Hello all,
My Synology NAS DS213j is approaching the end of it’s software support and I thought I might upgrade to their DS223.
Does anyone know if it’s a simple as sliding the drives out of the old NAS and into the new?
My NAS was worked well for me over the years, hence my intention to stick with Synology. I have considered a Uniti Core on occasion (I have an NDX2 streamer) but I often read here of people having problems, so I’m a little hesitant. Does anyone have an opinion on that? I run my streaming over wifi, and it’s pretty good. Hard-wiring would be a headache.
Thank you for your help.
Have you considered a single bay NAS ??
If you have a robust back up program such as a separate detached and/or cloud drive, the benifits of a 2 bay with RAID-1 (mirrored discs) is questionable.
I have a separate (detached) WD ‘My Passport’ USB back up on my 2 bay DS214, plus I keep CD’s & store purchased download files on another USB drive.
If & when my DS214 gets pensioned off, I’m looking at something like a DS124 at the moment.
It should be a simple matter of sliding the HDDs out of one and into the other. I transferred my 2 off 6Tb drives from a WD Nas to my Synology. No data lost.
I thought about a core, but the Nas, for me, was a better way to go. Rip with Poweramp then serve with Asset.
Plus you can use the Nas for other purposes.
You’re right of course. But my paranoia insists, not only that I have a mirrored backup, but also a separate drive with all my ripped music on. Plus all the CDs in the attic! For the small additional expense it’s worth it to me.
How old does that make your drives? If it were me, I’d replace the drives as well since they’re relatively inexpensive unless you plan to have many terabytes of storage.
That sounds promising.
I also have a Sonos system which shares the music library on the Synology NAS with the NDX2. I’m not sure if Sonos would be able to access a Uniti Core.
I do store some other data on the Synology, but it’s not really important with so much cloud storage available.
Well, pretty old! But they’re all separately backed up and quite safe. Transferring all that music would be a much bigger job that I’d really rather put off until I have nothing else to do!
Time consuming in terms of the copying, but actually pretty simple. Just run both NAS devices and copy the content of your old one to the new one.
I should add that one time I upgraded my Synology NAS with young drives to a better model and was able to just physically relocate the drives and it worked. However, I think you may need to be running the same major version of the DSM operating system for this to work. For example if your old NAS is stuck on DSM 6.x and your new one requires DSM 7.x moving drives might not work.
Over the network using a computer to do the copy from one to the other. Actually, there’s an argument for moving the files rather than copying, this way if the file transfer gets interrupted you simply continue moving the files from the old NAS, no worrying about what’s copied and what isn’t.
Transfers over a network can sometimes be painfully slow. If the NAS has a suitable USB port I would put a copy onto a USB drive and connect that to the new NAS.
Having said that, I wouldn’t be using a 2-bay NAS. It obviously makes sense to have a second drive for resilience, but there are many cases in which, if one drive fails, the other one in the same enclosure will fail too. So put the second drive in a separate enclosure and you will have far more resilience. Not only that, but if you have a second NAS, you can run a UPnP server on it so that if one of them fails, you can immediately select the other and continue listening rather than having to wait for a repair or restore from backup before you can access your music.
I have a DS214play. I had one drive start to fail bought another of the same popped it in all was well. I suggest a bit of maintenance once a year or so. Shut the Nas off take it outside or the garage pull the drives out noting which goes where. Use some compressed air to blow out all the accumulated dust off the fans and vents etc put it all back together.
One thing I forgot to suggest is using your old NAS as a backup device for your new one. Once you’ve got everything situated on your new NAS, I’d consider replacing the old drives in the old NAS and then using that for your backups.
As somebody who struggles understanding the instructions that come with a NAS, I’d be taking the failsafe, simplest route.
Buy a new modern NAS.
Buy new matching drive/drives.
Set it up at my leisure.
Install asset or similar at my leisure.
Copy a few albums onto the new drive, at my leisure.
Get the streamer, streaming from the NAS, at my leisure.
Once I’m happy everything is setup OK, copy the music files onto the new NAS, at my leisure.
While the new NAS is being setup, old NAS is still available to stream from. There’s nothing to go wrong.
Of course, if you’re using the nas to run a small business and there’s a dozen or so programs running on it, perhaps just swapping the discs is a good option.
I like your thinking. Also once you are happy with the new NAS, you could possibly repurpose the old drives into USB Caddies and use them as occasional backups of your new NAS (assuming enough disk space).
All I really store on the NAS is music files (and a CDPedia database). There are some documents there but they’re also stored on a cloud. After I’ve ripped a CD and transferred it to the NAS, I make a copy on a portable drive, so there’s no real need for further backup.
Also, 2 Synologys might just trip my wife’s anti-tech fuse!