It's worth me just mentioning quickly the Stora's architecture. It's a 2 hard drive NAS unit that provides digital storage for users on the network. It can act as a DLNA server allowing music, pictures and videos to be streamed over the network to games consoles and other computers. It is compatible with Apple products supporting an itunes interface, and provides shared network folders for windows or linux computers to access. The drives can be logically arranged in one of two formats; either mirrored so that all data is duplicated on both drives offering maximum redundancy or striped so that storage capacity is maximised as the full capacity of both discs is available to the user, but offers no redundancy. I have mine in the mirrored format. There are three lights on the front of the unit, the first is a power light, the second for hard drive 1 status and the third for hard drive 2 status; green for good and amber for a problem.With both drives containing all data it makes the upgrade a lot simpler. In theory, I don't have to copy all the data to another drive as the Stora is designed to allow a failed disc to be replaced with a new one. I seriously considered copying all the data to a 2nd location but decided that as both discs in the Stora had an identical copy of my data on them I already had a high degree of redundancy. If I encountered any problems, I could always put the removed drive back in to recover.
So, first I powered off the system. It is designed to allow hot-swapping of drives, but I decided the likelihood of damaging a drive whilst the heads were still spinning was a little too high for my liking. I removed the first drive, replaced it with the first new 2TB, and turned the unit back on. As expected, one of the little drive lights was amber indicating a problem with the new disk. A quick trip into the unit's management web page and it reported the problem that disk 1 was not ready, had detected the new drive and asked what to do. I told it to include the new drive into the array. The unit then formatted the new disk and copied all the data from the original disk onto the new disk. This was a surprisingly quick process and took a little under 2 hours.
Once complete, I checked the unit was functioning and then powered it off again. Removed the last original disk and replaced it with the new 2TB disk and powered the unit on again. As before, it detected the new disk but needed to know what to do with it. Another trip to the management web page and I added the new disk to the array and the formatting and data copying commenced again. 2 hours later this process finished. This was when I realised that although the new drives were working fine and had been recognised by the unit, the partition tables had also been copied allowing only the original 1TB of space to be available. The only way I was able to make the full 2TB available was to copy all my data to the removed drives by putting them in my desktop computer and to then reformat the entire Stora. This last step was somewhat annoying, but I now have a 2TB unit with plenty of space on it.
It is worth mentioning that the Stora is designed to be easy to use, so there are no disk partitioning options at all. The only option is to have either a mirrored or striped configuration. All capacity on the drives will be used. In mirrored mode, the maximum capacity is the size of the smaller drive.
I've yet to hear whether there is any potential to expand this unit further, but suspect that as the hardware is a few years old now, 2TB is probably the maximum disk size this unit can accommodate. For me, this is more than enough for the next year or so, and after that I will start looking at systems with space for more than 2 disks. Currently, QNAP is my favourite, but let's see what comes out in the next year.
Many Thanks for the Input!
ReplyDeleteI ordered the Stora with a 2TB disk but started of with testing an old 1TB drive. Now I put the 2TB in the second slot and the Stora is rebuilding the RAID (Yes, I know it will be limited to 1TB at this moment). When done I will rip out the 1TB disk and see where I am! :=)
Maybe add yet another 2TB later...
Thank you for the feedback. I hope it all goes well for you!
ReplyDeleteFollowed your directions(which were wonderful!) and installed 2 2tb drives. Issue: disk management shows the 2 drives at 1.8tb but under user preferences, diskspace still shows what appears to be 1tb drives (i.e. 278 used free 653. did I screw up? I do have 2 computers using the stora
ReplyDeleteI had exactly the same problem but it didn't show up until I used a linux computer and it reported the free space to be less than I was expecting, I meant to update this post to include an update. You've done everything right, so don't worry! It appears that when the disk copies data to the new disk it keeps the same partition size. The way I got round this was to copy the entire contents of the stora to another computer - I am paranoid about losing data so I actually copied it to 2 different disks to ensure I still had a backup. Once I had my data safely copied, then I reconfigured the raid configuration from raid 1 to raid 0 - this is the non-safe mode. Once complete I then changed it back to the raid 1 mode and reformatted as part of the process. It used all the new disk space. Then I copied all the files back.
ReplyDeleteI'm typing this from memory, so the steps in the admin website might be slightly different and if I remember correctly, originally I tried to do this without reformating and the stora kept the old partition table values so, unfortunately, I don't believe there is a way to use the new disk space without reformatting the disks. It might simply be that reformating is the way to go.
On the plus side, you know that your 2TB disks are compatible and working fine, just the slightly time consuming step of having to move data around to go and your done.
Good luck, I hope it all goes well!
