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[natty]

hi there

I have an old dns-320, which has stopped working. the drives within are still fine though. so i went out and bought a 320l in the hope I can simply take the drives from the old and put in the new and all will be well

however, I am worried that when inserting the drives in the new unit, it will format them
is there any way this can be avoided, or am I worrying unnecessarily?

thanks

nat

[FurryNutz]

I believe the drives will be formatted...

Any chance you have a small spare drive you can put in the 320 and format it and put some test data on it, then move it to the 320L and see what happens?

[natty]

Thanks, I'll give that a try.
Sure I have one knocking around somewhere, but don't think I have 2 spare drives of the same size though. The dns 320 has a raid 0 setup (if that is the one that mirrors data on both drives)
I had hoped that maybe it would simply recognize the fact that they are in the correct 'format' and leave them be. Does the 320L have a different setup, if. Copy some files on them etc. I had that fun_plug thing on the 320 also, not sure if that would make any difference?

[ivan]

It is very unlikely that you can do a direct swop - the firmware is different and since the RAID array is a software raid even if they did work it would be better to format the disks in the new box.

If it is a RAID 0 array then you will definitely need to re-format. RAID 1 is more forgiving but in all cases if your data is important you need to backup what you have (remember Murphy's first law will apply).

Data on a RAID 0 array needs special software to back it up if your DNS-320 isn't working.  For RAID 1, since both disks are identical the best way to back that data up is to use an SATA/USB caddy or adapter and a linux computer (a live linux dvd will work if you are careful).

Once you have the data backed up it is safe to try the disks in the new box and if it doesn't work and you need to format them then you can and just restore your data.

When you have the new box up and running I would advise you to keep the backup up to date (any data that you do not have at least two copies of means it is not backed up).
 

[FurryNutz]

Thank you Ivan. 

[natty]

thanks guys, appreciate the advice.
will see if i can locate a caddy and start copying files off ..somewhere before i start again..

[FurryNutz]

Let us know how it goes...

[natty]

finally got around to backing up the 320 data, simply popped one of the drives into my popcorn 410, and started copying to an external drive, only took 5 days!.
then popped both the 320 drives into the new 320L

logged onto the web interface and was immediately presented with a message saying something along the lines of

found a roaming raid from another share centre, would you like to integrate it into your current drive setup. to which I said yes.
and magically all the data is there fine!

can say I am a little surprised it was that easy. least I know have a decent backup of what I started with, along with the NAS being back up again.

[FurryNutz]

Thanks for letting us know the results. Good to know that this works for this series.

Enjoy.