DS218+ Convert From Mirrored Disks to Merged Hard Drive

[ipr101]

Hi,
I have a DS218+ with two 12GB hard drives installed, the drives are currently configured to mirror each other.

I'd like to stop mirroring the drives and change the RAID configuration so I have around 24GB of space available, the extra space is more important to me than having the files on the drive backed-up.

I can't find any information on how to swap the RAID Configuration once it has been set-up, the option to change the RAID type is greyed out in Storage Manager. So I wondered if this is something that it is possible to do?

I wondered if I deactivated one of the disks if I would then be allowed to alter the configuration when I re-activated it. I would prefer a solution that allows me to keep the data I have now with out backing up, and just have the extra space added.

Could anyone please point me to a relevant help article or let me know how best to progress this?

Thanks

 

[fredbert]

You will have to degrade the current storage pool by removing one of the drives: from what you said it is either SHR-1 or RAID 1. The best way is to turn off the NAS and remove a drive. I would restart the NAS to make sure that the degarded volume is still working ok (and shut it down again).

Then using a PC you can initialise the removed drive. Then reinstall it.

When you boot up the NAS the storage pool will show that it is missing a drive and has no resilience (as previously tested). But you can now make a new storage pool on the wiped drive. Your options would be to use a Basic or JBOD type, depending on whether you want to make one single 24 TB volume (with the risk of losing all data if one drive fails) or two 12 TB volumes.

You can then using Control Panel to move shared folders from the current to new volume. And after that you can decide what to do with the remianing drive of the original storage pool.


Note: any package you have installed on DSM will have its configuration and data files stored on the original volume. So you should backup these before working on that second drive.

BTW you should have a backup of your data somewhere as mistakes and errors can happen.

 

[ipr101]

Thanks @fredbert that's really helpful.

If I take out one of the drives, then format it and add it back in with a new RAID configuration, would I need to make changes to the other drive?

I was hoping I could get away with just modifying one of the drives and leaving the other untouched. But I'm wondering now if I'll have to make changes to both drives?

 

[fredbert]

The original storage pool, using the remaining drive, will will be marked as degraded and DSM will probably refuse to do some actions until it is rebuilt: I can't think exactly what they would be or how annoying, off the top of my head.

Moving shared folders between volumes is pretty easy. Just select another volume from the list. Here's my DS215j with two Basic storage pools giving me two volumes.

Each drive in the DSM NAS has a partition that is used to run DSM. So you see the drives aren't simple storage devices once they get used in the NAS.