CLARK!
One thing I’m doing with the new Synology NAS is making sure that everything is successfully migrated from my ancient Infrant ReadyNAS NV+.
There are two basic reasons for this:
The NV+ uses a non-standard power supply, and both of the ones we had at the office eventually burned out, requiring a temporary swap of mine until the data could be retrieved and migrated elsewhere. Mine’s still good, but if it goes…
While the firmware has been updated to cope with the most famous SMB security hole, it’s otherwise an ancient version of Debian on a custom SPARC chip, and even with the RAM upgraded to 1GB, it’s painfully slow at serving up files. It has decent write speeds, but when it comes time to get your terabyte of data back off, it takes forever, especially if you’ve got lots of little files.
I figure the copies should finish by the weekend. Maybe. On the bright side, it’s so slow that the Synology has plenty of bandwidth left to handle copies of every other old drive in the house…
After letting it chug along overnight, it’s averaging a steady 2 MB/s. With 500 GB to go, that’s just about 3 more days. This is so ridiculous that I had to double-check that it really is getting a full-duplex gigabit connection and not falling back to something like 10-megabit/half. No, it’s not the network; it’s just that mind-bogglingly slow. When this is all done, I’m going to reset it to factory defaults and do some testing.
I grabbed a spare 1TB USB drive, formatted it as EXT3, mounted it on the old ReadyNAS, and told it to back up the largest of the volumes (301 GB). It’s rapidly catching up to the aborted rsync job. As a bonus, the built-in backup job uses Perl. 😜
The 301 GB sneakernet finished considerably faster than the rsync job, and my other ReadyNAS just took a few hours, so I now have all my eggs in one basket.
And my basket is now running: find . -not -name '.*' -type f -size +4096 -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum to figure out just how much
duplication there is in the ~6 TB of files (not counting the 2 TB of
Acronis, SuperDuper, and Time Machine images…). I figure there will be
at least six copies of this video:
Update: nine copies of it. 😊
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CLARK!
A lot of ReadyNAS NV/NV+ units had faulty power supplies that ReadNAS, and later Netgear, had to do replacements on. I had one that failed and they replaced it no questions asked, though this was many years ago.
I moved to Synology when I was looking to move away from my ReadyNas NV+ several years ago and have gone through a couple of upgrades since (DS411->DS1812->DS1815). Generally they've been very good machines, though as a single user who isn't using it for many additional services other than basic NAS, I've not exactly stressed my units. The only real complaint I had was that I upgraded to the 1815+ from the 1812 since Synology had originally said they weren't going to deploy BTRFS on the 1812, which they then proceeded to do anyway about 6 months after I bought the 1815+!
One word of caution about holding off on getting expansion units, I know one of the reasons I went to the 1812 was that I waited on getting an expansion unit for the 411, and by they time I did they had rolled out a new expansion unit model that did not support the 411 and discontinued the old model at the same time. So by waiting, I was SOL.
One other thing, check which CPU you have. Synology (like many IT appliance vendors) was heavily impacted by the Intel C2000 series bug. They worked around it in their newer designs, but it's been such a pernicious issue for some that it will be important to keep an eye on it if it impacts you.
Yeah, the ones at work lasted long enough that Netgear wasn't replacing them any more, and you could either hunt one down on eBay or find a donor NAS. Fortunately I had a donor (pre-Netgear, even), since I needed to get that NAS back online in a few hours. I've got a ReadyNAS 312 that I'll be start pulling data from soon; I'm almost done with all the miscellaneous external drives now. The real fun will be running
fdupeson the Synology to figure out just how many duplicates I've scattered over all these drives over the years...Thanks for the other advice; I'm likely going to wait no more than a month or so before buying the expansion, just because the whole "single parity, no hot spare" thing gives me jitters with this many terabytes on the line. :-)
-j