Author Topic: LS220DE Hard Drive upgrade question  (Read 1862 times)

MEFlyingV

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LS220DE Hard Drive upgrade question
« on: January 02, 2020, 05:08:06 PM »
Hello. I purchased my third Buffalo NAS in 2017. A LS220DE and I put two 2 TB HHDs I already owned into the unit and set it up for RAID 1.

I now need to increase my capacity, and have purchased two 4 TB HDDs. I went to review the procedure for installing the new drives but I can't find a specific article on upgrading. I see articles on how to replace a failed HDD, but not upgrade to a bigger size.

I am especially concerned because of something I read in the manual regarding replacing a failed drive with a larger capacity drive. The manual states: "If a larger drive is used, the extra space will not be usable in a mirrored RAID array."

I assume if I properly swap both drives out,  that the additional capacity will be utilized by the NAS. Can someone please confirm this and also confirm the correct procedure?

Thanks!

P.S.: If I had to guess, I'd say I need to swap the drive in Slot 2 first, let it rebuild, and then swap the disk out in Slot 1.  And if it is not possible, I guess I will need to simply swap both drives out at the same time as if it were a new unit, place one of the 2 TB drives into my hard drive dock, attach the doc (to either the NAS or my PC) and then let it copy over from the dock to the NAS.


1000001101000

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Re: LS220DE Hard Drive upgrade question
« Reply #1 on: January 02, 2020, 06:59:22 PM »
Unfortunately, that’s not how these software RAID1 arrays work. If you replace both drives the way you described it would still be a 2tb RAID1 array despite having 4tb drives.


Kane88

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Re: LS220DE Hard Drive upgrade question
« Reply #2 on: January 18, 2020, 08:25:40 PM »
IDK if you have done this upgrade yet or not.  But you're going to want to back up all of that 2tb of data before you get started.
Unless you're a linux expert, those drives don't just plug into a windows machine.  The Linux ext file system doesn't work with windows.

As our numbers friend has said, the upgrade won't work that way.  If you do rebuild the array twice to get the disks in there
1. that's going to take a long time and
2. you're going to have 4tb of unallocated space.  I don't recall if you can or cannot use the unallocated on these units, to make another array.
Since you only have 2tb of data, you are better off doing a new array from scratch anyway.

As to growing the arrays as you increase capacity:  There are other brands of units out there that do it.  They're more of an enterprise level device.  They're super expensive, buffalo doesn't make them either.  And no, the linkstations won't do it.

Direct connecting usb drives to the linkstation unit- I wish you luck.  The usb with those units has been extremely finnicky for some people.  I never got drives formatted internally- to work when hooked up on a dock externally.  It would always see them as blank and want to format them.  Flash drives would read fine, but connect a windows formatted hard drive with data on it- it didn't like it either.  It wanted to format it too.

I would not trust connecting a drive directly to the usb port to the linkstation- for any kind of backup.  I do all my backups with drives connected directly to my windows pc.  It's a lot less headache, and you can restore the backups on them from pretty much any machine that way.  If your buffalo unit dies, your external drives formatted with that unit will only be read- by a linux os pretty much.  Save yourself the headache and forget the extra port, unless you want to keep a 3rd disk online with it 24/7 and share it, or sharing a printer.  That's about all the port is really good for.

And remember your raid 1 is not a backup.  It is just fault tolerant to keep your data active online, and that is all it does.  It still has to be backed up to an offline disk.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2020, 11:35:00 AM by Kane88 »