Migrating from WHS to DS411+II

[idburns]

My old WHS server decided to die over the weekend and I've ordered a DiskStation DS411+II to replace it. I've been wanting to replace the old tower with something smaller that is more energy and heat efficient.

My plan is to migrate the 4 drives from the WHS to the new DS. My disk configuration is 2x750GB and 2x1TB drives so I plan on using SHR as it seems the best fit.

Obviously to re-use these drives I have to get all my data off of them first. To do this I have a 1TB USB drive as well as an eSATA bay. Does the DS support copying data directly from the external USB and eSATA ports to the SHR, both of which can be connected directly to the DS?

Because of my lack of spare drives I'm going to have to add each drive manually to the SHR after I've emptied it. Is this going to pose a problem, it looks like I'm going to have to rebuild the SHR 3 times before all the drives are finally migrated over.

Will this work or am I begging for trouble with moving the drives over one at a time in this fashion?

 

[travisco_nabisco]

You should have no problem with the migration. Synology does allow direct copying from USB or eSATA attached drives. The only thing that raises a flag is the rebuild of the array 3 times. I don't think it should be a problem, but rebuilding an array has always been something I try to avoid.

 

[stevech]

My old WHS server decided to die over the weekend and I've ordered a DiskStation DS411+II to replace it. I've been wanting to replace the old tower with something smaller that is more energy and heat efficient.

Consider too: RAID is not a backup. You could arrange some of these drives as separate volumes and use that for backup.

 

[idburns]

Consider too: RAID is not a backup. You could arrange some of these drives as separate volumes and use that for backup.

Well aware and it's not really germane to the discussion, but thanks for the bump.

 

[idburns]

You should have no problem with the migration. Synology does allow direct copying from USB or eSATA attached drives. The only thing that raises a flag is the rebuild of the array 3 times. I don't think it should be a problem, but rebuilding an array has always been something I try to avoid.

I know what you're saying, it's my main sticking point with this whole process...

 

[idburns]

Well I've started bringing up my Synology and prepping the data from my WHS drives to get copied to the DS.

I added a 1TB drive to the Synology and got it running with a SHR volume.

But when I added a 750GB drive I had to create it as a separate volume. There was no way to just add the 750GB drive to the existing SHR raid.

Am I doing something wrong?

I want all 4 of my drives to be one large SHR volume that I will break up into folders for certain types of data. But, it's looking like I have to have all the drives in my system first, which wasn't what I had planned...

Right now I have 4 drives from my WHS:

1TB Internal (wiped and in Synology)
750GB Internal (wiped and in Synology)
750GB Internal (moving data off)
1TB Internal (waiting to move data off)

My three spares:

2TB Internal (holding data already migrated from WHS drives, moving more)
1TB External (holding data already migrated from WHS drives, moving more)
120GB External (holding data already migrated from WHS drives, moving more)

At this point I think I'm going to have to try to get all the data from the 4 WHS drives off onto the three spares above just so I can get the 2x750 and 2x1TB drives into the DS just to get the hybrid raid setup.

All my data should fit on those three spares since the 4 WHS drives were not full.

Or is there a better way to do this that I'm not seeing?

 

[summerdream]

I was setting up my very first NAS Synology DS212j last few days. The only complain I have is that is takes quite a while (~11hrs for 2TB drive) to create volume and the fact that I needed to backup all drives for NAS use (may find running out of space if don't have enough spare drive). Luckily this has only be done once.

Synology's DSM is just superb, extremely powerful and yet easy to setup. It can do almost anything I can think of.

 

[AlexLyan]

What kind of spare you have been using? Is it is upgraded?