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Replacing a drive in Synology

L

Liver

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Oct 24, 2005
Messages
6,337
I really have looked for this and I'm coming up empty.

How do I replace a drive in the Synology? I have enough space to remove the older and smaller drive. I don't need to immediately replace it (meaning I have enough storage).

The article I found from Synology said locate the drive, turn off the system, and yank the drive out.

I just don't believe it. What about the data on that drive?
 
I believe those instructions assume you have redundancy. And that putting a new disk in will cause the NAS to rebuild using the redundancy.
 
RAID 0 or JBOD you have to back everything up, yank the disk, install new one, reformat, then copy it back over. It's a pain.

https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?t=66772

If you had picked - pretty much any other option - yeah, you just turn it off, yank the drive, install new drive, and it does it all for you, which is quite nice. For most formats your data is still accessible while it's rebuilding even. I can confirm that works with both Synology and QNAP, and works quite painlessly and well.

I don't know how many bays your system has, but even if you don't want to redundancy, 4-drive RAID5 will give you nearly as much space as RAID 0, and still provide some level of redundancy and easy drive replacement.
 
I did not know that. I'll see if I can convert the raid. Then yank the drive. I'll read more on it.
 
Liver said:
I did not know that. I'll see if I can convert the raid. Then yank the drive. I'll read more on it.
Click to expand...
Make a copy of all that data on another drive before you try to change raid levels! I've never tried to change raid level on my synology, but it's likely going to wipe those drives when it builds the new array.


My recommendation would be to make a copy of that data and install two identical drives (I'm assuming you've only got a 2 bay unit, make the drives large enough to give you more storage than you need for the near future) and set it up for redundancy. If you've got a 4 bay unit I wouldn't risk raid 5 — with hard drive sizes in the multi terabyte range, the odds of an unrecoverable error during rebuild approach 100%, leaving you up a creek without a paddle. If your unit supports raid 6 I'd go for that or raid 10 instead.
 
I have an older 5 bay unit. What about the Synology Hybrid raid array? Any opinion on that? It's their array that allegedly has good protection without so much storage waste.

The plus side for me is I can set and forget. I've had this unit for years without any issues. It really is a nice unit (for me).
 
I didn't see it mentioned but, if you DO go with RAID 5 or 6, you WILL NOT gain any additional space by installing a single larger capacity drive. ALL drives must be upgraded to the same larger capacity before you get that additional space. This isn't the case for RAID 0 or JBOD but you also won't have redundancy. Since you only have a 5-bay unit it might be easier to get the Synology 51x expansion unit ( if you have a PLUS model ) and add capacity that way. I actually have a USB/eSATA RAID box ( Oyen Digital Mobius 5-bay ) that was relatively cheap that I use to back up my NAS. Depending on the size of your drives in your NAS it might be easier to just get a USB-based RAID box.

I just upgraded my 10-bay Asustor NAS from 6 TB to 8 TB drives. In RAID 6 it took 38 hours to rebuild after EACH drive swap. I didn't receive the full capacity until the LAST drive was swapped. The bonus is that I now have TEN 6 TB drives which will go into the Oyen Digital and AMS PC-connected enclosures. I now have one 6 TB, five 4 TB, and four 3 TB drives in a small stack on a shelf. LOL
 
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