After much debate, I decided to wait for those Black Friday Deals ($400/12TB Ironwolf) and upgrade my entire nas with 100% new drives.
For almost a year, I’ve been getting closer to filling my 8 bay NAS array, currenly full of 2TB drives ranging from Greens to Blacks and whatever I had available, some of the drives as old as 7 years! (only lost 2 drives in that time too)
Having 10TB of data, I was able to backup the ENTIRE 8BAY NAS ONTO ONE DISK! Holy SH*T.
nicely, qnap lets me do an rsync, so here was my process:
- rsync my data
- wait 3-4 days
- remove all 8 drives, label them and set them aside for emergency restore.
- mount and insert (3) new 12TB Drives (raid5, I’m aware)
- run this little script `/etc/init.d/init_lvm.sh` (may not be needed, but one of my 12tb drives had accidently loaded the raid config …tried something else)
- restore folder structure, restore databases, resetup shares.
- rsync my data back (in order of importance, like this website!)
- wait 3-4 days
- Enjoy 8TB of free space!!! (from 2TBx8 = 11TB to 12TBx3 = 21TB)
I was able to retain a lot of my settings, user accounts, etc. But to be honest, I mostly use my qnap for a basic NFS Mount, nothing special.
Additional Note:
3 of my original RAID drives survived 8+ years.