And it saved a lot of time (probably 20-30 hours' worth) instead of just blindly following the Synology FAQs. I wasn't actually expecting it to work quite how I was hoping, but it did. I recently doubled the capacity on my DS918+ running DSM 6.2 by cloning the 4TB disks to new 8TB disks. It always happens when you least want it to.įor what it's worth, if you decided to get / repurpose / shuck four smaller disks, to eventually replace with larger ones in future, it's not as daunting as it might initially seem. Fortunately when two drives in my NAS started to fail this time around I had some failure tolerance. I've done that enough times in my life to be burned more than once. So, er, why am I going on about all this? Hopefully it gives you some more ideas about what you could do in future, instead of just take the easy option of adding more disks to a box without any failure protection. (I bit the bullet and saved for a year to buy replacements) Losing files from JBOD disks hurts, though I appreciate NAS-grade disks also aren't cheap. That way you can use SHR-1 for 24 TB raw usable with one-disk failure tolerance, or SHR-2 with two-disk failure tolerance. I would recommend always installing the maximum number of drives your NAS supports, and have them all the same capacity. RAID is adequate and possibly better for a storage system which will always have the same capacity - or will have capacity added by installing more disks in a second caddy attached to the first system, something most Synology devices can't do. Internet forums debate SHR vs RAID and honestly, given my own practical experience on larger servers and storage configurations, I think I agree. However it's not without its own shortcomings, and I probably wouldn't use it again unless I knew I was going to expand my NAS capacity at a future time. SHR is just a brand name (Synology Hybrid RAID), which itself is just a combination of Linux tools to bootstrap some dynamic volume management and failure resilience on to an otherwise normal RAID array. Synology's RAID calculator is useful to visualise different combinations and compare RAID types. For example, two 18 TB and one 8 TB disk would give you 24 TB raw usable and 16 TB raw protection. To add the drive and extend the capacity on the same volume in a SHR RAID, you would need at least three disks, two of which need to be of equal capacity. You can't bridge or span the two disks in your configuration. The second disk once initialized would appear in DSM as a separate volume, to be used as you see fit. There won't be any data redundancy or failure resilience. If you have a four-bay NAS with only two disks in it, the only way you'll be able to expand available capacity is by initializing the 18TB disk as a completely separate second volume in Storage Manager.
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