Our Syntology DS218j is about three years old. Served us well as a file share, Time Machine backup, company stuff backup etc. It has a pair of WD 3.2 gig drives currently mirrored.  It’s a bit slow and noisy (although the ‘make less noise setting’ has made a difference) but as it’s really just a secure backup (we don’t stream off it or anything), never been a problem.

Issue is all the video editing I’m doing now has filled it. Still got loads more to do and I’d very much like a local backup of the iMovie library(s), the MP4 4k renders and – maybe – the original files off the GoPro. We don’t have a great internet connection currently so using GoPro cloud or some other service doesn’t really work. All docs are in iCloud but company stuff (sage mainly) and video and some other stuff we don’t want off the premises is on the NAS with no further backup.

It’s only a 2 bay enclosure so I think my options are:

1) break the mirror and double the storage

2) Buy a bigger enclosure and add more drives

3) Buy a bigger enclosure with faster/bigger drives and migrate and/or have 2 NAS with split use

1) seems cheapest (and probably simplest in terms of data migration) but it worries me because this means my backup is not protected. 2) is easy but at a cost and I’m not sure buying lots more quite slow 3.2 gig drives is a good investment (not sure if I can put mismatched drives in and still have a raid config?) and 3) is the most expensive, going to be a pain to do migration but gives me most flexibility (also would allow me to run the Pi on the NAS)

Have I missed anything here?

Have I missed anything here?

4) Get rid of some stuff. I guarantee that there’s stuff on there that you don’t need any more.

If they’re mirrored, can you not replace one drive at a time with a larger drive? My understanding is that the drive with data will be mirrored to the new drive, so after you’ve worked through them both, you’ll have your existing data plus free space.

If they’re mirrored, can you not replace one drive at a time with a larger drive?

I did that with my original 2 bay, started with 2x3TB drives, then 2x6TB. Ended up putting the 2x3TB drives into a upgraded 4 bay with 2 more 3TB drives.
So now have a fast 4 bay drive that i stream from and a slower, older 2 bay with big drives for back ups etc.

(And playing with a cheapy 4 bay drive as well, as the 2 bay drive is nearly full.)

4) Get rid of some stuff. I guarantee that there’s stuff on there that you don’t need any more.

Yeah, i used to get rid of ~10% if i cleared out. Though, i’m up against it now. Nothing left to get rid of really, might save 100 GB across the ~10TB storage i’m using. Hardly worth it.

Thanks all. @mert that sounds like the way to go. I will check the mirror works with bigger drives, but a quick google suggests it will. I would like a more powerful/quickier chassis that I can run docker on and create spaces for Pi, etc. But it’s not a priority.  A couple of 6 TB drives would give me some breathing space.

I probably could tidy stuff up – for example do I really need to backup my documents as they are all on iCloud? Probably not but I’m just a bit paranoid about non local storage.

Right let’s see what’s available in terms of drives..

I’ve nothing constructive to add to this thread, but i find like many of the financial threads on here (pensions and the like), that I just start thinking is this something I’ve missed that i should be doing? But then I read OPs and I’m aware that these are words, and that they must “make sense” to people, but I read these and I see

“Well, I’ve double flummoxed my doowap drive and it badger-setted all over the maxi-flop, so that’s that’s probably fine but when I restart my french-pistol it’s just seeing the single dowap, what I’m doing wrong?

Checking out Syntology compatibility list, it seems a pair of these would do the job: https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/38731-seagate-st6000ne000-2hdd/ – current ones spin at 7200 I think.

A further Q tho – are all spinny NAS drives much of a muchness? Or is it worth paying more for a premium brand? and if so which one!

🙂 @nickc – I feel the same when people try and explain MTB suspension to me ‘well I tweaked the rebound doooble dangler and exorcised the funky grunion valve and now my mid stroke low speed compression blowoff is amazing’

I’m pretty convinced that the sole reason I’m not a world cup racer is that I’ve never understood how to exorcise my grunion valve.

Could you back up some of your older stuff to Amazon S3 to save space?

I’m pretty convinced that the sole reason I’m not a world cup racer is that I’ve never understood how to exorcise my grunion valve

You keep telling yourself that 🙂

Could you back up some of your older stuff to Amazon S3 to save space?

