Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming TwinStore - Formatting 4TB Drives

Why not put one of the MD600 Discs into the TwinStore alongside a blank disc, this would force a rebuild of the Raid / Mirror.

Data Transfer across the SATA interface will be substantially quicker than across even Gigabit Ethernet and the File "conversion" that is part of the Restore process also becomes unnecessary, resulting in even further time savings.

In addition, deleted Albums would not be restored and Playlists would also be maintained.

I think the drives in the MD600 are lower capacity, hence the swapping after the restore.

Regards,
Carl

As Carl surmises, the MD600 has 3TB drives. It would be lovely if Sooloos could be made to work with uneven disk sizes, I'd agree.

I understood the reasons for swapping, but are you sure that the Sooloos Raid Build doesn't do that?

Just as most of the current NAS solutions out there do, Sooloos uses a version of BusyBox (Linux) as the OS on their NAS. Many of these NAS's now allow for RAIDs to build using different size drives, including RAID 1. In a RAID 1 scenario, the capacity limit is obviously the smaller drive.

But these NAS's do allow the following to occur in e.g. a 2TB Raid 1 setup...

Swap out one of the 2TB drives and insert a 4TB drive and allow the RAID to be rebuilt.

When the above Rebuild is complete, take out the remaining 2TB drive and replace with a 4TB drive and allow the RAID to Rebuild... you now have a 4TB Raid 1 NAS.

As most versions of BusyBox are "off-the-Shelf" with common tools (Raid etc.) built-in and which then allows the OEM to customize with their own Value Add-Ons, it MAY be that the TwinStore / MD600 would allow this to happen.

Depending on your adventurousness, it may be worth a try.

Ronnie,

As a more senior member of HHers I will defer to your advice and give it a whirl (once my back up has run...)

I don't suppose one of our PPS could also chip in before I destroy tens of thousands of pounds worth of hirez downloads and ripping time is destroyed...? (Obviously one of the smaller disks will remain as a potential source of back up, but that lacks the melodrama).

I'll keep you posted.

I recognize that I'm not the guinea pig here and that I don't exactly have a "horse in the race"

However, IMHO the worst that would happen if you insert a Blank 4Tb drive into your MD600 is

1) The Raid will refuse to Rebuild and the data on your "original" 3Tb (2Tb??) drive will remain intact

2) The Raid will rebuild, but the 4Tb will in future only be recognized as a 2Tb drive by the Sooloos BusyBox OS, i.e. without the Drive being reformatted.......again in this scenario, the data on the original 2-3Tb drive remains intact

The scenario that I outlined above of building a higher capacity Raid 1, I've seen it done on Client's NAS systems of different ages, OEM's and capacities.......the Raid 1's that I can recall were Drobo, Netgear, Western Digital, QNAP, Synology, Buffalo

However, don't do it if you are not comfortable and time for Restore probably isn't an issue anyway

If it were me, I would take "comfort" from the following

1) I always have my Sooloos Backups (as well as my Online and Offline Sooloos Clones that I've detailed previously)

2) IMHO, nothing bad will happen to the "original" 2-3Tb Drive that I would leave in the MD600 to initiate the Rebuild

3) Even if something bad were to happen, I still have the 2nd 2-3Tb drive that I took out of the MD600 and laid in a safe place

But that's if it were me

Well, have you taken out a Contract on me with Tony Soprano yet?

No. Only because Tony Soprano's (sadly) dead though...

Actually I'm still waiting for the back up to finish before I try your mad Frankenstein experiment on my beloved music collection. It started on Weds, so surely can't take much longer...?

How many CD's?

6,447.

My system takes on average 20 seconds per album, so that number would take about 36 hours to complete. However, that is to fast ESATA connected drives; USB 3 would be similar but USB 2 is much slower.

Regards,
Carl

Well I back up to a 3 TB HD, USB3.
It take 22 seconds per CD.

So I'm thinking you should be done in 40 hours.

How do you back up?