QNAP NAS Community Forum

OK, my QNAP 671 arrived today and I'm trying to decide on the best strategy for installing the existing harddisks. The drives (4x WD Red 4TB) are currently in a Synology NAS. Should I format them while still in the Synology, can the QNAP handle this during the initialisation of the new NAS or (the most cumbersome option) should I connect the drives to a PC one by one and remove the partitions before installing them in the QNAP?

A backup of my data is on two external drives and I'm getting a little nervous about formatting the NAS disks. Just to be on the safe side I may have to postpone the operation until this weekend when I have time to make an additional copy on whatever free space I can find on my PC. My fingers are itching though. Can the QNAP be initialised without any drives so I can at least play around with it?

Congrats for joining Club Q Izzy Now back to serious matters.

You don't need to format the drives in Synology, as QNAP will see them as "unformatted drives" when they are in the QNAP and handle that as part of setup. I am not sure if you can go through initialization w/o drives or not to be honest as I have never done it.

What format are your external backup drives in (ext4, btfs, etc.)? If it is a proprietary Synology backup format, then you could have troubles. Encrypted backups also would cause troubles.

Ideally you want to be able to attach that External backup drive to a PC and be able to see the files/folders on it. If you are say Ext4 or NTFS you are fine. ExFat would require a QNAP license but can be done as well.

Of course I couldn't resist and installed the drives. It was quite easy to set up. The only thing I don't understand why over 50% of my storage space is used by "volume/LUN". I opted for raid 5 and the status of the RAID group is "synchronising". I'll just delete the storage pool and see how it goes.

First impressions: wow! It's a beast compared to my previous NAS and it is so heavy!

Izzy10 wrote: First impressions: wow! It's a beast compared to my previous NAS and it is so heavy!

gratz now you can update your forum profile with your new model hehe.

yeah it's heavy. I got a few qnap and other networking gear which i store on my cheap Ikea storage cabinet as such. can snuggly fit a 6bay unit into one of these cubicles.

That's cool! My network equipment is all over the place.

OK, storage pool set up, thick volume built, now copying the first batch of data from my external drive. It was quite easy to set up but I can understand why someone without an IT background would find it daunting. Thanks everyone for helping me decide, I really love this unit.

Have fun. QNAP defaults to using only 50% of Storage Pool capacity for initial volume setup. This leaves space for iSCSI, etc. volumes/luns. Also you can expand volumes once they are created, but you can't shrink. So this helps people not shoot themselves in the foot.

Trexx wrote:Have fun. QNAP defaults to using only 50% of Storage Pool capacity for initial volume setup. This leaves space for iSCSI, etc. volumes/luns. Also you can expand volumes once they are created, but you can't shrink. So this helps people not shoot themselves in the foot.

i'll add this to faq. I see a lot of questions about this