Maybe. Or to one drive as we have 1TB as part of our business package. But the problem is I would quite like access to the video files (doing stuff for work now) and everything takes sooooooo long on our 5mbit/sec upload. I tried uploading some GoPro stuff and it calculated it would take 8 days. So I left it but it failed every time.

Fibre next year. Hopefully. Still we’ve been promised that for the last 5!

Think my drives are all NAS specific. 5400 rpm ish, the data transfer is generally not needed in a rush, and it’s not for gaming/processing. Just video (4k) streams. And they seem to fulfill that without issue.
Saves power and are (allegedly) more reliable. Anything i need highspeed processing for goes on a desktop or laptop with large SSD/M2 drives.

Beyond a certain point, i don’t think there’s any point in buying ultra expensive ones for a NAS, but by the same token, no name rubbish from amazon is probably high risk.

Most of mine are WD red or similar (Seagate IIRC)

I’ve expanded my Synology by pulling a drive, replace with a bigger one, let it return to healthy and then pull/replace the other. Takes a while but worked fine.

If you don’t already have a backup then first step would be getting a big external disk and backing it up over USB.

If your storage needs are growing though I’d definitely consider a new chassis and drives – maybe keep the old for things like time machine backups and do the more demanding stuff on the new one.

If you don’t already have a backup then first step would be getting a big external disk and backing it up over USB.

So could I do that using one of the ‘new’ 6TB drives if I can find a way to power it outside of the chassis? Otherwise not sure what I’d be  back the current 3TB onto! Or do I just buy a cheap USB drive with say 5TB capacity? They are only £100 and I have used them in the past as backup of backups (company accounts, etc) stored in a fireproof safe.

If your storage needs are growing though I’d definitely consider a new chassis and drives

Defo longer term. Whatever I do I’ll stick with Syntology. Took me about 2 years to learn how to use/manage it and not going to go through that again on QNAP or some other vendor!

This https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/41585-synology-ds920-16tb-siw/?gclid=CjwKCAiA9qKbBhAzEiwAS4yeDSrR8oUKtZeDIONkKfMLV4BgyxqFDdnrSGc7kyxicCIFm4D9j5NhIhoCaFgQAvD_BwE was the one I’ve been looking at. 4 bay, 16 TB, far more efficient use of disks.

As simon suggested, would then just use current one as TM target and new one for everything else.

Stop and consider for a moment, what do you need a NAS for. Do multiple people access it? Is read performance a concern? Is write performance a concern?

Splitting the mirror would double your capacity but double (JBOD) or quadruple (RAID 0) the risk. If it really is “just” a backup then a drive failure shouldn’t really matter because you have the data elsewhere. Is that the case? Would a failure be a catastrophe or a gallic shrug?

Is the best solution for your use case maybe more local storage?

If they’re mirrored, can you not replace one drive at a time with a larger drive? My understanding is that the drive with data will be mirrored to the new drive, so after you’ve worked through them both, you’ll have your existing data plus free space.

You can absolutely do this with ‘proper’ RAID, I’ve done it numerous times in servers. Swap a drive, wait for the array to rebuild; swap the other and wait again; then repartition the drives to use the extra space. Whether you’d get away with it on a domestic NAS I wouldn’t like to say; you probably would?

Oh, and,

If you do replace the drives, they’re greater than 1TB and you’ve nothing better to do with them than stick then in a drawer, I’ll have them. (-: I’m desperate for storage and broke.

Stop and consider for a moment, what do you need a NAS for. Do multiple people access it? Is read performance a concern? Is write performance a concern?

Two of us access it. Sometimes three (one remotely). Read performance isn’t a big issue. Obviously as we allow remote access (and I don’t currently have a fixed IP address so I can’t build a ‘proper’ DMZ) we want a box that is secure and robust. We could switch to a cloud service (and we’re in the process of moving SAGE there at the mo) and it’d probably be fine. But there’s something about having secure, robust on site storage I can’t get away from!

When we get fibre, the plan is to get a 90 gig sync connection and then my guess is any share we use would migrate to the cloud. I’d still like copies of all the videos/podcasts stuff I’m starting to do for work locally tho.

