Setting up a Synology NAS without formatting

[TW]Fox · 3 Jan 2015 at 14:51

Hi guys,

Just got a DS215J.

Plugged it in, installed my 4Tb media drive and... the setup process wants to format the drive and install DSM.

Is there any way around formatting the drive? I don't want to lose all the data on the drive just because I've transferred it from a PC to a NAS :confused:

syn3rgy · 3 Jan 2015 at 15:25

Not as far as I am aware, your best bet would be to look on tte synology forums however I think you will need to format

Meddling-Monk · 3 Jan 2015 at 16:47

I think I read something somewhere when I was doing some research for this NAS that if you want to avoid needing to format the drive with data on, you'll need to set up an initial drive first in the unit, then get the unit to clone/RAID1 the contents over from this existing drive. That should in theory keep everything on the disk. However, as I have yet to obtain my own unit yet, I can't guarantee this will work since I only remember seeing this posted a bit back and haven't actually got any real world practice on doing this yet.

:: edit ::

This of course all hinges on if you have a spare 4TB drive to "initilize" the unit first so that it can then clone the contents over.

bledd · 4 Jan 2015 at 00:09

No.

Synology uses EXT4 file format. Your existing drive is probably NTFS, plus it needs to install the DSM software to the drive.

Best thing to do is..

Buy a Western Digital Red drive (4tb or 6tb) and use that in the NAS.

The price difference per GB is about £3 per GB between the 4tb and 6tb drives.

WD Red are designed for NAS use. Then you can keep your existing 4tb as a backup of the data on the NAS.

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NB. Once you've installed a new drive it takes a while for it to do a full disk check (a few hours)

You can use it when it's doing this, but personally, I'd install it, let it get the latest DSM, and wait until the disk is 100% added before doing anything else.

Out of interest, are you planning to use it with Kodi (XBMC) ? If so, I'll dig up some good links for quickly setting up a shared SQL db for tracking the 'watched' status and sharing the library. It's a doddle