ReadyNas DUO remove 2nd drive not booting

[pliljenberg]

Hi,

I have a DUO with 2x2TB disks with X-RAID.
I want to do a factory reset of my DUO (to get 4k sector alignment) and I thought I should do a cheap backup of all my data before that, my plan was:
1) Remove second drive from DUO and plug it into an USB disk bay
2) Copy all data from DUO to USB disk
3) Factory reset
4) Copy all data back from USB disk
5) Plug in 2nd drive again and resync

When I remove the second drive and start the DUO it wont boot up properly thus I cannot copy the data
Is this solution not possible?

[mdgm]

Not a good idea what you did. I would have suggested getting a new disk to backup the NAS. You could then have had it handy as a spare in case a disk in your NAS were to fail.

What does your NAS show under the Info (far right) column in RAIDar (http://www.readynas.com/downloads)?

[pliljenberg]

It doesn't show up at all (probably since it didn't boot up properly). Inserting the 2nd drive again and it booted correctly and started syncing the 2nd disk again.
Does this mean that if one of my disks fail I won't be able to use the NAS until I get a replacement drive in? That sounds crazy, its a RAID system so it should work with just the one drive (but no redundancy of course ) until I get a replacement disk? Otherwise all data will be useless until the replacement drive arrives. What if 2TB drives goes out of stock/manufacturing - then I won't be able to access my data since larger disks aren't supported

[mdgm]

Which disk did you remove? The left one or the right one? What RAID mode are you using?

As for 2TB drives going out of manufacturing that won't happen for a while yet. The minimum disk manufacturers offer currently is about 500GB I think. As many old computers can't handle drives larger than 2TB in capacity they'll be in demand for quite a while yet I reckon.

[pliljenberg]

The right one (labelled 2)
Configuration: X-RAID (Expandable RAID), 2 disks
The note about drives going out of stock was mostly a joke - but I do think that the disks should be removeable and the data available even if one disk fails, that's kind of the idea...

[mdgm]

As disk 2 would normally be the parity disk (using X-RAID) I would've thought this problem would've been more likely to have occurred if you removed disk 1.

Anyway the NAS is designed to handle disk failure not removal of working disks at a random time.

[pliljenberg]

Hmm, is it possible to use RAID-1 instead of X-RAID on the DUO (thus allowing for my scenario in the future)?

[mdgm]

Take a look at the Software Manual starting at page 19: http://www.readynas.com/docs

[pliljenberg]

Thanks, a bit of Catch-22 for me then
Guess I'll have to get an extra 2TB disk after all.
Thanks for the info