Author Topic: Advice for convertig 2 drive RAID 1 to 4 drive RAID 5  (Read 4229 times)

rlanza1054

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Advice for convertig 2 drive RAID 1 to 4 drive RAID 5
« on: February 26, 2016, 12:29:10 PM »
Hi all,

I have had my Buffalo LS441DE for about a year. I really haven't had any major issues.

Because of funds, I purchased NAS without any drives.

At first just to get it setup, I threw in a 500GB drive I had available.

As soon as I had funds I immediately purchased 2 4TB Western Digital Hard Drives.

I set them up as RAID 1 which is just a simple mirror, so I did not get any advantage of getting extra space by doing RAID 0, I felt playing it safe was worth the trade off of getting the extra space.

I even tested a 128GB SSD just to see if it would work, it did.

However, I always knew I would be adding the remainder 2 drives to fully populate the NAS and really take advantage of it.

To my surprise, I filled the 4TB of space available. Which is forcing me to get the additional 2 drives.

I just ordered the 2 remaining drive which should get here in a few days.

My question is this:

I do not believe its possible to throw in the two additional drives and switch the existing drive to RAiD 5 without have to start from scratch and reformat everything. Hence losing all my existing data?

If I'm wrong please let me know?

Otherwise, I need to find a way to backup to an external drive, setup the NAS and then copy everything back.

I do own one of those My Book 4TB external hard drives, I think from Seagate. I think its formatted as NTFS.

The last time I tried hooking  up an external drive to the USB ports, the drive was not able to mount for access because it seems at that time it would have to an XFS formatted drive.

We had a firmware upgrade since then, so can the NAS now see an external drive when its formatted as NTFS?

If not I have to erase that and reformat that external drive if possible.

I am asking for any advise on how to perform this switch from RAID 1 to RAID 5 while adding the two additional drive to end up having a 4 drive NAS, that is fully populated

Thanks!

Rob.