So like many of us, is started out small, and have been progressing to needing more storage. Right now, I have 2 synology nas devices and a lot of random external drives (yay adhd).
My question is, when i need more space again, should I buy another nas, or try upgrading my drives to larger ones? The issue is find with upgrading is i wont have a way to move all my files from the smaller drives to the larger drives.
I was also thinking I should have another server or something to back up both my existing nas. Not sure. I worry im not doing it right.
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I’m planning to build another NAS, then pool both NASs together to make one big NAS, as I already simply use mergerfs and snapraid, so it’ll be cake to mount NAS 2 to NAS 1, then add it to the mergerfs pool. That probably won’t happen for a bit longer. I’m currently at 78TB with a max capacity of 256TB, and generating only about 1-2TB per month.
and a lot of random external drives
Somehow it rings home :-)
A separate backup NAS would better than nothing. If losing your data would be a disaster, then don’t overlook backing up your data in a separate location (either at someone elses house or use a cloud backup provider like Backblaze) incase of a fire, etc.
If your Synology NAS is in Raid, up-sizing your drives is dead simple.
Pop out one of your current, smaller drives. Pop in a new, bigger drive. Wait for Disk Station to migrate data over to the new drive (note that this can literally take days depending how much data there is). Then do the same with the next old, small drive and the next one until all old, small drives are replaced with new, big ones.
This will work as long as your current drives are not like 24 TB or whatever the upper limit is these days. In that case, you need more bays.
After this is done, move all the data from your externals onto your Synology NAS.
I’ve done this many times! A note, for extra carefulness, you can do the long SMART test on the disk before you add it to the array, or do the manufacturers diagnostic suite in it by plugging it into a SATA port on a PC first just to be extra careful, and also make sure there aren’t any firmware updates.
Replace NAS drives with larger ones and then repopulate data from your backup? That way you get to test your recovery and restore procedure at the same time.
Upsize your NAS drives. Get rid of external drives. Set up one nas to back up to the other, or pay for cloud backups. Synology cloud is relatively cheap.
Cloud or any way to backup your data in another location is greatly preferred to having another NAS in the same location just as a mirrored copy of your first.
Depends a lot on budget, space, and electricity costs. Going to ‘overkill’ level once can save a lot of these issues down the line.
Mine started similarly, some small box with a couple drives that got up sized and then moved to another to add more…
Eventually I bought a used 2U box with 14 bays and set it up with a ZFS pool all made up of mirrored disk pairs and auto snapshots so it can have a drive fail without issue and go back 2 weeks if something gets oops deleted.
Downside, now the whole lab uses about 700 watts continually so the power bill is kinda nuts.
I have 2 servers. One is used as a NAS and hosted stuff. The other is just for backups. If the space runs out somewhere, it will simply be expanded.
