[QUESTIONS] migrating Single disk --> RAID1 --> RAID5

[Yeroon]

Hi,

The main idea for me of buying a NAS was to have a more secure, expandible and accessible place for all my data and minimalise the risk of losing stuff without the need of much technical know-how.

I bought a QNAP TS-509pro and put a 400GB disk in it to start with. (firmware: 3.1.1 Build 0815T)

So i played around with this config and got several apps running.(Joomla, WordPress, Python & SABnzbd++, AjaXplorer. Also i created a new share 'DATA' to store my documents in. Also i figured out how to use my QNAP as a Printer server for my HP Laserjet 1018. very good and very nice.

So to fill my needs i decided to buy 2 enterprise Western Digital RE3 1TB disks to store my data on. i like to use them in a RAID1 configuration.
I the future i want to migrate to RAID5 by adding more 1TB disks (one at the time, want to expand only when i need more diskspace)

i added a 1TB disk and migrated my single 400GB disk volume to RAID1. After completing this task. (i checked in de RAID section of the menu if the mirror was functioning correcly))
i swapped the old 400GB disk for my second 1TB harddisk. again i choose migrate and added the new disk to a RAID1 configuration.
After hours the job was finished and i saw that the 1TB RAID1 was functioning. i was surprised the QNAP automatically expanded the RAID1 from 400GB --> 1TB, it's simple and logical and exactly what i wanted, QNAP did a great job here.

When examining my migrated setup i noticed that things weren't running as smootly as i expected them to.

Problems:
1. i did loose my self created shares; my self created folders seemed to be dissappeared;
so i can't access my data anymore without additional actions.
2. there appeared a 'recycle bin 2' in the shared folder list (?)
3. my SABnzbd++ addon wasn't functioning anymore. (changed path. also can't remove and reinstall by the package menu)
4. my startup /mnt/config/autorun.sh script was gone (i used it to initialise my hostbased HP printer)
5. my /opt folder in which i installed additional stuff is gone. (Optware QPKG)

Analysing:
It turned out that while migrating from single disk to RAID1 my stuff was moved from /share/HDA_DATA --> /share/MD0_DATA and apparently this can't be done without breaking some working functionality of the setup. please correct me if i'm wrong about this. i read about other users having similar problems.

Questions:
1. why? this is conflicting with the main idea of a NAS appliance; there should be no loss of data or functionality or a single byte or bit after single diskfailure, migration or expanding. I understand that a hardware failure of the device itself will always give trouble, and therefore you should have a backup, but implemented functionality like this should work flawless, i think of it as core functionality.

i don't want to be rude but in my opinion this core functionality should be fool-proof and without additional technical user actions. I understand that this can be fixed myself with some command line actions and i understand that my documents are still somewhere on my device, and i didn't really lose any important data yet. but this is not the way a quality applicance should behave. (in my humble opinion) At this i'm a bit dissapointed.

2. when i'm going to migrate to RAID5 in the near future will i face the same kind of problems? like losing shares, links, functionality? it's really important that i'm aware of this before starting.

3. I like to know if other QNAP user have the same experiences and how other QNAP users feel about this. (maybe they don't think this is a problem)

I'm aware of the fact that i'm very critical. my case is that i want to encourage QNAP to focus on reliability of this device while developing newer firmware, so people without technical skills don't get lost while migrating. and i really hope this can be fixed in the near future.

I really believe this product can evolve, and i think the QNAP team already has created a very nice piece of machinery here. Please look at this here as valuable feedback.

Jeroen.

[Yeroon]

In the meantime i expirienced that with some Linux knowledge the missing shares and links issues were easy to fix. there where some packages that weren't working anymore, and i had to deinstall them, remove manually the remains of these packages in the /share/MD0_DATA tree and after that i could install them again. also had to recreate my autorun.sh file.

But i still want to know if the path '/share/MD0_DATA/..' will still be in use after a migration from RAID1 to RAID5. if so i expect no issues in the near future.

thanks in advance.

Jeroen

[Don]

No you will not encounter that problem again. That only happes migrating from non raid to raid.

[Yeroon]

Thank you for answering my question.

[jmpaq]

Hi,
I cant seem to get my HP Laserjet 1018 to work.
Could you explain exactly what you did to get it working?

thanks