Expansion (X-RAID)

• How do I add capacity to my X-RAID volume?
• How do I expand my current 4-disk X-RAID volume?
• What happened if I add a larger disk to my current 2- or 3-disk X-RAID volume?
• What should I do if X-RAID expansion fails?

Expansion (X-RAID)

How do I add capacity to my X-RAID volume?

If you have less than 4 disks, simply add your disk(s) to the box. You can hot-add it if your ReadyNAS supports drive hot-swapping (i.e. NV, 1000S). If your ReadyNAS does not support hot-swap, simply power off the ReadyNAS, add the disks and power on. The newly added disk(s) must be at least the same size as the smallest existing disk. Note that you can add one or more disks at a time. You will be notified by email and through FrontView that the disks will be initialized (this can take several hours depending on the disk capacity). During the initialization phase, you can use the ReadyNAS normally. Once the initialization is done, you will be notified to reboot the ReadyNAS. Upon reboot, the expansion process will occur (this can take several hours or much longer depending on your drive capacity and the number of files in your data volume). You can monitor the status via RAIDar. Upon completion, you will be notified that the volume has been expanded.

How do I expand my current 4-disk X-RAID volume?

You will need to replace each of your disks, one at a time, with a larger one. Each time the disk is replaced, you will need to allow the disk to initialize and sync before continuing with the next disk. The initialization and sync process will take several hours or longer to complete depending on the capacity of your disk. With the ReadyNAS that supports drive hot-swapping (i.e. NV, 1000S), you can replace the disk online; otherwise, you will need to shutdown the ReadyNAS and replace the disk while powered off. Once all the disks have been replaced, reboot the ReadyNAS to start the expansion process. This will take several hours or longer to complete depending on the volume capacity and the number of files in your volume. Do not interrupt the process during this time. Once completed, you will be notified of the new volume size.

What happened if I add a larger disk to my current 2- or 3-disk X-RAID volume?

The expansion will still occur, but the expansion size will be limited by the smallest disk in the system. When you replace each of the smaller disks to the larger disk capacity, X-RAID will expand itself to utilizing all the space from this larger disk.

What should I do if X-RAID expansion fails?

On a failure condition, we advise you to contact NETGEAR Support immediately and provide them with system logs and step you took to expand your X-RAID volume. Do not try to fix the problem yourself at this point as you may create a 2-disk failure condition that might make data recovery hard or impossible.