Upgrade/Expand NAS Drive

Chris, sorry about the questions, but a bit more info is needed.

What is the current Raid setup you are using ?  I take it your current NAS only has two bays - which model ?  Do you only use it for music ?

Are you looking to retain the existing NAS shell and buy 2x new 6TB drives, if so do you have music backed up on a secondary hard drive ?

Or, is your preference to get a new NAS with 4  ( or more ) bays and either add to the existing drives or get all new ones ?

How much music do you have currently space wise and roughly at what pace have you been adding to it - 5GB a month ? and do you believe you will maintain that rate into the future i.e. this will give an idea of when you potentially may run out of space with 2 larger drives and whether it is better to go to a bigger NAS shell now.  This path also depends on how much money you want to spend too.

You are asking in the wrong place

You need to go to the Synology website

https://www.synology.com/en-uk..._expand_replace_disk

Chris Bell posted:

My Synology NAS drive is nearly full.  I'm seeking advice on how to expand it?  It has 2x 3TB drives in a raid array.  I assume I need bigger drives,  I want to double the capacity.  Advice welcome.  

Back everything up, change from RAID 1 to JBOD as a single logical drive (or RAID 0, but only if disk performance is critical) and use a proper backup solution instead of pretending Raid 1 is a backup.

I do this for my ripped video files. I keep the music mirrored and stringently backed up. If I'm honest, I don't need the mirroring. It's just habit. The mirrored HDD fail rate (two) is the same as the total array loss rate (once, when a ReadyNas spiked both disks simultaneously).

Guy007 posted:

Chris, sorry about the questions, but a bit more info is needed.

What is the current Raid setup you are using ?  I take it your current NAS only has two bays - which model ?  Do you only use it for music ?

Are you looking to retain the existing NAS shell and buy 2x new 6TB drives, if so do you have music backed up on a secondary hard drive ?

Or, is your preference to get a new NAS with 4  ( or more ) bays and either add to the existing drives or get all new ones ?

How much music do you have currently space wise and roughly at what pace have you been adding to it - 5GB a month ? and do you believe you will maintain that rate into the future i.e. this will give an idea of when you potentially may run out of space with 2 larger drives and whether it is better to go to a bigger NAS shell now.  This path also depends on how much money you want to spend too.

 

 

 

Guy... thanks for responding to my question! 

I don't know my current Raid setup, is there a way I can find it in the Synology disk app?  I have the 2 bay NAS DiskStation DS21.  

I'd prefer to keep the shell and add 2x new 6TB... I currently do not have it backed up. Do I need to buy another D21 to back up to?

I think adding 3TB should hold me over for a few years.  Cost is not a big concern, I want to do it right.  

What's the best workflow to expand my drive? 

I think there is a good chance that your NAS using raid1 because it is the default setup. You can check by go to the storage or file manager. If it is raid1, I would suggest that you do the following steps:

1) Get 2 new 6TB

2) Replace one of your 3 TB with one of your new 6 TB

3) Let them sync up

6) Once done, replace the 2nd old 3 TB with the new 6 TB

Wow... it's that easy?  Any pitfalls I need to be aware of?  

Nope, only that you will now have 2 spare 3TB disks

Note that if you are using 2 disks of different sizes, it shows the smaller size.

Peter Dinh posted:

I think there is a good chance that your NAS using raid1 because it is the default setup. You can check by go to the storage or file manager. If it is raid1, I would suggest that you do the following steps:

1) Get 2 new 6TB

2) Replace one of your 3 TB with one of your new 6 TB

3) Let them sync up

6) Once done, replace the 2nd old 3 TB with the new 6 TB

Why do you need RAID 1, that's only useful for high availability solutions.

If you're going to get an extra 6TB, much better to use it as backup rather than a marginal gain in data availability.

I would recommend RAID 1 as it protects disk failures and better performance, unless you care about economizing your disk space and take pain to do the backup yourself.

Note that raid 1 does not protect you against file deletions. 

On average with WD Red disks you'll get a simple disk failure once every 40 years.

How important is it to specifically protect against that one particular risk when many other problems are are much more likely to occur?

It is all about choice! I would suggest the OP to think it through and make a decision for himself. You know someone would choose a Skoda instead of a Roll Royce or Breexit over anti-Brexit for that matter .

I hope I'm in the middle of the WD Red bell curve. Having lost one when it was young, I may never lose another in my lifetime. Nice.

One more very important point that I think I ought to mention here is that if you go for the JBOD (i.e.  One big volume, non raid 1) option, you would lose everything even only one disk fails, and disaster strkes when you least expect it, always ensure your investment even when someone says your disk would last 100 years.

Chris if you want to want to keep the shell, you can do as Peter mentions. I can’t confirm the raid setup as I’m a QNAP user – but the link earlier in the thread takes you to the steps on the Synology site as mentioned - but there should be an ‘Admin’ access through a web browser that should tell you more information, as an aside, if you haven’t been into the Admin, there might also be a firmware update – which depending on the age of the last firmware might be necessary to see the 6TB drives.  And if you haven’t rebooted the NAS recently, you might also want to do that prior to the firmware / drive swaps.  You’ll also need to look on the Synology site to check the new hard drive is on their ‘ok’ list, these are the only pitfalls I can think of, other than having a backup.

As to not having an external backup, I would strongly recommend you do that prior to the upgrade, as you could buy an external WD 6TB for about $200.  The sad thing is you will shortly have two 3TB drives, that you could buy shells for, format them ( once all is stable on the main NAS ) and then use them as back up drives for the future.

I originally had my NAS set up as RAID5, but I found that the access speed a little slow ( I use it for more than just Music ) and then I re did as JBOD mode as Huge mentions, which gave more space and faster access.  I backup onto external LaCie’s that were the primary drives before and are now dedicated for Music / Photos / et al.

Peter Dinh posted:

 

One more very important point that I think I ought to mention here is that if you go for the JBOD (i.e.  One big volume, non raid 1) option, you would lose everything even only one disk fails, and disaster strkes when you least expect it, always ensure your investment even when someone says your disk would last 100 years.

True. But only if one was idiotic enough not to do an off NAS backup. 

I suppose there might be some crazy people out there. 

There are plenty who qualify for that, and some who think RAID 1 is a backup - at least until a disk controller failure or bug in a driver or OS takes out both disks (and these failures are at least as common as disk failures!).

...or free up some space. 3TB nett equals roughly, say, 4000 CD's. Half a year of continuous music. That's not collecting, but close to hoarding. Or do you have a lot of movies also?

Anyway, since I have a Tidal subscription I do not have the need anymore to rip and buy lots new music. I buy only what I will listen on a regular basis, the rest via Tidal. So my 512GB SSD is not even close to full and will not be full in the next 10 years I guess.