What happened to my 4 Tb HDD?

RAID storage for video editing professionals or who care much about the speed
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softlee
Posts: 2
Joined: 28 Sep 2021, 15:20

What happened to my 4 Tb HDD?

Post by softlee »

Hi TerraMaster
I set up a D2-310 as a RAID 1 device with 2 x 3 Tb WD Red HDDs as a Time Machine service for my iMac 2019.

After a good eighteen months with no problems and with space dwindling, I decided to replace the 3Tb drives with 4 Tb Seagate Barracudas.

I hot-swapped one drive and waited for it to be initialized and the data to be mirrored. After both disk lights had returned to green I checked the volume size in the macOS Disk Utility and the size of the array was 3Tb. I assumed that the 4 Tb drive had temporarily been limited to 3 Tb to match the other original drive still in service. I replaced that drive with another Seagate Green HDD and waited for the RAID to mirror over.

When I checked the RAID volume the size was still set to 3 Tb. This was unacceptable as the Time Machine was complaining that it had run out of space, so I erased the drives and set about reformatting them to get them back to 4Tb. No matter what I've done (format as HFS+. APFS, exFAT etc) the drives refuse to return to 4Tb. I've tried the CLI Unix tools, also without success.

Somehow the TerraMaster has reset the volume specification of these drives at a level not accessible to my tools or knowledge and I can't get them to revert to factory spec. Is there a way?

Also, what is the recommended method for replacing drives in a RAID 1 array with larger capacity ones without that extra capacity being lost in the initialization?
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TMSupport
TerraMaster Team
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Joined: 13 Dec 2019, 15:15

Re: What happened to my 4 Tb HDD?

Post by TMSupport »

Hi!
D2-310 does not support the expansion of RAID capacity by replacing hard drives one by one. It is recommended that you rebuild RAID1 with two 4TB hard drives.
To contact our team, please send email to following addresses, remember to replace (at) with @
Technical team: support(at)terra-master.com (for technical support)
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softlee
Posts: 2
Joined: 28 Sep 2021, 15:20

Re: What happened to my 4 Tb HDD?

Post by softlee »

TMSupport wrote: 29 Sep 2021, 14:17 D2-310 does not support the expansion of RAID capacity by replacing hard drives one by one. It is recommended that you rebuild RAID1 with two 4TB hard drives.
Thanks for that information, which would be useful if included in the Instruction Manual.

Have you got any advice on how to reset the volume spec of these 4 Tb drives?
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