Hi all
I have a BlackArmor NAS 220 with 2 x 1TB and I wanted to upgrade to 2 x 2TB drives. I did manage to do it and I am posting this message for the benefit of people looking for answers to "How to upgrade BlackArmor NAS 220 from 2 x 1TB to 2 X 2TB drives". This forum came up high on my Google Search and as other people pointed out, Seagate support staff are not forthcoming with a proper procedure. They sent me to the tutorial of how to swap a failed hard disk with failed link to a Knowledge Base article. So indeed, not much help!
Method 1. Tried, tested and working
All the data on BlackArmor NAS 220 got obliterated, including the default shares that were defined in the original system. What doesn't get deleted is the operating system on the NAS 220 which is NOT stored on the hard disks. So if you have any important data and/or configuration shares, copy the data somewhere else and make good notes of the configurations you have so to re-create them later.
Assumtions: Initial configuration 2x1TB drives organised as one RAID1 volume of 1TB. The target is 2x2TB drives with one RAID 1 volume of 2TB.
Step 1. Turn off system. Take out one 1TB hard disk and replace it with a 2TB hard drive. Turn on NAS 220. Use BlackArmor Discovery to access the device. Go to Storage/Volumes. Click on Claim icon displayed to the right of the new disk. Once the processing is done, go to Volumes and click on the Recover icon displayed at the right of the degraded volume. This will take a while (hours, variable time according to the amount of data).
Step 2. Repeat Step 1 for the second hard disk.
Step 3. Now you should have a system that shows one "good" volume of 980GB or so and two drives of 1.9TB. If you haven't saved the data and configuration settings as described above, now is the last chance to do it. If you don't care about it, go to to step 4.
Step 4. Go to Storage/Volumes and click the Modify icon at the right side of the present volume. On the next screen, assuming you already have a RAID 1 configuration, you have the options of RAID 0, RAID 1 and Span. Select RAID 1 and press submit. You'll get a warning message that all data will be lost ( and it does get lost!). Proceed and the system automatically deletes the volume, recreates a new volume from the two hard disks, formats it and then a couple of hours later it will present you with a brand new 2TB RAID 1 volume.
Step 5. Reconfigure the system with the shares you had before and restore data
Based on my experience with BlackArmor NAS 220 I suggest two more methods, one of them that cuts down the time needed in Method 1 and another method that very likely would preserve your data but a bit trickier.
Method 2. (similar to Method 1 but quicker)
As your data will be lost anyway, don't bother with the rebuilding of the RAID 1 in step 1. Remove both 1TB hard drives and replace them with the new 2TB drives. Go to storage, use the Claim icon at the right of each drive to introduce the drives to the system. Go to Volumes, select modify and create your RAID 1 Volume. Re-configure the drive and restore data.
Method 3 (Keep the data, keep the configuration, achieve the 2TB RaID 1 volume you wanted, but take a day off to do it!)
STep 1. Follow Step 1 and 2 in Method 1
Step 2. Now you have 2x2TB Raid 1 voulume with a capacity of 1TB. Turn off system and take out the two new harddisks and put them in a PC that supports Raid. Make sure the bios configuration is set up properly to accept the new RAiD. Bring up the PC with its normal OS. It is true that Windows 7 allows you to extend/shrink a partition but I don't trust Microsoft to do a good job with a non-ntfs partition. Use a different partition manager like Partition Assistant Home Edition (free) which hopefully is more robust in dealing with different types of partition formats. I haven't tried it myself so please correct me if wrong. Ok, now use the partition manager software to extend the last primary partition on the transferred RAID to take in all the remaining space. As you noticed, I said "last" partition. I had a look at how BlackArmor organises the drives and found 4 primary partitions. The first 3 are smallish ( < 1GB) and the 4th one is the largest of 900+ GB on 1TB drive or 1900+ GB on the 2TB drives.
Step 3. If step 2 worked well, take the system down, transfer the drives back to the BlackArmor box and put them back in using the initial order (disk 1 in bay 1 and disk 2 in bay 2).
Notes.
1. Method 1 definitely works and very likely Method 2 as well. Method 3 takes a long time, is fiddly and might not work as your partition manager software might not be able to deal properly with the partition type used by BlackArmor.
2. Which ever method you use, all is safe as you still have the original 1TB drives intact and always able to go back to the initial configuration. Just MAKE SURE you know which disk came out of which bay on BlackArmor, so if you need to go back, you put them back in the right order and off you go.
All the best
alex
