I’ve been using a two-bay Synology nas for the last couple of years with 2x 8TB drives and a stupidly large media collection. I recently acquired a four-bay ugreen nas but don’t have any drives for it yet because fuck you AI.

Since I need to have all the same drive size for raid, I was thinking of getting larger disks and taking out a second mortgage. Like start with 2x 12TB and some day add two more. If I do that, I’ll have 2x 8TB that wouldn’t be useful without keeping the Synology running, and I don’t really need both.

The other idea was buying two more 8TB for the new nas, copying the media over, and then moving the two over to make four and decommission the Synology.

I am not well versed in raid, so there easily could be something I’m not considering or a way I should do this to make my life easier.

Also, any advice on how one normally keeps backups with such a large amount of data. I know raid ≠ backup, but right now I’m just praying to the tech gods that the disks keep spinning. I know others out there have large media collections… what do you do?

  • vext01@feddit.ukEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    I moved from my old nas to my new in a similar manner.

    I have a two disk mirror. Call the disks d1 and d2.

    • removed d1 from the old server, put it in the new nas
    • creat fresh filesystem on d1
    • copied the data, over the network, from d2 to d1.
    • took d2 from the old server and added it to a mirror with d1 in the new server. Let it resilver.

    It worked, but I was damn sure to have a backup.

    Also note, the ugreen nas software is garbage. Install your own os.

    • TheMadCodger@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      Coming from Synology it was a little too walled garden for me and I also hated their software, but that was also my first forray into nas. Good place to get my feet wet and all. I’m not really well versed in nas os’s though, any recommendations?

      • vext01@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        People like FreeNAS.

        I just installed alpine Linux. I just wanted a compact Linux with good ZFS support.