NAS200 Data Management?

[Gillbot]

I have a linksys NAS200 with dual 250GB drives in mirror. I'd like to upgrade these to a larger capacity but due to the slow nature of this device, I'd prefer to clone one of the current HDD's to a larger one then put it in the device and let it mirror itself. Is this even possible? I know ghost can duplicate and resize windows drives but is there a similar utility that will work on these?

 

[Gillbot]

No ideas?

 

[Gillbot]

nothing?

 

[taltamir]

i have absolutely NO IDEA weather or not this nas device supports it.
AFAIK the partition will not magically expand if you do that.
I have no idea what the linksys nas200 supports...

Lets say the nas drives are Drive A and Drive B, and that the new drives are C and D.

To answer the question the way you ASKED it: if the NAS has an option to select a drive to mirror unto the other, then perhaps you can do it this way:

take out drive A from the nas, put it in a PC, put drive C in that PC as well. mirror drive A to drive C, expand the partition from 250GB to whatever TB drive C has. take out drive B from the nas, place the drive C into the NAS and set it as "good"
Put the unformatted Drive D into the NAS and have the NAS mirror the data from drive C to Drive D...

But the easy simple and surefire way to do it is:
take out Drives A from the NAS, make sure your PC can read it... if it can take drive B out of the nas and put it aside (in case of catastrophic failure). If the PC can NOT read drive A that put it back in the NAS to avoid losing data.
Put Drive C and D into the NAS... set up a new mirror array and format them...
Plug Drive A or B into a PC on the same network as the nas, and then simply copy all the files from drive B (on PC) to the new NAS array.

 

[Gillbot]

I believe the NAS uses EXT3 by default (or some other Linux filesystem) so a simple copy is unlikely. I know some drive utilities can handle linux disks though. I guess i'll have to copy all the files off first (painfully slow), upgrade, then copy back (slow again).

 

[taltamir]

how this post end up appearing BEFORE the post I replied to? anyways I am editing it for chronological accuracy.

 

[taltamir]

why is a simply copy unlikely? doesn't ubuntu support reading ext3 as well as, well, any type of file transfer? just use a liveCD

copying files has the potential of being a lot faster than waiting for the drive to mirror! as it copies over empty space while mirroring.

 

[Gillbot]

Yeah, I could use a live CD. I was just tunnel thinking about WinXP.

 

[taltamir]

check it out first though, i am not 100% sure that a liveCD will work without a need to install or enable some obscure service... so if you are unfamiliar with that os it might be a problem to do.

 

[Gillbot]

i'll give it a test when I pick up a pair of drives. Not sure if I want to jump to a pair of 1TB's or go cheap and pick up 2x500gb.