Upgrade/expansion - help[ needed...

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dizzyfish
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Upgrade/expansion - help[ needed...

Post by dizzyfish »

Hi There, hoping for some help/advice...

I currently own an Asustor AS-202TE with 2 Seagate 4TB 3.5 inch drives in RAID 1 configuration. I have another portable external 5TB USB disk which I use to make a full backup every week. The NAS disks are 7 years old, and currently at 95% capacity.

I was thinking of buying a new NAS enclosure, and buying newer bigger disks. I was thinking I will need 12TB of disk storage to keep me going for the next few years.

Question... If a buy a new 2 drive NAS enclosure eg. NIMBUSTOR 2 with 2 x new 12TB disks RAID 1, how easy would it be to a) migrate my existing RAID 1 data to the new NAS/Disks? and b) How easy would it be to increase my disk size in the future (If say I wanted to update from my dual 12TB disks to 20TB for example)? And maybe with this in mind, would it make more sense to buy a 4 bay enclosure, rather than a 2 drive enclosure?

Many thanks - Ian
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Nazar78
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Re: Upgrade/expansion - help[ needed...

Post by Nazar78 »

According to Asustor, it's as easy as just transferring your existing disks to the new NAS, then update ADM and apps, https://www.asustor.com/online/College_topic?topic=343.

Also you can easily upgrade its disks to a larger size, details and few types of migration available here, https://www.asustor.com/online/College_ ... 352#raid32.

4 or 2 bay is up to your budget but I would go for a 4 bay for future expansions.
AS5304T - 16GB DDR4 - ADM-OS modded on 2GB RAM
Internal:
- 4x10TB Toshiba RAID10 Ext4-Journal=Off
External 5 Bay USB3:
- 4x2TB Seagate modded RAID0 Btrfs-Compression
- 480GB Intel SSD for modded dm-cache (initramfs auto update patch) and Apps

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dizzyfish
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Re: Upgrade/expansion - help[ needed...

Post by dizzyfish »

Can anyone explain this in simple terms for me? I have read the "according to Asustor its easy" college topics, and to be honest, they made me more confused than I was to start with.

I have an old Asustor NAS with 2 raid 1 drives. How do I get the data from those old 2 NAS drives onto a new 2 enclosure Asustor with 2 new bigger drives?
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Nazar78
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Re: Upgrade/expansion - help[ needed...

Post by Nazar78 »

1. Physically transfer the existing disks to the new NAS. Power the NAS on, upgrade the ADM in the settings and upgrade the apps in the App Central.

2. As stated in the 2nd link, in the Storage Manager, click on Volume, then Management, then RAID, then the [Replace the existing drives in "Volume1" with larger ones]. Thereafter, the wizard will guide you the steps/prompts of replacing to larger new drives.

3. Finally after step 2 is completed, on the same Storage Manager, click on the [Expand Capacity] to increase the volume to full new disk size.

Another way is just initialize the new NAS with the new larger disks installed. Setup the NAS/users/shares/apps matching the old NAS. Enable your preferred file protocol i.e. SMB in Service. Mount the shares from the old NAS. Then just copy over the data over LAN via the File Manager. If you're not confident handling RAID migrations, then this is the better approach for beginners but tedious as to manually transfer the data.
AS5304T - 16GB DDR4 - ADM-OS modded on 2GB RAM
Internal:
- 4x10TB Toshiba RAID10 Ext4-Journal=Off
External 5 Bay USB3:
- 4x2TB Seagate modded RAID0 Btrfs-Compression
- 480GB Intel SSD for modded dm-cache (initramfs auto update patch) and Apps

When posting, consider checking the box "Notify me when a reply is posted" to get faster response
dizzyfish
Posts: 30
Joined: Sun Jun 21, 2015 4:30 pm

Re: Upgrade/expansion - help[ needed...

Post by dizzyfish »

@Nazar78 thank you so much for taking the time to explain this to me - its very much appreciated.

Are there many advantages of the 4 bay over the 2 bay enclosure? I guess I am stuck with Raid 1 with 2 enclosures, what are the advantages of higher Raid levels with 2+ drives?
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Nazar78
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Re: Upgrade/expansion - help[ needed...

Post by Nazar78 »

NP. Yes of course there's additional advantages 4 vs 2 bays. You'll have flexibility with either, RAID5 which could provide further space expansions (3+1), or RAID6 extra redundancy (dual parity, two disks failures) albeit slower than RAID5, or write speed improvements with RAID10 (in simple terms RAID1 mirror sets in RAID0 stripe config, one disk failure for each mirror array).

