How to upgrade to bigger drives effectively/fastest way TVS-871+UX800p

[Paradoxon]

Dear community,

I am running the following system:

• Qnap Turbo Station TVS-871-i7-16G
  One storage pool containing
  8 x 6 TB WD Red in RAID6 as volume1
• Qnap UX-800p
  8 x 6 TB WD Red in RAID6 as volume2

As I am running out of space, I am eager to upgrade to bigger drives, mainly WD Red 10 TB or Seagate IronWolf 12 TB.

I am aware, that online RAID Capacity Upgrade, where one eject the old, insert the new hdd and rebuild the RAID is possible, but that does not sound handy. I guess that would takes weeks.
As I own another Qnap Turbo Station TVS-871-i7-16G I thought of cloning the volume1 to the other one (user data and configuration) right away with the 10 TB/12 TB drives, but I am not sure about the enclosure ...

What would you suggest as best and fastest approach with minimized write operations?
Thank you for any hints!

[storageman]

No, can't see anyway around this.
Because it's one pool, not two separate pools you have no choice but to use the disk upgrade process.

[Paradoxon]

Hi storageman,

Thank you for your reply.
So that means, that if one of the volumes is missing from one storage pool, you can't upgrade seperately?

Is there any way to predict how long it will take to rebuild the raid per disk? So let's say 1 day per disk x 16 means about 2 weeks and some days?

[storageman]

I would agree
How much is actually used?
Can't you setup other 871 with the drives and replicate to it.
Later add the UX-800 back and add to the pool to expand further.

[Paradoxon]

Well, I guess I will build the 2nd TVS-871 with 12 TB and copy all data (vol1 is about 80 % full, vol2 75 % full) to it on a new vol1 with pool1. After that, switch the 12 TB to 1st TVS-871, reload the configuration, add the UXP-800 as vol2 on pool2 and seperate data again.

Guess that would be the fastest way.

[spikemixture]

Interesting exercise!
My thoughts go this way.

Rebuilding say as you put it a day per drive ( I think longer)
But then how long to copy the 40TB (??) or is it 80TB ? from old box to new box !!
Also a long time!!

Personally I would go with the upgrade one at a time.
Things will still work (maybe a little slower) but likely to go unnoticed
.

[Paradoxon]

Hi spikemixture,
Thank you for your thoughts.

Size is now about 50 TB, which probably means at 110 - 120 MB/s it will take about 5 days and 6 h if I am correct (at 115 MB/sec) to simply copy from old to new.
Replacing one at a time may take a month I guess but as you said, likely go unnoticed. However, there are far more write operations involved, that's why I am a bit concerned.

[storageman]

Well, I guess I will build the 2nd TVS-871 with 12 TB and copy all data (vol1 is about 80 % full, vol2 75 % full) to it on a new vol1 with pool1. After that, switch the 12 TB to 1st TVS-871, reload the configuration, add the UXP-800 as vol2 on pool2 and seperate data again.

Guess that would be the fastest way.

You said you have one pool and two volumes, not two pools, two RAID groups and two volumes. So which is it?

If there is one pool you would have to completely kill what's on the UX-800 to add it back to the pool.

[Paradoxon]

Current status now is: one pool with 2 volumes ...
Future plan is: two pools with 1 volume each