I just realised, I haven't provided an update to my drive replace / upgrade story for my NAS (file server) Storage from earlier this year. Back at the beginning of the year, I planned to swap out / upgrade the RAID controller as well as the all the drives in the RAID group on the server storage with newer hardware. Well I'm happy to report that the project is done....well sort of done. 

The first drive swap began back in August of 2016, the first step in the upgrade process was to add additional redundancy to my RAID group. After swapping out the old RAID controller and replacing it with a new (old) LSI 9650SE-16ML, I put the first of the Western Digital 3TB Reds into the server and began the migration from a RAID5 container to RAID6. 

The process took a better part of a week to complete, but I felt more confident with a RAID6 container, as it gives me 2 parity drives. Which will come in handy as I started swapping out all the old Seagate 2TB drives. The process took a couple of weeks to complete, as I wanted to buy the drives from different Canada Computers stores at different times, to ensure that that the serial numbers of the drives would be better staggered. That way if one drive was part of a bad batch, hopefully not all of the drives are bad. The swap / rebuild / swap of the remaining drives took the better part of 2 months, and as of about mid Oct, the finally 3 TB drive was inserted. The only crap bit, was I wasn't able to grow the container as it still said 12.73 TB after inserting the new drives, the only way to fix this, was to delete the existing container and copy all of the data back on to my server. Thankfully there hasn't been a drive failure on resource in a while and I was able to complete the task in about 4 days of hard coping. 

As it stands today, I now have 9x3 TB Western Digital Red Drives in a RAID6 container, that gives me just shy of 20 TB of usable space. Now you maybe asking, why is it sort of complete? Well I still have room for one more drive and I may in early Feb pick up one more 3 TB drive and put it in there, hopefully growing the container by another 3TB of space, or leaving it as a spare disk, I'm not sure yet.

As for the the 2 TB drives that I pulled out of Storage? Those disk have found there way into a small QNAP TS-431 I bought and am using it as a backup storage device for all of my user shares, that I eventually copy the data off to my external "offsite" drives. I am in the process of upgrading it to 4x3TB drives in RAID5, that's a project that I want to finish in Jan, possibly in the next two weeks.

With all the remaining drives from Storage and from what I'm calling cap-nas, I plan on eventually putting them into that Chassis I bought earlier this year. Oh you thought I forgot about asstraffic-new....nope, it's going to be put to use as a backup server for my network, and I'll have resource / storage dump data there, maybe a monthly task to fire it up, robo-copy files over and then power it down, or if I can rack it somewhere, set up a VPN between home and offsite and have a hot standby of my data somewhere for that just-in-case scenario. 

The last upgrade path for both Storage / Resource for 2017 will be to swap out the Western Digital Raptor drives for SSDs and do a much needed upgrade from Win2k3 to Win2k12, the CPUs should be fine, but I'll have to pick up RAM for both boxes. I have some VMs on Resource, that'll have to be moved to as yet to be built hypervisor, but we'll see what 2017 brings in terms of IT projects that I want to get done. 

Happy New Year!