If we just go for new drivers @cougar, sure you can have the ole ones. I just “found” a spare 4TB drive so that means I can do a USB backup. Which having looked at the current WD Red drives (which spin at 5400RPM) might be a good thing. The idea you can mirror to a different make/different speed drive is making my head hurt!

If it really is “just” a backup then a drive failure shouldn’t really matter

some other stuff we don’t want off the premises is on the NAS with no further backup.

If there is no backup (i.e. the only version of a file is on the NAS) then DO NOT break the mirror. You know what they say about mirrors and bad luck.

Whether you’d get away with it on a domestic NAS I wouldn’t like to say; you probably would?

One (possibly 2?) of the newer NAS i’ve got will even do hot swapping of drives. (I’m old school, so i don’t.)
None of them *won’t* rebuild a RAID array or mirrored drive automatically.
One is about 8 years old and was discontinued when i got it on sale, the other two are 3 and 5 years old and still current.

some other stuff we don’t want off the premises is on the NAS with no further backup.

Yeah, i’ve got private stuff that i don’t want offsite.

It’s still backed up (one copy on the NAS, one on a portable HDD that i update infrequently)

Assuming there are no “issues” with the current setup, i would be:

Pulling one drive, replacing it with a much bigger one.
Letting it mirror
Replacing the other one

And the boxing up one of the pulled drives onto a shelf, as is with all the stuff still on it.
maybe send the other to a relative to put on a shelf in case your house burns down with your drives and backup drives in it.
Always keep a backup of the backups.

Hmmm, turns out none of my NAS are still current. 😀

Ah well, all had updates to software this week!

@olly – sound advice. I just looked at the config and the backup via USB is really good, I’ve  set it up dump all the files off the drives when my cheap 5TB external drive connects. I known our NAS isn’t really a full backup if you delete a file that you don’t have an original copy for.

Learned that lesson the hard way. Having sync’d / shared files is brilliant for us. Until an idiot deletes the only copy!

Stop and consider for a moment, what do you need a NAS for. Do multiple people access it? Is read performance a concern? Is write performance a concern?
…
Is the best solution for your use case maybe more local storage?

I would echo this. A NAS is a pretty expensive and not ultimately the most efficient solution for home data storage. I have a basic one for films and music, for round the house access by multiple devices such as telly, iPad, etc, but all my files are stored on a 2 disc RAID 1 set in a cheapo enclose I bought online. I only switch it on when I need access to stuff, so it’s not always on, burning unnecessary energy and wearing out the drives. USB-3* connection, so quicker and more reliable than transferring data than over wi-fi, and faster (almost 5Gbps) than ethernet (assuming Gigabit ethernet on most machines). A NAS needs to be connected either to a router to enable wireless access of course.

*My iMac also has Thunderbolt/USB4, so even faster at 40Gbps, but such enclosures are very rare, and very expensive. Not a lot of use unless you need super fast data transfer. If you’ve been used to wifi data speeds, then USB 3 will seem lightning quick.

So yes. My main issues with NAS have been dropped/shonky connections. Need to Turn It Off Then Back On Again™ once a month on average. That’s why I much prefer a simple USB attacked storage device.

Aye.

IF I needed attached storage, I’d stick an SSD up the USB3 port on my router. But my use case isn’t anyone else’s.

… will even do hot swapping of drives. (I’m old school, so i don’t.)

Pulling drives is a great trick until you have a brainfart and pull the other one. A place I once worked for had a Major Service Outage because they sent a Tech to swap a drive in a RAID1 stack in a SQL server and he pulled the one with the green light rather than the red. How we laughed. Eventually.

Oh, and,

Half a mirror stuck on a shelf Just In Case is not a reliable witness. Ask me how I know. 😁

RAID comes a huge degree of chicanery. Take a RAID1 (mirrored) enclosure, pull both drives. Stick one in the opposite bay. Stick another in a different enclosure. What’s going to happen? Will your data live? Where do you suppose the stack configuration is held? If your answer is anything other than “I’m not sure” then you’re either an expert or a fool.

Heaving drives out of an array is a great tool in your arsenal and I have – successfully – used it as disaster mitigation in a crisis. But it’s a bold move and by christ I wouldn’t want to rely on it.

