Since about a year back, all our media at home is stored on a NAS (D-Link DNS-320), which simplifies things since we are laptop-based. I originally put in an old 1 TB drive I had lying around, but as you might expect it finally filled up.

Since the DNS-320 has two slots, I bought a Western Digital Red 3TB SATA III, which should fill our needs at home for some time. One of the nice things with getting a NAS was that adding a disk should be pretty much plug-and-play. Thus I inserted the new drive, entered the web interface for the NAS and begun formatting. Initialization went fast, but then progress halted at 0% when formatting. I aborted and retried, but to no avail.

After a while I finally manged to find a solution. I shut down the NAS, removed the original disk which was in the left slot, inserted the new 3 TB disk in that slot and booted up. Formatting now magically started working.

Both disks were now available, but there was a new problem. The DNS-320 runs Linux and by using a little hack known as fun_plug, we can gain access to the OS and install additional software on the device, such as a web server or a torrent client. This hack was installed on the original disk, but even though both disks were identified, fun_plug wouldn’t start.

As I searched for a solution on this problem, I found a wiki for DNS-323 where the same problem was described. It turns out that fun_plug needs to be on the right-most disk in order to start up, so I had to make sure the original disk which had it installed resided in the right slot.

Mission accomplished.