Hi, everyone. I hope someone can help with what I had assumed would be a straightforward operation.
About 3 years ago, I bought a second-hand TS-453A on eBay, installed a single Toshiba 8TB SATA –– as a thick volume, doing my best to understand the options during that initial setup –– and it's been running fine since, primarily as a Plex server.
I recently saw I was creeping up above 75% usage on that drive, so bought a Seagate 8TB SATA to add to my TS-453A. I slotted it in bay 3 (to leave some air space between it and the system drive in bay 1), formatted it, and it shows up fine in the Storage & Snapshots app in QTS 5.0.1.2248. (As a static volume, even though I don't recall being offered any option to choose thick or thin when I formatted it.)
However, I've spent bits of several days now trying to figure out how to either add it to the existing Storage Pool that contains the first drive or to create a RAID containing both the old drive and the new one. The 'Expand Pool' option under 'Manage' only offers me the option of 'Create and add a new RAID group', but after clicking 'Next' the system says no drives are available, apparently not seeing the freshly-formatted Seagate HDD.
I had hoped to set up a RAID 1 –– to have a complete copy of my current (75% full) Toshiba HDD running in parallel –– and then was going to look for deals on further 8TB drives to increase my actual storage capacity... but it seems I can neither set up a RAID nor expand the storage pool to span both drives, so I'm at a loss for how to continue.
I'll try to attach some screenshots which may help you spot what I'm doing wrong here.
Many thanks in advance,
Zoë
Failing to add a second HDD to my TS-453A
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Failing to add a second HDD to my TS-453A
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- dolbyman
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Re: Failing to add a second HDD to my TS-453A
You will not be able to build a RAID now that will expand your capacity (at least not with one extra drive, as only RADI1 would be possible)
You could kill that new volume and add it to your existing pool (single drive).
You could kill that new volume and add it to your existing pool (single drive).
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Re: Failing to add a second HDD to my TS-453A
Hi, dolbyman.
Thanks for your response. I'm willing to give up the plan to make a RAID out of the two drives and simply add the new drive to the storage pool containing the first –– or, indeed, to not expand my overall NAS capacity by placing both drives into a RAID 1 setup –– but the problem is I can't see how to do either of those things with 'Storage & Snapshots' in the QNAP interface.
As you can see in the screenshots above, QTS will neither let me take the new, empty 8TB Seagate drive and add it to my existing storage pool, nor manage it (or the existing 8TB Toshiba drive) to place both drives into RAID 1 mirroring mode.
I'm hoping for advice on how to convince QTS to do either of those operations, since at the moment when you attempt to do anything involving storage pools or RAIDs, the Storage & Snapshots app pretends like I don't have any HDDs installed that these operations can be applied to.
For instance, how can I 'kill' the new volume? There's no menu option for this (or anything synonymous). All I did was insert the blank HDD into the drive bay and use the 'Format' option in Storage & Snapshots, as everything else was greyed out whilst the HDD was unformatted. If this auto-created a volume that I now need to kill before I can add the new HDD to the existing storage pool, please let me know how I go about this.
Thanks again,
Zoë
Thanks for your response. I'm willing to give up the plan to make a RAID out of the two drives and simply add the new drive to the storage pool containing the first –– or, indeed, to not expand my overall NAS capacity by placing both drives into a RAID 1 setup –– but the problem is I can't see how to do either of those things with 'Storage & Snapshots' in the QNAP interface.
As you can see in the screenshots above, QTS will neither let me take the new, empty 8TB Seagate drive and add it to my existing storage pool, nor manage it (or the existing 8TB Toshiba drive) to place both drives into RAID 1 mirroring mode.
I'm hoping for advice on how to convince QTS to do either of those operations, since at the moment when you attempt to do anything involving storage pools or RAIDs, the Storage & Snapshots app pretends like I don't have any HDDs installed that these operations can be applied to.
For instance, how can I 'kill' the new volume? There's no menu option for this (or anything synonymous). All I did was insert the blank HDD into the drive bay and use the 'Format' option in Storage & Snapshots, as everything else was greyed out whilst the HDD was unformatted. If this auto-created a volume that I now need to kill before I can add the new HDD to the existing storage pool, please let me know how I go about this.
Thanks again,
Zoë
- dolbyman
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Re: Failing to add a second HDD to my TS-453A
See here for level migration
https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/tutorial ... -migration
adding disks to a pool
https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/faq/arti ... ng-a-drive
to remove the disk, hit detach in the gui and format it
https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/faq/arti ... orage-pool
https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/tutorial ... -migration
adding disks to a pool
https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/faq/arti ... ng-a-drive
to remove the disk, hit detach in the gui and format it
https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/faq/arti ... orage-pool
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Re: Failing to add a second HDD to my TS-453A
Hey there. Just wanted to say thanks for the earlier suggestions. In the end, I was able to detach the new HDD, create a new storage pool and then install the HDD as a thick volume in that.
Originally I was just going to 'expand' my existing storage pool to encompass the second HDD, but towards the end of that process a confirmation dialogue box popped up warning that all files and data on the selected disks would be deleted and asking if I was happy with that plan. Since in the previous window it had shown both my existing (i.e. nearly full) 8 TB drive and the new (i.e. completely empty and freshly formatted) 8 TB drive as 'selected', I wasn't courageous enough to click 'OK' and risk QNAP wiping all of my existing files just to add the second empty drive to Storage Pool 1. (And yeah, I kept telling myself that they couldn't possibly mean that, but I really didn't want to risk it, so just created Storage Pool 2 for the second HDD...)
So my next challenge is trying to work out how to set up qbittorrent to run from within a container on my TS-453A that always uses my VPN connection. (Because at the moment qbittorrent seems to be simultaneously torrenting on both my VPN and on my open ISP IP address, which is less than ideal. But that's a problem for another thread!
Originally I was just going to 'expand' my existing storage pool to encompass the second HDD, but towards the end of that process a confirmation dialogue box popped up warning that all files and data on the selected disks would be deleted and asking if I was happy with that plan. Since in the previous window it had shown both my existing (i.e. nearly full) 8 TB drive and the new (i.e. completely empty and freshly formatted) 8 TB drive as 'selected', I wasn't courageous enough to click 'OK' and risk QNAP wiping all of my existing files just to add the second empty drive to Storage Pool 1. (And yeah, I kept telling myself that they couldn't possibly mean that, but I really didn't want to risk it, so just created Storage Pool 2 for the second HDD...)
So my next challenge is trying to work out how to set up qbittorrent to run from within a container on my TS-453A that always uses my VPN connection. (Because at the moment qbittorrent seems to be simultaneously torrenting on both my VPN and on my open ISP IP address, which is less than ideal. But that's a problem for another thread!
- dolbyman
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Re: Failing to add a second HDD to my TS-453A
nope that message is for the new drive added (files deleted..if any on it)...but if you are that worried about the data..work on that backup game of yours..because with two single volumes..you made the danger of loosing files twice as large now
and a raid is also never a backup
and a raid is also never a backup