I’d stick an SSD up the USB3 port on my router

But you’re still limited to wifi speeds, no? Hence all the nice speed of the SSD ad USB 3 is wasted?

I’m desperate for storage and broke.

I’d love some super fast SSDs to replace the noisy HDDs. Trouble is, I have 2x8Tb, and 2x4Tb drives. That’s quite a lot of money already, at current storage prices. I dread to think what it would cost to switch…

But you’re still limited to wifi speeds, no? Hence all the nice speed of the SSD ad USB 3 is wasted?

I take your point but, you could say the same of a NAS.

I’d love some super fast SSDs to replace the noisy HDDs. Trouble is, I have 2x8Tb, and 2x4Tb drives.

My entire life is on 2x 1TB spinnydisks. I really should practice what I preach and sort out backups. I have a backup drive at my mum’s for stuff that’s actually irreplaceable but it’s, I don’t even know offhand, 500GB?

That said, it’s in my office so noise isn’t an issue. If I’m streaming from it then I’ll be watching from downstairs rather than having it thrashing away under the telly.

I’d have a read of the below, as far as I’m aware you need a minimum of three discs to perform a rebuild.
https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/help/DSM/StorageManager/storage_pool_what_is_raid?version=7

Also if you upgrade the NAS you might not be able to use the old disc in the new NAS without reformatting them.

Think I’d get an external drive and back the data up.
Insert new discs and perform a restore.
Use the external drive for a USB external backup.
Main back up to idrive you can usually find an offer for $9.99 a year.

Other option is a bigger NAS with more drives but that comes at a cost.
I just have a single 7TB drive which is backed up to idrive, saves costs.

Thanks all and esp for that article @highpeakrider

We do have a gigabit connection out the back of our Orbi mesh wireless boxes. Transfer rates have never been that good even when I plugged the Mac and the NAS into the same Orbi (4 ports on each). I mean it was better than via wifi but nowhere near advertised speed. Not a massive issue tho, I want secure/on site/robust rather than fast.

I’m defo NOT doing the mirror thing without a USB backup to an external drive. I know it should work, but I’ve lost more data than I should have by trying to do the easy thing!

On a tangential note, we used to be able to swap massive line cards on old Infotron Mux’s back in the 1990s. Hot swap they said then just close the rail for the power. One datacenter fire later 🙂

I’d have a read of the below, as far as I’m aware you need a minimum of three discs to perform a rebuild.

That’s interesting but complicated. Does anyone want a RAID crash course / overview? (There’s little point me typing mansplaining paragraphs if not.)

I’m defo NOT doing the mirror thing without a USB backup to an external drive. I know it should work, but I’ve lost more data than I should have by trying to do the easy thing!

A wise decision IMHO.

I’m happy to have some RAID knowledge in an easy to digest format. I kind of remember something about RAID striping. I know 1:1 is a mirror and (maybe) 5 is ‘the best’, no idea what happened to 2, 3 and 4 🙂

6 is better than 5, hot spares rule.
Drives from different build batches are good, from different manufacturers better.
Always keep a backup.

Read as always keep an offsite backup.

Alex
Full Member

I’m happy to have some RAID knowledge in an easy to digest format. I kind of remember something about RAID striping. I know 1:1 is a mirror and (maybe) 5 is ‘the best’, no idea what happened to 2, 3 and 4 🙂

Only 1/10 and 5/6 are really relevant now.

RAID 1 is mirror – 50% wasted space, you can lose either disk and still be okay.
RAID 10 is mirror + stripe which gives (much) better performance. Basically two pairs of mirrored disks with the data interleaved. You can lose either disk out of each pair, but no more than that.
RAID 5 is distributed parity – lower wasted space. Files are spread over multiple discs + a checksum on the final one, so losing one disk is no problem. If you lose two then you lose all the data.
RAID 6 is same as 5 but two copies of parity bits – lower wasted space than mirror, more wasted than RAID 5 but better resiliance than either. So you can lose two disks and still be okay, if you lose 3 you lose all the data.

eta and RAID 0 but that’s only for performance, not resilience

eta2 i didn’t see cougars post, feel free to correct any glaring errors 🙂

@cougar 🤷🏻‍♂️ I might have some old NAS drives of various capacity that I have no use for. I’ll check if my memory of this is real and tell you what I have.

