Terastation Upgrade

April 21st, 2008

Couple months after I replaced a drive in my terastation, another drive died. Sigh. Time to upgrade. Took many many hours, but I upgraded my 1TB Buffalo Terastation (4 x 250GB) to 2TB (4 x 500GB). Of course its less than 2TB – once RAID 5 is setup, it comes out to about 1.4TB of usable space. And you definitely want RAID 5 – that means if any one of the 4 drives dies, you don’t lose any data, just replace it before a second drive fails.

Here’s the deets:

  1. Bought four 500GB drives for about $100 each,
  2. Copy data from Terastation to one of the 500GB drives – mounted via USB on windows xp, could also work with IDE inside PC (4-6 hours)
  3. Disassemble Terastation, pull out 250GB drives (<1 hour)
  4. Copy data from 500GB to 2 of the 250GB drives on windows xp PC (6-8 hours)
  5. Partial Reassemble Terrastation with 4 new drives (10 mins)
  6. Upgrade Terastation firmware to 2.16 (had trouble with disk format till I did this)
  7. Format each disk (5 mins) (had to reboot a couple times to get it to work)
  8. Create Raid array 1 (RAID 5) using all 4 disks (2 mins), raid “checking” took 13 hours
  9. Create shared folder
  10. Copy data from the 2 250GB drives back to terastation.

More on http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/Terastation_FAQ