What is the best way going about upgrading a synology nas that lacks a cold and hot spare?
Depending on the NAS, in particular raid config and number of bays…
I would think either replacing each drive individually and resilvering in between, or doing a block copy of each drive to each replacement drive. I’m assuming, anyway, that synology’s software can expand the partitions to the larger drive capacities, taking advantage of the additional space.
Block copy is probably the safest way, since each outgoing drive is only being read once over, and each incoming drive is being written once over, with no need to worry about software detecting a slow write as a failed drive. But, it may require quite some time of not being able to access the data on your drives.
A linux liveCD can copy the data pretty easily if you have a couple external drive docks. First, find the drives using gparted(GUI software) or lsblk(command). If you have two drives of the same capacity and can’t tell which is which, you can download smartmontools(apt-get smartmontools or pacman -S smartmontools) and use smartctl -a /dev/sdX to read the model and serial number of the drive while it’s in the system, and match that to the model and serial number on the physical drive.
Once you know what drive you want to copy, and what drive you want to copy to, you just use sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY bs=4M status=progress
where X is the letter of the drive you want to copy FROM, in gparted or lsblk, and Y is the letter of the drive you want to copy TO. If you get these backwards, you lose all your data, so make sure you got it right.
bs=4M just tells it to use a 4Megabyte buffer size, status=progress gives you a report on how much of the drive has been copied so far.
To get more space with a Raid5 or Raid1 configuration, though, you would need to replace all the drives so that they have higher capacity, I think.
But, I could be wrong, as I have no real experience with Synology. I just can’t really think of a lot of other good options for a system where you can’t plug in extra drives without replacing existing ones, but want to upgrade the capacity.
Depends on your DSM version, and whether or not your enclosure supports hot swap (most do, but worth double checking). IME* (with SHR2 and Raid 10), it’s deactivate drive > pull drive > replace drive > follow the web UI prompts to add the drive back to the volume. Or if you’re wanting to reconfigure to a different raid type, use that drive to start the raid type you’re targeting.
Usual caveats of have working backups of what matters beforehand, and let it finish the resilver and/or a scrub afterwards before swapping another drive.
EDIT: Also, this should cover it: Replace a Drive | DSM - Synology Knowledge Center
- IME: I have an 8 bay, and had an 8-wide SHR2 setup. I now have a 4 disk raid 10 (actual stuff i care about) and 4 basic disks (drive testing/chia; these are significantly larger than the raid 10’s disks and the original disks in these bays). I went through those steps one drive at a time to pull a disk out to make a basic, then the next for raid 1. Made plain file copy backups to another box, then used active backup to backup the SHR2 volume into into the raid 1. Test backups, then removed the SHR2 volume and reconfigured the disks the way I wanted, then had active backup for business restore everything into the raid 10, then decomm’d the raid 1 and moved those into their end target. YMMV, my storage environment is weird and terrible.
I am guessing I might be better off redoing my nas, it is shr1. I am in an active backup state atm, i have a second nas that is larger and can take in all the files on it.
TBQH, it’s probably not a bad idea to just make one from spare parts. Makes expansion much easier most of the time, especially if you have a nice case with 7 or 8 3.5" positions and/or 3 stacked 5.25" bays that can be adapted into 5x3.5" hdd positions.
I already have the synology, i also already have two other nases from spare parts. Those other two consist of 8 x 16tb and 4 x 16tb. I suppose i could, but my spare parts that i have are mini itx.
What’s wrong with your current setup, other than drive sizes or age (i.e. what i assume you’re wanting to swap drives for)? Likewise, how many bays does the device have, and how many are in use?
10 drives 10 bays full. I am planning on upgrading to 20tb disks. I already have 2 just backing up my nas before i try swapping in the 20tb ones
Ah, yeah, would probably want two disk redundancy for that end volume at minimum (raid6 or shr2, depending on future expansion plans or portability to other Linux environment considerations). Resilvering my 8x4TB shr2 was ~8hrs a disk swap as it was, scrub afterwards added more to that. 20TB … lot of time for the volume to be unhealthy.
Hi there,
You already have quite a bit of info here but in case it might be of use and further to the Synology instructions, here are my internal HowTo instructions whcih cover replacing failed disks and upgrades when using RAID5 or RAID6.
I have 2x 8-bay NAS units (1812+ and 1821+) and the former was upgraded over several interations of RAID5 (at the time) using this method.
RAID Repair or Upgrade
Positively identify failed disk or disk to replace:
- Start Synology DSM Storage Manager
- Navigate to Storage Pool …
- … select the faulty pool …
- … and expand the pool
- Under Disk Info make a note which slot this disk is in.
Next remove the failed disk or disk to be replaced:
- Still within Storage Manager navigate to HDD/SSD …
- … select the failed disk …
- From the Action menu choose Deactivate
- Confirm the action in DSM
Here is a screenie of what this looked like in DSM6 (very similar in DMS7) as you can see the available disk options:
DSM will warn you (just in case !) and this is what that looked like:
The status LED on the deactivated drive will turn AMBER for easy visual identification.
You may now remove the drive and replace it with a spare (or new) drive:
To activate the spare and commence repair, still within DSM’s storage manager:
- Navigate to Storage Pool …
- … select the faulty pool …
- … and expand the pool
- From the Action menu choose Repair
- Choose the replacement (or spare) disks and click OK to commence repair
I do have a screenie with the Event Log and Storage Manager showing what shows up as the repair [of the RAID or SHR volume] commences:
The Synology DSM instructions are very good these days but I found one gotcha:
what is not clear is that you MUST wait until the volume creation is complete BEFORE creating (any) shares.
HTH 
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Thanks.
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