So like many of us, is started out small, and have been progressing to needing more storage. Right now, I have 2 synology nas devices and a lot of random external drives (yay adhd).
My question is, when i need more space again, should I buy another nas, or try upgrading my drives to larger ones? The issue is find with upgrading is i wont have a way to move all my files from the smaller drives to the larger drives.
I was also thinking I should have another server or something to back up both my existing nas. Not sure. I worry im not doing it right.
If your Synology NAS is in Raid, up-sizing your drives is dead simple.
Pop out one of your current, smaller drives. Pop in a new, bigger drive. Wait for Disk Station to migrate data over to the new drive (note that this can literally take days depending how much data there is). Then do the same with the next old, small drive and the next one until all old, small drives are replaced with new, big ones.
This will work as long as your current drives are not like 24 TB or whatever the upper limit is these days. In that case, you need more bays.
After this is done, move all the data from your externals onto your Synology NAS.
I’ve done this many times! A note, for extra carefulness, you can do the long SMART test on the disk before you add it to the array, or do the manufacturers diagnostic suite in it by plugging it into a SATA port on a PC first just to be extra careful, and also make sure there aren’t any firmware updates.