I have a TVS-671 with 6x2TB drives. One of the drives has failed. Is there a way to rebuild without adding a new drive? I don’t really need the full storage and don’t want to buy a new drive at the moment.
I’m not a storage specialist, so I will probably need some specific guidance/ steps if possible! Any help appreciated.
Thanks, Iain
You cannot rebuild on thin air, your NAS will remain degraded until you replace the drive.
Hope you have backups (no, a RAID is not a backup)
Yeah, you can rebuild into a RAID5 w/o adding new drives but it means losing all your data and restoring from a backup…
If you have 6 2TB drives, then you basically have 8 TB of storage. Moving to a RAID5 would still give you 8 TB of storage. The difference is you now have a working system that will allow one more drive to fail before you lose everything.
So if you don’t “need” the storage from all your drives, then RAID 6 is the safer way to go.
You have two choices:
1.) Replace the drive and stay in RAID6.
2.) Back up your data (which you should be doing anyhow - as @dolbyman has said - a RAID is not a backup. Then once data is backed up, wipe everything out and start over again in a RAID5 configuration. Restore from backup.
Option 1 is by far the easiest…
In this case, if you don’t currently have a backup device, you may consider purchasing a larger external hard drive. You can back up your data to the external drive, rebuild the RAID, and then copy the data back afterwards.
This way, you will also have an additional backup, which helps ensure the safety of your data. Just something for your consideration. Thanks!
