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How long does it take to upgrade an 8 bay NAS?

Short answer...a month or more.

Most of you may know that my wife does a lot of 4K video, so we have two 8 bay QNAP NAS boxes with 24TB and 42TB respectively. Since she was filling it up along with my music and other video media, I decided to buy 12TB drives and replace the existing 8TB drives, making the 42TB box able to handle a about 65TB. The old drives would then replace the 4TB drives in the older NAS giving it about 42TB.

Upgrading appeared easy, just replace the new drives one at a time. Let them sync and replace the next one and so forth. What I didn't know was it takes 2 days to sync one drive or about 24 days to complete the task. Replacing the 4TB drives with the old 8TB ones only took a day each.

In the meantime, between swapping, I also upgraded the boxes to 8GB of memory for each NAS which does seem to make a difference, but not helping for sync time.

The old NAS was finished first and the software was easy. Just expand the capacity and then allocate it to the RAID group. Easy, peasy.

For the newer, bigger NAS, it refused to expand the capacity because it exceeded a 64TB limit. After many searches and posting to the QNAP forum, I found out that I was screwed! The maximum storage is 250TB, but that is only if you set a 64K bytes per node at initialization. By default, mine was set at 16K or a 64TB limit.

My only option was to blow off the entire NAS and restore backups. Ouch!

Prior to starting this process, I ensured that I had full backups on both NASes and pulled them out for posterity and bought new 16TB USB drives for new backups. So, I triple checked that the backups were complete and up to date and crossed my fingers and pulled all the 12TB drives. To reinitialize the NAS, you then power it up with no drives. Next, you load them all back into their slots.

Once the system is fully booted with the drives, the QNAP browser GUI is quite slick and easy yo configure the RAID type and so forth and then it starts syncing again. Initially, it told me that it would take over 300 hours to complete! Double ouch!

However QNAP has an option for background process priority. Changing it to the highest priority changed the time to 55 hours.

Right now, I'm at 38.9% and another 38 hours and 38 minutes.

Then, it'll take several more days and restore the backups.

On the upside, usage on the NAS during the upgrade was not interrupted. Now and then, it would be a little laggy, but not too bad until I had to reformat the big NAS. However, I copied the wife's docs from the big NAS to the other one, so she's good there. The backups are also connected to the old NAS, so she can get any of her video projects and copy them to her local PC if she needs to work on anything and update those to the NAS when it's done.

In the end, the moral of the story is check your backups and keep multiple copies!




-Rod


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Topic - How long does it take to upgrade an 8 bay NAS? - Rod M 10:37:33 12/27/22 (18)

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