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[billm]

I have a DNS-345 set up with a RAID 1 volume ie 2 physical drives.  The volume is 2TB and I want to increase this to 3TB without (if possible) having to find another 2TB drive to back up to first or without losing my data (of course)!  I'd hoped I could replace one of the 2TB drives with a 3TB, do a rebuild to the new drive (which would only use 2TB of the 3TB), replace the second drive, rebuild that and then hope that, as part of the second rebuild, the system picked up the fact that capacity was now 3TB.  Is this possible?  There doesn't seem to be much info on the web about increasing RAID sizes and nothing I can find about doing this on D-Link NAS specifically.  Can anyone help?

Bill

[JavaLawyer]

I don't believe the DNS-345 explicitly supports RAID resizing. However, there are alternatives.

As per the DNS-345 manual, the DNS-345 supports RAID migration: Standard to RAID 1 without data loss. If you format the 3TB HDD in a free slot and copy the data from your RAID-1 array to the new 3TB standard volume, you should then be able to convert the 3TB standard volume to a new RAID array using one of the two physical HDDs from your old RAID-1. Not having worked with the DNS-345 I do not know the procedure for performing this function, but presume this resides under Disk Management.

Not knowing how smart the DNS-345 is, here is a trick used on the legacy DNS-343 series to prevent the unit from getting confused with the existing RAID-1 format on the old HDD your going to use for the RAID-1 migration: Mount the old RAID-1 HDD in a Windows PC and remove the existing partitions. Since the DNS-345 uses the Linux file system, having Windows alter the HDD will make the HDD unrecognizable to the DNS-345, prompting a reformat.

Presuming you go forward with this, please post back and let us know how things work out and describe the procedure for other readers.

** RAID-1 provides redundancy, but is not a backup (DNS-345 - Data Backup Versus Redundancy).  Make sure you have a second physical copy of your data before performing any procedure like this.  If you don't have a backup, you can always use the 2TB HDD from your legacy RAID-1 array after copying your data from the RAID-1 array to the 3TB HDD,

[billm]

Many thanks for this comprehensive reply.  I'll probably not go ahead for a while yet but if and when, I'll certainly post my procedures/experience for others.

[JavaLawyer]

Not a problem.