Running Low On Free Space

[Jamil]

I am now seeing warnings in the admin console of my TS-809 NAS:

RAID 6 Disk Volume: Drive 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 - the volume is nearly full. Please replace the drives with larger ones or purchase a QNAP NAS with more bays.

This NAS cost quite a penny when I bought it years ago (over $2000 US dollars). I am not ready to retire it just yet. To prepare for new drives, I installed the ElephantDrive application, and it's available for use. My plan is to backup all data, buy new larger drives, and finally restore my backed up data to the new file system.

My question is what is the largest sized SATA drive that may be installed in a single slot? I know that the maximum storage permitted is 16TB. I currently have eight 2GB drives installed under RAID 6 providing 10993.86GB of total space. I will either replace the drives with 3GB or 4GB instead of 2GB. When I install larger drives, I will leave some bays empty to avoid exceeding 16TB.

According to http://www.raid-calculator.com/default.aspx, here are a couple options:

1. Six 4TB drives under RAID 6 providing 16TB total space
2. Seven 3TB drives under RAID 6 providing 15TB total space

Are there any issues with a single slot supporting 3TB or 4TB SATA drives?

[Jamil]

I am leaning toward seven 3TB drives. The drives will be Hitachi HGST drives. I can get the 3 TB drives very cheap (40 USD per drives), and Hitachi drives are bullet-proof reliable.

[dolbyman]

I would stay below 16TB so 7x3TB in RAID6 should be best .. also it sound like you have no external backup yet .. buy a large external drive (12 or 14TB and start backing up your stuff, a cloud backup will probably take weeks to restore .. and your decade+ old EOL NAS doesn't even support any internal apps to restore or backup to any cloud)

[Jamil]

I have ElephantDrive installed right now. Isn't the purpose of this app to backup and restore from cloud ?

Backing up to USB 2.0 will take longer than the weeks you stated cloud would take. lol.

[dolbyman]

If Elephant drive still works, HBS(3?) will either not work or all the plugins for the version for your NAS will be horribly outdated

USB 2.0 has 480Mbit\s write, doubt your NAS will be able to do much more to WAN (if your internet connection is even that fast)

[Jamil]

I am trying the ElephantDrive free trial right now. If it doesn't work, I will simply cancel before I get charged.

All it needs to do is copy all file system content to the cloud for backup. It shouldn't be complicated to complete, and if it doesn't work I will simply cancel and not pay.

[Jamil]

ElephantDrive version 3.6.4 installed within the QNAP console does allow login using my trial ElephantDrive account. It is locking up after clicking Manage backups. I simply left a note for ElephantDrive support on this issue.

In the meantime, I freed up 500GB of space to remove the low space warning messages. These messages appear to show when space is less than 1.5TB free.

[Jamil]

Okay -- I made progress on my own. The ElephantDrive QNAP app is maintained by ElephantDrive it looks like. I downloaded the latest version directly from them: https://support.elephantdrive.com/hc/en ... rive-QPKG-

I manually installed version 4.4.6 to my NAS, and I will try this again. These guys are selling a service they should maintain these things...

[Jamil]

ElephantDrive is working perfectly. My NAS is backing up by itself now with no action on my part.

This is how it should be done.

[Jamil]

I will order a DiskStation DS220+ along with two 6TB drives JBOD. I will connect it to my network and copy all data via Ethernet for backup purposes.

[Jamil]

All data is 100% backed up using my new NAS via rsync. It took less than 24 hours to copy all data. My TS-809 Pro has the seven 3TB drives installed and is now 41% complete synchronization. It should be complete and ready for restore tomorrow. The good news is all data will be defragmented via new format, rebuild and fresh copy. Yes -- fragmentation still happens under ext4