Moving existing RAID1 to a new N299

[ausmark]

Six months ago we setup a N299 RAID1 on our home network, hoping to give ourselves a secure, reliable and network-accessible data storage device.

And we had all of that, until about a month ago when the unit died.

Yes, the unit. A dead N299. As far as I can tell, the drives are fine.

The dead N299 was sent back under warranty, and today I received a replacement N299.

So now I am in the position of having a pair of drives from the dead N299 that have a RAID1 setup that I want to install in the new N299.

1. Is it as simple as plugging the pair of drives into the new N299 and firing it up?

2. If it's not, is there a way I can recover the data from the RAID1 before having to reconfigure the drives as a RAID1 in the new N299?

When setting this up, I always considered hard drive failure as the risk in losing my data; never did I expect the N299 itself to fail!

Thanks in advance for any advice,

Mark.

[Iammer]

Its hard to say:

The easyest way is to plugin the harddrives and restore the configuration from your dead N299 which you should have saved on your management PC.

That works cause I have tested it before I stored data on N299:
I have saved config.bin file and restore the maschine to factorydefaults. Then I restored configuration and all users, folders and the RAID1 were back and working.


I hope you got a config file from your old N299.

[ccomley]

Mark, unles during it's death the N299 did something nasty to the file system, then you should be safe, just pop the drives in the new box, put your lan/wan/etc config back (did you have a config backup?) and it should be business as usual.

But I would also say, even with a RAID system, you should back up your data!

As a business user, I back up my four-drive THecus NAS to a four-drive Zyxel NAS *and* key data (e.g. the Sage database) is backed up offsite via FTP.

My personal stuff (e.g. music files) are kept on a 2-drive Zyxel and backed up to an external USB - and would be kept on a 1-drive Thecus N1200 if the latter would *work*.

[ausmark]

I should have posted a response to this sooner, as I actually have things up and running without any hassles.

I did two things before this post: I emailed Dan at Dan's Data (www.dansdata.com), and I emailed Thecus support.

I've had a few emails back and forth with Dan, who is very knowledgeable, helpful and patient. He also suspected some trickery would be required to get my data back.

However after I received my first email from Dan, I received a reply from Thecus support -- Yvon told me: "The N299 supports disk roaming, which means if the RAID is healthy all you need to do is install the drives into another N299."

So I gave it a go, and as Yvon suggested it just worked!

The N299 might be a a low-end cheapie unit, which I'm disappointed about being misled by Thecus' own web site claims about the performance of the unit, but I have to say Thecus support has always been very responsive and helpful. Every problem (and there haven't been many) or query I emailed to Thecus has always been handled quickly and effectively, and this time was no different.

I also have to recommend Dan's Data -- also very responsive and very helpful, even though I'm not a customer of his.

[ccomley]

Good

I had no doubts.

The N299 usese bog-standard Linux raid filesystems.

We recently took a pair of disks which had been used in an N299 and mounted them in a new twin quad-core Xeon server we're commissioning, which is running Fedora... it mounted them no problems.

[Mathonar]

Glad to see a thread on this already as my N299 has also died so i was wondering what would happen when i get the replacement as i also use it in RAID 1 for backing up stuff off my PC.
Did your replacement come with the 1.00.24 firmware?

[ccomley]

The firmware should not affect the underlying filesystem format so I would hope that putting the existing RAID into a new box would then give you the option of upgrading the box f/w if necessary - but this is just speculation I've not tried it.

[ausmark]

Did your replacement come with the 1.00.24 firmware?

Yes, it did.

And though you would think the firmware versions wouldn't/shouldn't make a difference to the RAID, it does -- the original unit I received had instructions to reformat the RAID after the firmware was upgraded (I think this was upgrading from 1.00.10 to 1.00.15 or something similar).

[Mathonar]

Yes, it did.

And though you would think the firmware versions wouldn't/shouldn't make a difference to the RAID, it does -- the original unit I received had instructions to reformat the RAID after the firmware was upgraded (I think this was upgrading from 1.00.10 to 1.00.15 or something similar).

Yes, that's why i asked, just so i'd know how likely i was to need to do a firmware flash before plugging the drives in, don't want to risk losing the data when i didn't get to back it up before my unit died...

[Thecus - Yvon]

Dear Sir,

Update wouldn't & shouldn't make a difference to the RAID, the early version firmware as like V.00.1x or before, due to new functions added and only few N299 release on the market, thus we need recreate new RAID for these new function need, current N299 as like N5200 with huge number in users home, thus Thecus have to confirm the firmware very carefully, and it is hard/impossible to asking user doing such operation now.

Yvon.