be replaced. Follow the instructions to proceed.

 

 

 

The process may take from hours to tens of hours to finish depending on the drive size. Do NOT turn off the NAS during this process.

 

After RAID capacity expansion has finished, the new capacity is shown and the status is "Ready". You can start to use the NAS. (In the example you have 1.8TB logical volume.)

 

 

 

Online RAID Level Migration

 

During the initial setup of the TS-509 Pro, you bought a 250GB hard drive and configured it as a single disk. The TS-509 Pro is used as a file server for data sharing across departments. After six months an increasing amount of data is being saved on the TS-509 Pro. There are growing concerns regarding the hard drive capacity and health. Therefore, you planned to upgrade the disk configuration to RAID 5. You can install one hard drive for setting up the TS-509 Pro and upgrade the RAID level of the NAS with online RAID level migration in the future. The migration process can be done without turning off the NAS. All of the data will be retained.

 

You can do the following with online RAID level migration:

 

You need to:

 

 

The process may take from hours to tens of hours to finish depending on the hard drive size. You can connect to the web page of the NAS to check the status later.

 

Online RAID Capacity Expansion

 

Scenario

You had a tight schedule to set up a file server and an FTP server. However, you had only one 250GB hard drive. Therefore, you set up the TS-509 Pro with a single disk configuration. The original plan was to set up a 3TB RAID 5 network data center with the TS-509 Pro. You now plan to upgrade the disk configuration of the TS-509 Pro to RAID 5 and expand the total storage capacity to 3TB with all the original data retained after the hard drives are purchased. Using online RAID level migration to migrate the system from single disk to RAID 5 the total storage capacity will be 750GB (with one 250GB hard drive and three 1TB hard drives, the disk usage will be 250GB*4 for RAID 5.) You can refer to the previous step for the operation procedure.

 

Use online RAID capacity expansion to replace the 250GB hard drive with a new 1TB hard drive, and then expand the logical volume from 750GB to 3TB of RAID 5. You can refer to the previous step for the operation procedure.

 

Adding Hard Drives

 

Follow the steps below to add a hard drive member to a RAID 5 or RAID 6 disk configuration.

 

To add hard drives to a RAID 10 disk volume, repeat the above steps. Note that you need to add an even number of hard disk drives to a RAID 10 volume. The storage capacity of the RAID 10 volume will increase upon successful configuration.

 

This process may take a few hours to tens of hours to complete depending on the number and the size of the hard drive. Do NOT turn off the NAS during this process. You can use a RAID configuration of larger capacity after the process.

 

Configuring Spare Drives

 

You can add a spare drive to or remove a spare drive from a RAID 5, 6, or 10 configuration.

 

Follow these steps to use this feature.

 

The original data on the RAID 5, 6, or 10 disk volume will be retained. After the configuration completes, the status of the disk volume will become "Ready".

 

 

Bitmap

 

Bitmap improves the time for RAID rebuilding after an unexpected error, or removing or re-adding a hard drive from/to a RAID configuration. If an array has a bitmap, the member hard drive can be removed and re-added and only block changes since the removal (as recorded in the bitmap) will be re-synchronized. To use this feature, select a RAID volume and click "Action" > "Bitmap".

 

 

RAID Recovery

 

RAID Recovery: If the NAS is configured as RAID 1, RAID 5, or RAID 6 hard drives are accidentally unplugged from the NAS, you can plug in the same hard drives into the same drive slots and click "Recover" to recover the volume status from "Not active" to "Degraded mode".

 

If the disk volume is configured as RAID 0 or JBOD and one or more of the hard drive members are disconnected or unplugged, you can plug in the same hard drives into the same drive slots and use this function to recover the volume status from "Not active" to "Normal". The disk volume can be used normally after successful recovery.

 

 

N = Number of hard disk drives in the array

 

Setting/Canceling Global Spare

 

A global spare drive replaces a failed hard drive in any RAID 1, 5, 6, 10 disk volumes on the NAS automatically. When the same global spare drive is shared by multiple RAID volumes on the NAS, the spare drive will replace the first failed drive in a RAID volume.

 

To set a disk drive as a global spare drive, select the single disk volume and click "Action" > "Set Global Spare". All the disk data will be cleared on the hard drive.

 

 

To cancel a global spare drive, select the drive and click "Action" > "Cancel Spare Drive".

 

Further Information about RAID Management of the NAS

 

The NAS supports the following actions according to the number of hard disk drives and disk configurations supported. Refer to the following table for details.

 

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