Six or eight weeks ago (I didn’t mark the date) one of the drives in the RAID 10 Array in my DIY NAS failed. I had a spare at the ready, used it to replace the bad drive, and Intel Rapid Storage Technology rebuilt the array in a few hours. The array was four 3TB Seagate NAS drives (5900 rpm). All was well, then again, all the drives were the same age and well out of warranty; I bought them as a group about five years ago. I considered that it would be prudent to replace/upgrade the drives.
I ordered five 4TB Seagate Iron Wolf NAS drives, which arrived this past Thursday afternoon, June 4. I set about my task Thursday evening, formatting a drive in the drive dock on top of my NAS. I consider it best practice on a new, RAW drive to run a full format, because that checks every sector on the drive. It takes a good while longer, but it eliminates the possibility of writing data to possibly bad sectors later on; all available sectors are known good after a full format. Any bad sectors are marked as unusable. It’s not that I expect bad sectors, it’s that I want to know for certain that there aren’t; best practice in my view.
After formatting that first drive, I pulled the drive in port 3 and replaced it with the new drive, I opened Intel RST and marked it as a spare, then began formatting a new drive while Intel RST recognized the spare and began rebuilding the array. The array rebuild was finished before the drive was completely formatted. I repeated this process three more times during the course of Friday, June 5, finishing up around midnight. Before I went off to bed, I placed the fifth drive, my new spare, in the drive dock, and formatted it as Intel RST was once more rebuilding the array. The RAID array was available for use throughout this time, although perhaps with a slower response time.
This morning I removed the spare from the drive dock, boxed it and put it away for safekeeping, then opened Intel RST to expand the array size to fit the new 4TB drives. The array size will increase from 5.5TB to 7.4TB after RST has completed initializing the array expansion. When the initialization was complete, I restarted my NAS, opened Disk Management, and extended the volume, which is seen by Disk Management as one drive. Then another restart, and my NAS upgrade is complete and good to go.
