Adding second HDD / RAID to Synology Diskstation

[roger06]

Hi

I currently have one 2TB disk in my Synologoly Diskstation. I'm now thinking about adding a second drive as a RAID set up.

In order to do this will I lose all the data on the initial disk? A brief look on Synology's site suggests I will. Anyone done it?

 

[professorhat]

How is your first disk setup? Is it just a basic disk, or do you have a volume configured as Synology Hybrid RAID (without data protection)?

What are you looking to achieve i.e. do you want the new disk to mirror the existing one, thus adding protection against failure, but no extra space, or do you want to add it as extra space? If the latter, do you want to expand it so you just have one 4 TB volume, or are you okay have 2x 2 TB volumes?

 

[roger06]

I beleive it's just a basic disk (ie when I put it in and first turned it on all I remember it doing was formatting it)

I want the second disk to mirror in case of the main one going puff...

 

[professorhat]

Ah, then yes. I think to do this, you'd need to reset the volume to be either Synology Hybrid RAID (which I'd recommend), or you can just RAID 1 which is mirroring. This would, I believe, delete all the data on the disk, so you'd have to backup to a USB disk first, then restore back the data once this was done.

 

[roger06]

Actually Prof I've just checked now I'm home - the volume is 'Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) (without data protection)'...

Does this make things easier?

 

[professorhat]

Yes - in that case, I believe you can just add the new disk and then kick off the mirroring process from what I remember reading in an article earlier today. Off to sleep now, but will try and find it again tomorrow for you.

 

[roger06]

Thanks sounds good. I guess it would be prudent to backup up anyway...

 

[philipjohnwright]

I'd suggest getting an external backup disc is more important than a second one for the Synology itself; as even with a RAID configuration you are vulnerable to theft / damage of the whole thing, which would mean starting again. I'm guessing 2Tb means you have a fair amount of stuff on there; I know if I lose mine I'd be looking at 3 months of re-rpping everything (because that's how long it took first time round).

FWIW I have a Raided 2TB Synology solution with a backup external drive that gets updated automatically every week. I also have another 2Tb external disc that I backup monthly and keep off site. I know I'm paranoid but am I paranoid enough!

 

[professorhat]

Hi Roger,

Here's the forum thread - note the response which says:

What you need to do when you get your second drive is simply insert into the system and then from Storage Manager, add it to the *existing* volume. As it is a SHR volume, it should start to put into usage, which means begin to mirror the first disk.
After the mirroring operation is finished, the disk type should become 'SHR with 1-disk protection'.

Thanks sounds good. I guess it would be prudent to backup up anyway...

Absolutely - mirroring protects you against a hardware failure, but it's not a backup. As philipjohnwright says, it doesn't protect you from theft / damage to the unit, nor does it protect you from something simple like corruption or accidentally deleting a file (since the file is instantly corrupted / deleted from both disks).

Best practise would be to use RAID to protect against hardware failure, and then regular backups (ideally stored at another location, but at the very least in a different room of your house) to protect against other mishaps.