Apologies if I missed some stuff already mentioned in the thread but assuming you can’t clear out old data or want to increase capacity while maintaining data redundancy (which is not a backup!!), I’d suggest a 4 bay Synology NAS as you are used to those so minimal relearning. Add the drives you have with 2 of the biggest drives you can afford (I’ve had decent luck with current model Seagate IronWolf drives), using all 4 drives in the new NAS, setup SHR (Synology hybrid raid), which is a fairly common implementation of raid5 in Linux circles these days, you use 3 of the drives for data and the 4th drive is a parity drive which is used to rebuild data that might be lost to a failed drive. The beauty of SHR or any of the other similar implementations is that you can use drives if any size together as long as the parity drive is at least as large as the biggest drive in the array.

#EDIT : oh and another advantage is that in the future I’d you need more storage you just swap out the smallest drive in the array for a bigger one (no bigger than the parity drive though) and the drive will be incorporated into the array, all the data will be rebuilt from the parity drive and you carry on with extra storage. The only issue is after however long you need drives larger than the parity at which point you need to rebuild the entire thing or move the drives to a bigger NAS that you can just add more drives to, hence why you buy the biggest drives you can afford now to miximise the length of time the parity drive works.

Thanks muchly for the offer of hardware donations. Appreciated, I’m kinda stuck.

RAID wise, OK. I’ll try not to re-tread what others have said. There’s a shedload of different RAID levels but at a consumer level you’re looking at 0, 1 and 5.

RAID 1 is the easiest to explain, it’s mirroring. You take two drives and write the same data to both. Write speed performance is high because it’s easy, read speed is high because you’ve got two sources to read from. A catastrophic failure of a single drive doesn’t matter because you’ve got the same data in two places. What does matter is malware infection or something like failure of the enclosure. But that’s true of any RAID solution. Array rebuild time is relatively rapid because again it’s easy; how fast can you stuff data across the backplane? But the massive downside to RAID 1 is cost because you’re paying for storage twice over.

RAID 5 is n+1 drives. You need a minimum of three drives and your storage capacity is, well, n-1 so with say three 2TB disks you’d have 4TB. With seven you’d have 12TB. Read speed is rapid, write speed isn’t great because it’s computationally hard work. Rebuild time after a failure is an arse. For years RAID 5 was (situationally) the preferred way to build servers, but as disk capacities and array sizes have increased rebuild time is becoming increasingly prohibitive. It’s considerably cheaper than RAID 1 *if* you can take the hit on being vulnerable for a protracted period following a failure. (For a home backup solution I probably would, for a production storage server not on your nelly. A rebuild of a sizeable RAID 5 array is in the order of days or worse.)

RAID 0 is taking a bunch of disks and slapping one dirty great partition across all of them. Look at that 0. There is zero redundancy, zero resiliency. Worse, you’ve increased the risk because a failure of a single drive will collapse the entire array, the more disks the greater the likelihood of failure. There is a time and a place for this but generally you probably don’t want it. JBOD – “just a bunch of disks” – is likely a better option than RAID 0.

There’s others. The intervening numbers are long obsolete. RAID 6 is like RAID 5 but can take a hit on losing two disks in a stack instead of one (and I think is largely proprietary tech). RAID 10 is variously RAID 0 on top of RAID 1 or the other way around, relevant in corporate deployments but probably not so much when you’re backing up your CD collection.

TL;DR:
RAID 1, probably best, expensive.
RAID 0, almost certainly terrible, cheap.
RAID 5, somewhere in the middle, probably the best compromise unless you’ve got a stack of massive drives and high availability is a concern.

[disclaimer to Techs: this is a huge oversimplification I know, I’m trying to make it accessible]

setup SHR (Synology hybrid raid), which is a fairly common implementation of raid5 in Linux circles these days, you use 3 of the drives for data and the 4th drive is a parity drive which is used to rebuild data that might be lost to a failed drive.

I know nothing about SHR, never heard of it until you mentioned it. But RAID 5 doesn’t have a parity drive, rather parity is striped across the array. A dedicated parity disk in an array was… RAID 4? 3? 🤷‍♂️ One of the dead ones.