Synology NAS adding second, bigger, drive.

ElliorR

ElliorR

ElliorR

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Hello all. I currently have a WD My Cloud single drive NAS and I’m going to upgrade to a Synology NAS, most likely a 2 bay one, and have a question I’m trying to find the answer for.

Let’s say I buy the NAS and one 4tb NAS drive to start with but later on decide to stick an 8tb NAS drive into the second bay what will happen? From a few YouTube videos I’ve seen, based on Synology 4 bay NAS with at least 2 bays populated already, running Synology’s SHR in raid 1, adding a larger drive gave more storage space with backup (I think). As 1 disc isn’t a raid, as far as my limited understanding believes, what would happen when I put the larger drive in?

I’m just trying to work out if I potentially wipe the existing drive if a raid 1 is created, if it creates the shr raid 1 without losing data or if it’s something else completely. I’m relatively newish to this side of computing.

Cheers for any help you can give me.
 
I've not played with a Synology in a while but at the worst you'd end up with 4TB RAID1 array and 4TB of space left unused on the 8TB drive. You'd be able to reclaim the unused space if/when the 4TB drive was replaced with something larger.

You shouldn't loose any data in the process, but unless you're very brave (or don't care about the data) you wouldn't attempt any kind of array migration without a verified backup in place.

And RAID isn't a backup it's hardware redundancy. If the NAS decides die and takes both drives with it you should have recovery plan in place.
 
In a two-bay NAS the best way to use different sized drives is probably not to bother with a RAID level at all - just have two JBOD volumes and use a backup task to copy the contents of one disk to the other. Either use the large disk as your primary and copy a subset of that data to the smaller disk, or use the smaller one as your primary and use the larger one to let you retain versions of files.
 
I just ordered a DS418play and, for now, 1 4tb Ironwolf. After buying a £2k plus laptop last month and now this NAS, I'll populate the bay with 4tb drives one a month. I'll be using my old WD My Cloud as a back up device but only for important stuff not for the Plex stuff.

I just hope it gets delivered tomorrow but I'll see with the snow.
 
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