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Thread: update: RAID expansion- hope this helps everyone

  1. #1
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    update: RAID expansion- hope this helps everyone

    OK, before I go any further let me just tell 5200 non-pro owners to go get the newest firmware off the Thecus website ASAP- don't migrate until you do.

    I have struggled for almost 3-4 months now with problem after problem with my Thecus and have learned a lot of painful lessons I hope people can use to avoid similar pain and suffering.

    Another point I want to make before you lose your interest in what I have to say is that it appears ESSENTIAL to building a RAID array to use hard drives that are freshly, low-level formatted with no file system on them.

    I have four 500gig Seagate 7200.10 SATA drives and the Thecus crashed during rebuild until I clean low-level formatted them.

    NOW, my story:

    SO, where we kind of left things was I had a four-drive RAID 5 array was built in the Thecus and, as I'm finding out, I had the same issue almost everyone else is with that drive getting added to a uselses snapshot allocation. The four drive was 100% allocated to snapshot and preceiveably there was nothing I could do about it (Or my friend remoting using SSH).

    SO, I decided to remove the 4th drive, format it, copy all the contents of the array to it (luckily I had less than 500gig worth of stuff accumulated), erase the entire array, rebuild the array, copy the data back and re-migrate back to a 4 drive system. That was the plan anyway...

    SO I attempted to copy/paste the data from the "degraded" 3 drive thecus to the 4th drive which was plugged into my desktop using windows. Well, anything over 3-4gig in transfer size CRASHED THE THECUS! SO, I had 480gig worth of data I had to manually copy a gig at a time- NO F-ing way.

    SO, I thought to myself- well, windows is the worst software created in the history of the planet, and the Thecus firmware is scary unrefined- maybe if I use the Thecus FTP server + modules things will work better. Sure enough, I was able to copy everything in two, 250gig transfers using COREFTP at about 15-20 MB/sec [which made me drool].

    SO that was a few roadblocks I managed to find solutions to.

    SO with all my data safely moved, I erased the 3 drive array using the RAID CONFIG section, updated the firmware to the brand new 2.00.01 official release directly from Thecus for the N5200 (and pro), and attempted to rebuild the RAID 5 array with the same 3 drives. Crash, reboot, Crash, reboot, Crash.. No dice. Couldn't rebuild the array using the same drives that were in there before!!!

    SO I noticed the first few rebuilds the Thecus crashed at low-percentage rebuild, then I noticed that the Thecus was crashing during the "FORMATTING" of the array before the rebuild even.

    SO one-bye-one I removed the drives, plugged them into my desktop, used a really AWESOME free low-level format program I had, low-level formatted all three drives and I **** you not- the Thecus formatted and built the array FIRST TRY.

    I copied everything back from the 4th drive to the new 3 drive array. Once finished I low-level formatted the 4th drive before putting it back into the Thecus (because it seems like the Thecus can't handle anything but), and now, am currently am at 95% migration done, first try.

    SO, lessons learned:
    1.) firmware prior to 2.00.01 is bad for people who love RAID 5
    2.) Thecus FTP software and modules are great
    3.) Thecus HATES Seagate 7200.10 drives that are un-freshly-formatted (or just in general)
    4.) Rogaine does not prevent hairloss due to constant tugging from Thecus frustration

    Can you believe the hassle?

    I really hope this helps someone. There were times when I thought I'd have to buy a second Thecus just to RMA this one... Nightmarish past few months...

  2. #2
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    Re: update: RAID expansion- hope this helps everyone

    OK, so it formatted, migrated and automatically started rebuilding without me doing a thing...

    I'll let a picture say the 1000 words... Notice "TOTAL CAPACITY", "DATA CAPACITY" and firmware version ... ahh beautiful!!!


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