I ‘upgraded’ my Synology NAS last year (from a 212j to 218). My 212 was beginning to show some disturbing signs of power failure.
It wasn’t as easy as hot swapping the disks across - I can’t remember why (different versions of DSM maybe?)
I bought 2 new SSDs for the 218; formatted and placed in RAID. Copied 1/3 TB of music across on the WiFi network from the 212. This took less than 10 minutes as I recall.
I bought a cheap hard drive ‘caddy’ and the HDDs from the 212 are now used in the caddy as another back up to provide resilience.
I think that I’ll go the whole hog just for peace of mind: buy new disks and copy everything across. The Synology and disks are ten years old now and I’ve had disks fail before… Nasty!
I was intending to use the Synology Migration Assistant but it doesn’t seem to be available for download on my DS213j (which would be the source drive anyway, so not important) but neither is the DS223, my intended purchase and destination drive, mentioned as being able to use Migration Assistant.
Looks like I might have to do it the old fashioned way!
Probably I should find a relevant Synology forum at this stage.
I replaced my Synology 4 drive NAS that failed due to the Intel C25xx CPU bug, with an 8 drive 1821+ by taking the discs out the old NAS annd placing them into the new.
No issues with the move at all, don’t over think it.
You can always replace a drive with a larger one and the NAS will rebuild the array, just be prepared to wait a while.
I had an older 18xx+ Synology NAS that failed with the same issue, but after 5-6 years when I upgrade a NAS I always buy new drives as well. New warranties all round!
There’s a market for used drives on eBay too; I run a disc health report for each one showing that they’re good along with other key metrics and am usually able to recover enough to pay for one or two of the new drives.
Just to let you know what happened:
I bought a Synology NAS (DS224+), set it up and installed Migration Assistant to move the files across from my outgoing DS213J. It wouldn’t work. The DS213j was incompatible in some way, even though it was, I believe, listed as being compatible and running the DSM 7.1 software.
I just plugged both NASs into the ethernet switch and copied the music across using MacOS Finder. There are over 2000 CDs on there. I did it in chunks and while I was able to be around (not overnight). It took 2 days. Everything works perfectly.
Thank you all for your advice.
My Synology nas keeps shutting down at night it shuts down and restarting again I don’t know it’s happening until I go onto my nas Webpage is there a fix thanks.
I found the ds213j sounded muddled in the midrange but the ds224+ was much better. I don’t know why but it was.
For a while I tried various leads etc to sort it but ended up by chance setting up a new nas for a friend and tried it on my system. I wasn’t expecting any improvement but rather just making sure everything was working. I was gobsmacked when I heard the improvement.
Thanks for feeding back. Could you have not swapped the drives to the new nas?
Or if the drives were also being replaced, put one old and one new drive in new nas, allow it to " mirror", then replace old drive with second new drive??
I wanted to replace the drives as they were 10 years old and carrying valuable cargo. I suppose I could have mirrored an existing drive onto a new one, but I was happy to do it the way I did as I felt I had more control. Also there were a couple of large files on the original drives that could not be deleted (by me anyway, as they were locked) - old Mac Photo files. I didn’t want them copied onto the new drives as I wanted rid of them.