Replacing/Upgrading Terastation HD-HTGL/R5 to 4x 1TB or 4x 1.5TB

[RHayden]

   

One of the drives in my old 4x250mb Terastation has failed after being a workhorse for years.  :smileysad:

 

Given that the RAID5 space is only 750gb anyways, it would really make sense for me to upgrade the system as a whole to a larger capacity.  In researching online and even searching these forums, I found mixed information about whether I can do that, and many were contradictory.

 

One I found said if I replace the drives one at a time in the following order 2,3,4,1 and allow a rebuild between each, I'd end up with a new system that I could wipe and recreate on.  One said I couldn't do it with drives larger than 640gb - another said the cap was 1TB another speculated on "new" (at the time) 2TB drives.

 

Another defined a process of getting shell access to the system and manually building md drives.

 

It's all very confusing.

 

Assuming I buy 4 hard drives that are identical, along with 4 SATA to IDE converters:

 

1)  Can they be installed into the legacy terastation

2)  What is the maximum size of drive I can install (4x 1TB, 1.5TB or 2TB)

3)  What is the definitive procedure to do the upgrade process?

 

I'm not concerned about maintaining the data - I'll back that out before I start surgery.

 

 I suspect this has been answered all over the place in the past, but the information is so contradictory that I'm just not sure at this point what is and isn't accurate.

[PCPiranha]

Just replace the drives and flash the firmware either via TFTP or EM mode with a force firmware update.  Understand that this is not something that we support doing.

 

Also I wouldn't updrade the capacity to anything larger than double the size.

[RHayden]

   

Ok, I don't think that helped me any.  I recently upgraded to the lastest firmware.

 

Are you saying pull out all 4 and put in all 4 new ones?  Wouldn't it not boot at that point (blank drives)?  Sorry if I'm seeming overly clueless.

[PCPiranha]

Sorry, mistook your unit for the TS Live for some reason.

 

The only way to do it would be to put one drive in and restructure it into the array.  Then the second and so on and so forth.  Once you get all the drives replaced you would have to delete the array and recreate it to get the full capacity.

 

This particular drive also cannot handle drives that are larger than 500GB.

[RHayden]

   Ok that helps.  Shame about the 500gb limit since larger drives are so inexpensive.

[PCPiranha]

Yeah, if you did larger than that it would just scale the capacity down to 2 TB

[Praetorian]

   

I replaced my drives a few years back; no big deal ... update your firmware, and re-image your new drives with the os software.  You can find the software in the forums .... if you are not running an NIX macine you can boot easily from a FEDORA / UBUNTU or favorite pet rock NIX ver. build and image the terastation. 

 

Anyhow I am sure you are already back and running ... my two cents was about the stated 2T limitation ... My quesiton is .... the 2T a limitation on the array ... could one not use both the arrays as 2T so in total one would have 4T on the terastation.  I.E. 'RAID 1 Array = 2T'  and 'RAID 2 Array = 2T' TOTAL = 4T .... thoughts ???  Comments ???