"soft" change of system drive?

[Viridel]

My current system drive is also the one that gets the most robust use, which creates unnecessary risk of failure. I would live to move my System Disk onto my Backup drive - which has a significantly lower use-rate. Is there any way to do this via the browser-based Admin panel?

[dolbyman]

not sure what and where your backup drive is

but if you use a redundant drive setup at the beginning, then the system is spread across all disks

without more details about the configuration, nas model and firmware it is very hard to help

[Viridel]

Converting from a TS-251 to a TS-451+. Currently the 4Tb Transmission drive is in Slot-1, therefore the System Disk. I would like to move that into Bay 2 (or whatever) and use my 1Tb Backup drive in Bay 1 as the System Drive - so that if the Transmission drive fails from overuse (and it's been going for ~5 years, so it's a distinct possibility sooner than later), then I haven't blown my NAS config.

[dolbyman]

use the move to convert from single drive to a RAID (I would suggest 5) and all those issues are gone

[P3R]

Is there any way to do this via the browser-based Admin panel?

Not that I'm aware of.

That's one of the reasons RAID 1, 5, 6 or 10 is strongly recommended for at least the system volume.

[Viridel]

Is there any way to do this via the browser-based Admin panel?

Not that I'm aware of.

That's one of the reasons RAID 1, 5, 6 or 10 is strongly recommended for at least the system volume.

So given that Raid5 requires 3 drives, on a 251 model, how would one go about backing up the system drive?

[P3R]

So given that Raid5 requires 3 drives, on a 251 model,...

You can't have 3 disks in a 251 but since you mentioned a TS-451+ previously I would guess that's what you're talking about here?

...how would one go about backing up the system drive?

As far as I know there is no automatic procedure to do that completely.

You can backup the configuration settings (System Settings, Backup/Restore) but that's just the most basic settings. All apps and their indivudal configurations you need to backup manually!

What you could do (but as I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind, it may not be right for you):
1. Follow the instructions for System Migration and move the disks from the TS-251 to the TS-451+
2. Follow the instructions for Expanding RAID Group Capacity and migrate the single disk system volume to RAID 1 by adding a disk
3. Follow the instructions for Expanding RAID Group Capacity and migrate the RAID 1 system volume to RAID 5 by adding a disk

You can search the online documentation correct for your Qnap model and QTS firmware version used to find the exact instructions for all the higlighted procedures above.