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Currently got two 500GB HDD's in my Synology NAS not set in RAID configuration, but I am going to replace with two 1TB drives set up in RAID. Looking at instructions on how to do this they seem quite convoluted as they assume that you want to retain the data on the drives, so do it in a methodical way so you preserve the data, however I've been using it as a back up drive so not bothered about backing up. Therefore in that case am I OK just to replace both HDDs at the same time and start from a 'fresh install'?
I currently use it as a back up device, but now want to use it as a main NAS for holding my media files and photo's to facilitate access by multiple devices, and i'll back up via other means.
Cheers
I don't see why not.
Yep just chuck the new drives in, there'll be a process of selecting the 2 new drives and creating a fresh RAID. RAID1 for redundancy (1Tb total storage) and RAID0 for space + speed (2Tb total storage).
A lot of NAS have a USB on them, you can connect an external USB disk and create a backup job to run direct off the NAS too (my Buffalo NAS was a bit crap at this though)
Agree, should be fine. 2 observations though:
1. You may find that 1TB is not very much especially if you are planning to store media files. With 2 disks you will be setting it up as a mirror pair so although you have 2 disks you will still only get 1TB of storage. If you can, get bigger disks - 4TB if you can stretch to it.
2. With bigger disks there's nothing to stop you using the NAS for backup as well. Just backup your data to a different share on the NAS.
Do another back up *before* you remove/dispose of the current back up drives 🙂
And back up in at least 2 places, so that your data exists in 2 separate spaces. Hopefully in before Cougar RAID1 is not a substitute for back-ups.
Thanks. Good advice on capacity - no harm in having more. I guess since I wont be chucking the old drives and there is nothing wrong with them i.e. they're not faulty or failing then there is no need to back those up.
my back up strategy will be to have one separate HDD backup and one cloud based back up, so if the house burns down or gets burgled then I have an independent backup.
My Synology has a couple of USB inputs so easy to back up on another drive.
Old disks will only be useful - for retrieving anything - if installed in the Synology. They may not even be detected as a valid RAID after the new disk setup is configured. Back it up first.