ReadyNAS NV+ drive upgrade

I have 2 ReadyNAS NV+ devices. One I bought new, the other used off Ebay.

The used one I store my media files on.

Going into the deal I knew I would have to exchange the drives for larger ones, I was simply waiting on the prices to come down a bit...BTW the ReadyNAS devices only support certain drives of each size, so before you buy drives, check.

I bought 4 2TB drives that were on sale (and were compatible) from Newegg. (OEM drives but full warranty and packed nicely).

This particular ReadyNAS was formatted with their X-RAID system, a redundant, expandable, hot swappable system. So I thought I would see how well it worked.

As far as speed goes, I can stream BD rips off it in full HD, so that doesn't seem to be an issue.

I already had 4 drives installed, so I didn't test part of the expandability of the system.

I am not big into hot swapping, so I didn't attempt that.

But part of the X-RAID expandability is you can exchange smaller drives for larger ones without having to move your data off the system, and back on. I did this.

According to the Netgear site, I could have done this upgrade while hot swapping.

I turned the system off (using the web based interface) pulled one 500gig drive out and replaced it with the 2TB drive. I started it back up and it started crunching data.

The machine said it would take 17 hours to fix the drive...same procedure if you had a drive go bad and replaced it. I started it before I went to bed and it was done before I got up. Checking the logs, each drive took 6.5 hours to sync. Then after a reboot the ReadyNAS expanded the filesystem, and that took maybe 30 minutes.

If I had elected to pull the data off on to a backup device and do all the drives at once, and put the data back on, it would have probably been quicker. But in this case I wanted to see if it would work, and I didn't want to fool around with a backup...things always happen, and you have to start over...especially when dealing with many files.