Thursday, October 29, 2015

network shares - Expanding Synology NAS in the future to a Raid 5

I have a question very similar to this: https://serverfault.com/questions/607437/will-expanding-my-synology-hybrid-raid-delete-the-data-on-the-initial-disk


I have just bought a 4 drive Synology NAS unit (2nd hand), and I have a single 8TB hard drive. The cost for this for a home solution has been quite high, but I like the allure of being able to plug in 3 more drives in the upcoming years as a Raid 5 setup for a total of 24GB.


My questions are with regards to the setup of this single drive:


1) If I plug this drive in now, it will effectively be a Raid0, and in say 12 months time if I plug in a 2nd hard drive, will the conversion to another raid system lead to data loss? (i think this is most probable)


2) Given that the above solution might lead to data loss: I have 1x 8TB hard drive, but I also have 2x 2TB hard drives spare, is it possible to start off a raid 5 system with these drives (I know I will not get the full 8TB storage - which does not matter right now), then migrate the data and swap out the 2TB drives later. Will this allow me to maintain Raid 5 and no data loss?


For example my server would look like this over the next few months:


empty, 2TB, 2TB, 8TB ( this drive is used for data consistency)


I then plug in another 8TB drive


8TB, 2TB, 2TB, 8TB


I then remove one of the 2TB drives after migrating the data:


8TB, empty, 2TB, 8TB


I then add an 8TB drive:


8TB, 8TB, 2TB, 8TB


and so on and so forth, until I have all 4 slots filled with 8TB.


Is that a feasible solution? Can I decommission a 2TB drive, and will the NAS move the stored data to the other drives in the system (I understand raid by default scatters the data across all drives in the NAS)?

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