Buffalo NAS HS-DH500GL Hard Disk Upgrade

Objective: Upgrade my elderly HS-DH500GL NAS Buffalo Hard drive from 500Gb to 2Tb.

500Gb seemed like a lot of space a few years ago when I bought it, but with more photos and ripping all my CDs to FLAC for Squeezebox I was now running out of space quickly!

There seemed little point in jumping to just 1TB which wouldnt last long, so I chose to go for 2TB. However after looking at the prices of NAS boxes in the 2TB region, none were particularly cheap and so I began my journey on upgrading what I had already. After doing some trawling on the net I ended up with the following disk as a suitable replacement.

Samsung F4 EcoGreen 2TB 32MB 5400RPM 3.5 inch SATA-II Internal Hard Drive - OEM - Approx £66

I discounted the Western Digital WD20EARS on the basis of various reports on the net about the Load Cycle Count bug(?) in the firmware and so went with the Samsung F4. The original drive in the NAS was a Samsung so I figured it should be ok

I bought one of these to enable me to access the Hard disk.

IOMAX USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Adapter Kit with Power Adapter for 2.5/3.5/5.25 Inch SATA or IDE Drive - Approx £18

However I made a screwup in that I then realised I dont have any SATA hardware kicking about, so I couldnt use it to clone the disk and didnt have enough space to be able to back up the drive and restore it to the new one! ARGH!! Stupid huh

I played around with various software tools to try and backup just the partition configs and restore these but couldnt make this work at all. After restoring the partitions the NAS would either not format the disk or would go into EM (Emergency Mode) and try as I might I never found a rebuild partition option that other people have mentioned in the Buffalo software.

After playing around for a few days with different things, I gave up and bought a Hard disk copying device.

Integral (SATA) HDD Copy Station - Approx £33

This worked really well. I just plugged in the original NAS disk and cloned it to the 2TB disk. This took about 45mins or so and then I put the 2TB disk back into the NAS to check it worked ok.

Everything started up and now I had a 2TB disk working albeit with just a 500Gb partition on it!

Next job was to resize the partition. This could probably be done with the Copy Station but since I had paid for the IOMAX Adapter kit I used this and armed with Gnome Partition Editor, I downloaded the .iso file and burnt this to disk and booted from the Live CD.

Download Gnome from here; Gnome

Simple case of resizing the 500Gb partition container and then resizing the partition all the way up to 2TB.

Reconnecting the disk and booting the NAS I was presented with a working 2TB, well actually 1.82TB

So far so good, everything seems ok the NAS does seem to take slightly longer to boot up and shutdown but otherwise no issues at all!

Next Job is to find a cheap HS-DH500GL on ebay and upgrade that so I have a backup strategy!