ASUSTOR Community Forum

Hi ADM persons
seeking advice before purchase to ensure i can migrate data

looking to move from a very old 4 bay qnap (3 2tb red drives) to the 5304T 4bay
have 3 good quality 3tb red drives as a raid 5 array which i wish to re-use in the asustor
using QNAP backup station currently to a single 4tb ext4 red drive

So my newbie migration plan is to

do full backup to the single disk
check i can read it with windows or linux from qnap
move the nas disks physically into the new asustor
follow normal ADM setup process - (assume it formats the drives)
create desired new partitions and restore my data from the single 4tb backup

Can anyone guide me on this
would my esata Vantech nexstar NST-D200SU ext caddy be compatible with asustor?

just a bit nervous about how this is going to work
appreciate anyone's experience, did look at forum topics but nothing related to QNAP=>ASUSTOR migration

thanks
Ed

Hi,

I'm using the 5304T.

So my newbie migration plan is to

do full backup to the single disk
check i can read it with windows or linux from qnap
move the nas disks physically into the new asustor
follow normal ADM setup process - (assume it formats the drives)
create desired new partitions and restore my data from the single 4tb backup

Should be no issue at all, can be easily done.

Can anyone guide me on this
would my esata Vantech nexstar NST-D200SU ext caddy be compatible with asustor?

https://www.asustor.com/service/storage ... rand_id=35. There's vast variety of such caddy, I have not used this before but I'm sure it should work with any typical mass storage. I've used a few older USB2/eSata USB enclosure with no issue at all. Only that you need to take note, from what I see on the net, this caddy is USB2/eSata. AS5304T has only USB 3.2 Gen 1 x3 ports (faster and of course backwards compatible with USB2). So you can only use USB not eSata interface. Probably for your migration it's faster to transfer via LAN than USB2. If your older QNAP has at least 1Gbps ethernet, you don't have to copy to an external 4TB backup, just copy them via LAN, AS5304T has 2x2.5Gbps.

Thanks for that
once i move the raid array i cannot use the LAN transfer as the QNAP doesn't exist
The data will only be on the 4tb ext usb caddy

So I would i just backup the raid to the single 4TB usb
then move the raid disks into the 5304, go thru setup and build new empty raid
Then use the caddy to restore via usb2 as i cannot use e-sata on 5304T

any thoughts on this?

Oh yes, you're going to reuse the 3x 2tb red drives. That would work. I would however suggest that you also get a USB3 caddy, it's cheap, or perhaps a multi bay enclosure. Also look for those which has support for UASP, most have them but just to make sure. Use it to migrate the data from old NAS to the 4tb then to the new NAS, after which you can use this caddy/enclosure to replace your old USB2 caddy for the same purpose of backing up the new NAS to the 4tb external disks with improvement in speed.

thanks, i'll look into a new USB3 caddy with UASP.
I am guessing the 5304T has UASP ? but could not see in specs ?
but my old qnap does not so the benefit of a uasp caddy would be the speed of ongoing backups to the caddy over straight usb3.0 ?

UASP performance is only slightly faster but good to have compared to BOT. The current kernel doesn't support UASP but I've raised a request and has been forwarded to team.

If you can get the USB3 now, you can benefit the speed of USB3 over USB2 for your migration provided your qnap has USB3. Else you can get the USB3 caddy later for the new NAS for external backups.

Hi again
now proud owner of a new 5304T and its very smart, got some basic questions which may sound a bit dumb.

I ended up installing a single 4tb drive into the NAS to boot it up and then added the 3 2tb disks for the RAID 5 array, All seems well except i need to replace one of the disk as its starting to error

but my dumb question where does the OS live as if i remove the first 4TB disk the system boots back up again. so it must be in ROM or not on disk ??. sorry really dumb question

Also i found the file explorer really flakey when comparing the disk restore sizes it was like telling me files were copied when they were not and there one minute and not the next. In the end i used windows to do all the checks of files from the backup drive to the Raid, what gives with the explorer as i recall the QNAP equivalent was equally weird, or am i not using it correctly

otherwise Plex is fast as and the apps much nicer than QNAP IMO

Regards
Ed

edwardb wrote:Hi again
now proud owner of a new 5304T and its very smart, got some basic questions which may sound a bit dumb.

I ended up installing a single 4tb drive into the NAS to boot it up and then added the 3 2tb disks for the RAID 5 array, All seems well except i need to replace one of the disk as its starting to error

but my dumb question where does the OS live as if i remove the first 4TB disk the system boots back up again. so it must be in ROM or not on disk ??. sorry really dumb question

Volume 1 is special. All apps are installed onto this volume. You'll need to follow this guide to replace the disk of volume 1: https://support.asustor.com/index.php?/ ... ts-damaged

edwardb wrote: Also i found the file explorer really flakey when comparing the disk restore sizes it was like telling me files were copied when they were not and there one minute and not the next. In the end i used windows to do all the checks of files from the backup drive to the Raid, what gives with the explorer as i recall the QNAP equivalent was equally weird, or am i not using it correctly

otherwise Plex is fast as and the apps much nicer than QNAP IMO

Regards
Ed

Not sure what you mean about "flaky". You'd better to provide more detailed information or screenshots.

thanks for the guide on disk 1 being special
I just replaced drive 3 in the raid array which has some warnings and all seems well there as its 4% rebuilding

I will provide a few details regarding the problems i had with the file explorer
basically i was copying data from drive 1 to the raid array using the options to select all items and then copy to. It was failing with messages like couldn't find files etc. if i restarted it it might work or have the same error in a different place.

Maybe my misunderstanding of how to build the system from new
1. took my 4tb drive with all data on and installed into NAS bay 1
2. booted up and it created volume 1 from that drive
3. i then checked all data on the drive and it look good
4. installed 3 * 2tb disks from old QNAP and created a RAID 5 volume 2
5. tried to copy folders etc from vol1 to vol2 and had strange errors as above

In the end I used a Windows network share to move all the data i needed from Vol1 to Vol2

mm... It's new for me. There are no problems about your procedure. I did not see "failed messages like couldn't find files" in my case. Anyway, first of all, you'll need to make sure that there are no disk errors (your 4TB disk is bad or not?). You can check ADM web -> System Information -> Logs.

If all things in logs are fine, you'd better to report it to asustor directly. https://support.asustor.com/