How do you cancel a RAID migration

[ozDave]

I have a new 7700Pro and I started a migration from 4 disk RAID 6 to 5 disk RAID 6 (1.5TB drives). It's going to take about 80 hours and I would like to cancel it. It will be quicker to delete the RAID, create a new one and restore the data from the backup (only 600GB of data so far).

Can anyone tell me how to cancel this RAID migration? I cannot see anyway to do it in the UI, I've tried removing all the disks and turning the machine off - nothing seems to work. Although the unit has another disk as a JBOD as well as an unused disk, the RAID management part of the UI is unusable during the migration. The upside is that the unit seems very robust - you're not supposed to remove disks or turn the unit off during a migration.

Dave

[ozDave]

I'd still like to know how to do this, so if there is a Thecus moderator out there, could you please reply.

48 hours have passed since I asked the question and the migration has now completed, and taken with it one of the new 1.5TB WD15EARS-00Z disks which is now has a warning about 1 "Current Pending Sector", whatever that means.

I had to delete the RAID after the migration because despite starting with 4 disks and migrating to 5, it only registered as having 3 disks in the RAID at the completion of the migration.

[philhu]

Welcome to the world of >1tb disks and Thecus

You have been assimilated in the 'Error World'

[ozDave]

Not really a world I wanted to join. I wish I'd found this forum before purchasing the machine. All I found were glowing reviews of the 7700 and 8800.

I have now found another problem with the UI. I have started the creation of the new 5 disk RAID 6 array, 75% of which is allocated to XFS. It will take 82 hours to create 3.2G of usable space ! I then wanted to create another JBOD RAID on the last single disk in the unit, but the "Create RAID" button is greyed out for the entirety of the 82 hours. 3.5 days of the unit being inaccessible to me is, to put it kindly, bizarrre. This is a dual-core machine running Linux - the hardware and operating system is capable of decent multi-tasking and would be capable of creating another RAID array on a different disk in the unit at the same time as building the XFS array but the UI wont let me do it.

In this 3.5 days, I could choose some different hardware, have it delivered to Canberra by courier from Melbourne, install Windows 7, create a RAID and copy some data - all while the Thecus is locking me out while it deals with only 3.2G of disk space!

So then I thought I'd use some of the 3.5 days and create a thin-provision iSCSI drive on the unallocated space on the RAID 6 array. The buttons aren't greyed out but when I try to do it the system tells me the RAID management unit is busy (for 3.5 days) !

So then I thought I'd use one of the USB or eSATA ports to attach a disk to copy some files to. I read the manual under the misleading heading "USB and eSATA Storage Expansion" and to my horror find out that "If you want to write to an USB storage device, the file system must be FAT32". Nobody uses FAT32 anymore, other than for USB sticks and camera flash memory. Why can't the external drives use ext3 or use NTFS-3G to enable writing to NTFS ?

It all just seems quite odd, the Thecus hardware and marketing machine seems OK, but the firmware is unfortunate.

[Funkstar]

This is why I build a bad ass server instead.

(see my sig for details)

[peterfu]

Why can't the external drives use ext3 or use NTFS-3G to enable writing to NTFS ?.

You can use ext3 formatted external drives (read/write) and there is a NTFS-3G module available. However the NTFS-3G module requires manual unmount/mount of the drive via commandline (for access via SSH also modules are available) - the modules for the N5200 run fine on the N7700
br
Peter