More details on RAID here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels. Typically home users with 4 bays+ will opt for RAID5 which balance in space, performance and fault tolerance.

That said, the 2 bays with RAID1 would also suffice as you could also expand your options using external exclosures. Get the Asustor bay expansion in the future to support additional RAID config (recommended for normal users) or like me, get a cheap 5 bay enclosure and mod it to allow similar RAID setups. Note however external bays performance are constrained to the USB3 5Gbps I/O vs the faster internal SATA 6Gbps I/O controller (unless both your new NAS and enclosure supports better USB links i.e. 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps). But with a little tinkering you could theoretically combine two or more USB3 links i.e. two USB3 ports connected to two external disks in RAID1 array config.
AS5304T - 16GB DDR4 - ADM-OS modded on 2GB RAM
Internal:
- 4x10TB Toshiba RAID10 Ext4-Journal=Off
External 5 Bay USB3:
- 4x2TB Seagate modded RAID0 Btrfs-Compression
- 480GB Intel SSD for modded dm-cache (initramfs auto update patch) and Apps

When posting, consider checking the box "Notify me when a reply is posted" to get faster response
dizzyfish
Posts: 30
Joined: Sun Jun 21, 2015 4:30 pm

Re: Upgrade/expansion - help[ needed...

Post by dizzyfish »

Thanks. I guess the real question is this... Given I am currently using around 5TB of space, and maybe over the next 3 years maybe that will increase to 10TB of use, is it worth me buying a 4 bay enclosure, or should I just go for a new 2 bay enclosure?
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Nazar78
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Re: Upgrade/expansion - help[ needed...

Post by Nazar78 »

I can't answer that as it depends on your preferences, budget and how fast you fill the space.
AS5304T - 16GB DDR4 - ADM-OS modded on 2GB RAM
Internal:
- 4x10TB Toshiba RAID10 Ext4-Journal=Off
External 5 Bay USB3:
- 4x2TB Seagate modded RAID0 Btrfs-Compression
- 480GB Intel SSD for modded dm-cache (initramfs auto update patch) and Apps

When posting, consider checking the box "Notify me when a reply is posted" to get faster response
dizzyfish
Posts: 30
Joined: Sun Jun 21, 2015 4:30 pm

Re: Upgrade/expansion - help[ needed...

Post by dizzyfish »

@nazar78 I understand ;-)

If I bought a NIMBUSTOR 4 bay enclosure and initially only used 2 bays in a RAID 1 configuration, would it be easy to add further drives to increase capacity and convert to RAID 5 at a later date?
Also, if the Asustor NAS enclosure breaks or say ASUSSTOR goes bust, would I be able to take the RAIDED disks from the ASUSTOR enclosure and move them to a new NAS enclosure from a different manufacturer (ie. would the RAIDED data still be readable from a QNAP NAS enclosure)?
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Nazar78
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Re: Upgrade/expansion - help[ needed...

Post by Nazar78 »

If I bought a NIMBUSTOR 4 bay enclosure and initially only used 2 bays in a RAID 1 configuration, would it be easy to add further drives to increase capacity and convert to RAID 5 at a later date?
Yes it's easy to migrate and expand the RAID using the wizard. You don't have to use any Linux commands that admins would typically use.
Also, if the Asustor NAS enclosure breaks or say ASUSSTOR goes bust, would I be able to take the RAIDED disks from the ASUSTOR enclosure and move them to a new NAS enclosure from a different manufacturer (ie. would the RAIDED data still be readable from a QNAP NAS enclosure)?
You can only do this disk transfers on Asustor's models as the config i.e. partitions is different on other manufacturers. But if the other NAS has vanilla Linux (not like busybox stripped down OS) with mdadm installed like a DIY NAS running Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora etc., then it could probably auto assemble and mount your arrays. That said, with some knowledge, think it's also possible to mod the new NAS to accept the Asustor's disks.
AS5304T - 16GB DDR4 - ADM-OS modded on 2GB RAM
Internal:
- 4x10TB Toshiba RAID10 Ext4-Journal=Off
External 5 Bay USB3:
- 4x2TB Seagate modded RAID0 Btrfs-Compression
- 480GB Intel SSD for modded dm-cache (initramfs auto update patch) and Apps

When posting, consider checking the box "Notify me when a reply is posted" to get faster response
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