Home Computer Audio Asylum

Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

Need for a skilled appliance repair person.

I had a Linux adventure a few months ago. The 1.5 TB disks on my Thecus NAS were getting old and full, so I took advantage of a sale to buy new 3 GB drives. These were supported by new firmware, so I upgraded that as well. Then I proceeded to upgrade the NAS by swapping drives, one at a time, and have the RAID array rebuild. (Actually, not quite true, first I backed up all the files on the NAS to a spare drive that I keep off-site.) The rebuild took several days, swapping one drive at a time. Finally, when it was done I had the space I would have had if I had purchased 2 TB drives, not the space I thought I'd paid for.

Some Googling showed that the problem was that the drives had originally been formatted with fdisk (because when I got the NAS I was using older firmware). Therefore there was the 2 TB limit. Swapping drives as per the RAID kept all of the new drives formatted the same way. Some more googling showed that an existing drive formatted with fdisk could be "jacked up" and the gdisk formatting dropped in. I took one drive out and put it on another computer running Linux. This worked. Unfortunately, when I dropped the "jacked up" drive back in the RAID didn't like it. (Maybe it would have worked if I had "jacked up" all of the drives before putting them back into the NAS.)

At this point, I admitted defeat and followed the official instructions, which amounted to zapping all five new disks and restoring from my backup.

In this case, the problem was the 2 TB limit, inherited from who knows where? (IBM, Microsoft and Intel?) Incidentally, Thecus sells their NAS products as appliances, not computers. However, they do have the ability to add some software, in this case I added SSH to gain root access to the machine, which was how I figured out what was going wrong, spacewise.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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