Oh great. I'm sitting here with two new 2tb drives and thought this would be easy. Question: If only going through the first part of this process and just replacing drives and ending up with the same partition information, does this mean you would still only have 1tb of space to use?
ReplyDeleteMy thoughts were you would eject one of the 1tb drives. Install a 2tb in the now empty slot. The app asks if you want to format the drive, you say 'yes'. Wouldn't it be partitioned for 2tb afterwards? Then, you'd only need to allow the 1tb to copy it's data to the 2tb and you'd have 1tb of newly free space on the new drive. Then, replace the 2nd 1tb with another new 2tb and go through this same procedure once again. If this doesn't work, I'm questioning why? Is it the firmware or just the way drives format and are manipulated? I also thought RAID drives were hot swappable, not all drives or is the brand or???
Re-reading your post on this I am just about convinced that I will need to copy everything from the Stora to another external docked drive now. Just to insure that I have a backup of my data before I go attempting messing with the Stora configuration.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'd really like to try doing is a hot swap. It just makes sense that you should be able to do this with a RAID drive system from all that I've read. First, though I'd have to eject the drive under the admin if it will let me. I'm thinking it will only let me do it if the drive has failed. I cannot find anything written anywhere about this so maybe I will be the first to report on it.
My thoughts are that the Stora will detect a new drive once I click it into the slot and then it should ask me if I want to format it. Hopefully, I'll be able to tell it to do it and not bother with the good drive. In theory I would believe the format would format the new drive as 2tb. Why would it only format it as 1tb? From what you describe from your memory it seems like the Stora will see the new drive once plugged in, automatically go and format it as the other drive at 1tb and then rebuild or copy the data over to mirror the 1tb. This just seems illogical to me but I don't know without trying. All this confusion on my part stems from not spending enough time with the Stora. But, isn't that how it goes? You get something set up to do what you want and you forget it until you need to upgrade or repair it. Whatever I do, I'll report back here and let you know. Hopefully it will help others in this situation. Hard drive prices are coming down again I see. That's why I jumped on these 2tb Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001's this past week at $119 each. I can remember when the first 1gb drive came out and it was $1,000. Probably was twenty years ago. Drives are so cheap in comparison now. ;)
Hello,
DeleteI'm about to buy Seagate 2TB (ST2000DM001) and want to know if its work perfect on Stora coz I'm about to buy two x 2TB (ST2000DM001) very soon
Let me know
Cheers
Roberto
It's exactly how it goes for me too, this was why I've started to document some of these upgrades so that I can refer to back to what I've done before rather than rely on my memory!
ReplyDeleteFortunately, these units are designed to deal with failed disks, so when a disk suddenly becomes unreadable, the unit still works, which means you can either just yank it out whilst its powered up or switch it off and remove it. As far as the Stora is concerned it doesn't matter. Personally, I would strongly advise against moving a hard drive where the drive is powered and potentially the platters are spinning. You risk doing permanent damage to either or both drives if the Stora is knocked during the removal process.
Powering down the unit and then removing a drive is by far the safest way to do this, and you don't have to tell the Stora you are doing to do it either, you can just turn it off and swap the drives over.
I don't know of any way to increase the disk size of the unit without reformatting I'm afraid, I did look into this but because the software is designed for ease of use it comes with minimal functionality. At a technical level, it is possible if you understand linux and are prepared to gain backdoor root access to the system and modify the partitional tables manually, but I wouldn't recommend that.
If I were doing this again, I would copy all my data to another location (preferably 2 locations for safety), turn the unit off, remove and replace both drives, power the unit up and reformat the new disks using all the available space. I would then copy the data back. Job done!
Good luck, I hope it all goes well for you :)
Thanks for your blog on this. I have had my Stora for a few years now and the original 1 TB drive is nearly full (I blame those new high resolution digital cameras!).
ReplyDeleteI run two 1 TB drives in RAID1 and periodically insert the second drive to mirror then move it back to the safe.
Your blog saved me the heartache of installing a 2TB drive and expecting it to mirror the 1 TB but retain it's native capacity. I had a feeling that it wouldn't work hence my Google searching that led me here.
So I will copy everything via ethernet to my PC's 2TB drive, install the two new drives in the Stora and copy everything back. Thank goodness for my brand new desktop PC, my old laptop wouldn't have had the storage available!
When you copied the data to your PC, did you just use Windows Explorer copy...paste? Or did you FTP it? I don't think I've ever moved that much data before.
Thanks again for your great blog entry,
Andrew.
Thank you for your comments, always happy to help! I used windows copy and paste (although it did take a long time). I tend to avoid using ftp for large volumes of data as it can be very slow for large numbers of small files.
ReplyDelete