Increase NAS storage capacity without losing the data

[CHCH-M]

Hi all, just wondering if I could get some help on this.

We need to increase the storage capacity of our QNAP NAS.

Currently it has 2 x 8TB drives (RAID-1) installed. We use the NAS solely for storing our on-premises Veeam backups.

Is there a way of increasing the storage capacity without losing all of the existing data? I saw that RAID-5 would be one option but then also read about some of the downsides of RAID-5 (slow rebuild times, risks of problems etc.)

[dolbyman]

what NAS model is it ?

you can swap both raid1 member drives or add another drive (3+bay models) to expand to raid5

during rebuild raid5 speeds will suffer..yes..but you can decide if you want to prioritize rebuild or data transfer speed in gui

[CHCH-M]

It's a four bay TS-431XeU.

My initial thought was to add one or two more 8TB drives and expand it to RAID-5 (keeping the existing data in place).

Is there anything inherently wrong with RAID-5 that would make this a bad idea? It's just used to store our VM backups from Veeam so I can't imagine the speeds would suffer drastically would they?

[dolbyman]

nothing wrong with RAID5

you can expand to raid5 with 1 or 2 additional drives .. up to you

[CHCH-M]

Many thanks dolbyman.

The NAS is only written to over night during the backup window and even then the backups only take about 15 minutes to complete.

Think we'll go with the RAID-5 route - at least that means we won't lose any of our existing backup data.