newbee

[spikey1973]

hello,

as i mention in my meet and greet i had my hands on two synology nas's (is that the plural?) the last couple of days. and am not happy.

so i saw this presales topic and wow.. that is for me. as i would like to have a few questions answered, most of them will be just a yes or no sorta case.
i know that a lot of this info is available somewhere, but i really don't have the time now to look it up as i will have to go to sleep and buy the nas early in the morning will i have it fixed before work and the weekend. appologies for this.

1) i have two (shr = synology hybrid raid) installed drives with data on it. and these are the only copies of what i got.

now i have the dilemma how to get the drives in my asustor WITHOUT dataloss.
i see three options.:

A) insert drives and all is the wonderfull world of perfect bliss and asustor will install the operating system there where the DSM of synology is now located.
would be great but really unlikely.

B) install drive one, format it install the asustor operating system on it. and copy the data from the 2e drive back on the 1st and then add the 2e after the data is copied on the 1e and some way magically convert the setup into a raid1 setup.

C) A and B is not an option and i will have to install both drives at once.. in which case i'm F3&k3D as i have no extra drives available to copy the data back on for now.
i intend to have these two old drives in the nas (both 1TB) and replace one in a while and add like a 8TB one. and even later replace the last 1TB for another 1TB.

for now i only have like 450 GB of data. but some of this data is the last and only source. if lost it will be lost forever.
oke the earth will still keep spinning (i hope, if not sorry guys all my fault) but i would really like to keep it for in the old peoples home later.

so PLEASE help me to figure out a save way to get these drives installed without data loss.

2) can someone confirm that one can actually work directly from the nas (network drive) without the need to copy files back an forth all the time. and this under ubbuntu.
i found out that with the synology i could watch movies directly from the nas via nautilus with vlc but could not under windows. (always automatically copied it first)
now this is not so important for movies (copy and then delete, but is more essential when i have a edited text file or such and i need to save it in the same place without creating copies which then will spread like a plague over the several appliances, all ofcourse various editions and then well let's hope not ww-III or such.

so either of these two are really importent to me now.

hoping for some help.

Kind regards

Matthieu

[orion]

You should go B) way if your old synology NAS is set to RAID-1.

• Make sure your 2 HDDs being working fine before doing this job. You'd better to do disk check under Synology NAS first.
• Remove one HDD from Synology NAS and put it onto Asustor NAS. Turn Asustor NAS on and initialize it. Both NASes can only recognize its own format. Although I think we can actually access those file system data manually without initialization (that's open source Linux environment). I won't do that. It takes time to investigate their proprietary settings.
• Make both Synology NAS and Asustor NAS work correctly over network.
• Copy your data from Synology NAS to Asustor NAS through network.
• After done, you can move the remaining HDD on Synology NAS to Asustor NAS.
• Perform RAID migration function (ADM web -> Storage Management). You should be able to convert single disk volume to RAID-1 volume. However it takes time for the conversion.

There is a application, called Looksgood, that can stream movies directly from NAS to PC without copy. You can try it.

I wonder why you need to copy files to PC, edit files, copy files back to Synology NAS. You should be able to map a network drive to your PC (no matter which OS), then edit files. You don't need to copy files back and forth. That's a basic function on NAS. You'd better to describe your procedures in details.

[spikey1973]

thank you for your reply,

indeed seems like the B way is the way to go. although as i can't excess the nas (won't boot, won't reset) directly i'll have to do it via my linux distribution and attch the two drive at the same time to that. on the synology site there is a whole work up on how to do that.

i've decided to go for bying at least 1 wd red drive. to have something compatible. and use the other drive as back-up in a drawer somewhere.

also i'm going to buy the asustor nas. but not return the synology just yet.
this way i have all means to get things fixed and running over the weekend and afterwards deciding which to return.
but at this point the asustor nas has really gotta prove to be that it's crap if i would decide to go for the synology.

anyway we'll see. what ever way. i will be completely broke, at least for this weekend. afterwards only really poor :p

about the accessing the drives like i said, i'm sure it's just my unexperienced way of dealing with things and because the nasses basically run on some varient of linux it will be easier to access them from linux (same ext4 format) then windows. but it have no doubt that it would be a lot easier.

just noticed when i did the same thing under linux it worked perfectly and under windows it started to copy all sorts of things.

kind regards

Matthieu

[orion]

about the accessing the drives like i said, i'm sure it's just my unexperienced way of dealing with things and because the nasses basically run on some varient of linux it will be easier to access them from linux (same ext4 format) then windows. but it have no doubt that it would be a lot easier.

just noticed when i did the same thing under linux it worked perfectly and under windows it started to copy all sorts of things.

kind regards

Matthieu

I think you should get the similar experience if you map a network drive to your PC under Windows. Simply select "Computer" icon and click mouse right button. It should show up a pop-up menu, map a network drive. That's similar to mounting NFS / samba folders under Linux.

[spikey1973]

thanks.. i'll sort that as soon as i have my windows machine on the network again.

much appreciated!