HDD Upgrade Help

[spaxz]

I have a Qnap TS-251+ with Plex installed on it. My drive is full and I'm planning to upgrade to a larger drive - swap the old one out for a new drive. I want to ensure nothing gets lost when I do this and don't want to lose any meta data (exact copy of old drive?). I also do not use any sort of RAID at the moment. I combine both drive capacities on the NAS and backup in the cloud and on a USB external drive. What process can I use to ensure PLEX is installed on the new drive along with the meta data ensuring there are no hiccups?

[kherr4377]

all you can do is backup, reinitialize and restore data, reinstall apps. if you used raid1 it would be telling the Q that your changing disks and hot swap them. all configurations would have still be intact .... sorry, pitfalls of using single disk volumes instead of raid.

[P3R]

If you buy 2 larger disks you could migrate your single disk to RAID 1, then expand the volume by replacing the current smaller disk. Yes it would be twice as expensive but you would also get the reliability and flexibility of RAID 1.

[spaxz]

Is it possible to mirror one of the drives (or both perhaps) to an external USB drive then install the externals insisde the NAS? If that was possible then I hopefully wouldn't have to re-install all the apps, configuration, etc. I currently have a 1 & 2TB drive installed. The 1TB is primary with all the apps installed, the 2TB stores media. I Plan to use the 2TB drive as the primary drive (hopefully mirror/clone from the 1 TB drive) and install the new 4TB drive as the secondary drive (possibly mirror/clone from the 2TB drive for this).

[P3R]

Is it possible to mirror one of the drives (or both perhaps) to an external USB drive then install the externals insisde the NAS?

No. The only supported way of getting all of the configuration and data you have on the first (system) disk onto a larger disk is to migrate it to RAID 1 and then expand the mirrored volume with larger disks.

All experienced administrators recommend using using RAID 1 on the first (system) disk. That because of the disk redundancy so that you don't always have to reinstall your NAS from scratch when (not if) the first disk fails but also for the flexibility offered when you want to expand your storage by increasing the disk size in the future while keeping the data on the NAS.

MIrroring (RAID 1) is a irreversible configuration on internal disks only. If insist on keeping your single disk configuration and want to clone your primary single disk onto a larger disk, that may be possible outside of a NAS in a PC with a disk cloning program. It would of course be totally unsupported by Qnap so you'd be on your own if you run into any problems. I think some people have reported success doing that but it isn't anything I would recommend.

[spaxz]

Thanks for the reply, looks like the only real option here is to start from scratch. I see why the raid option makes sense, swap and go - but double the cost for HDDs.

[MrVideo]

but double the cost for HDDs.

While that is true, the headaches are many times less. Well worth it.