How to do I move my stuff from Synology and what should be my plan?

[maverhick]

I have 2 Synology drives 1815+ and a DS411+, both have given up on me for different reasons. However in each of these, I had 4 drives each. 

Ds1815 - 4 x 8 TB Drives

DS 411 - 4 x 4 TB Drives

 

I want to build my own NAS system and reuse all these drives. I am looking for suggestions on how to best do this.

Questions:
1) How do I salvage the data from these drives?
2) I was considering building a 8 bay NAS using the the following case: Fractal Design Node 804  - What sort of hardware should I go for to keep my NAS chugging in? It will primarily be used for storage only and not any intensive computation
3) What kind of redundancy should I be looking at if I am OIK with 2 drives failing at a time 

4) Any suggestions on motherboards and the rest of the hardware?

 

Thanks
 

[Energen]

So for storage only you can go with lower end hardware but you absolutely have to consider the future possibilities.  Right now you say storage only (just like I did) but then started to venture off into different things with dockers and vms and this and that.  I just spent more money on a new motherboard and cpu when I could have / should have got it the first place had I known I was going to do all this other stuff with my Unraid server.

 

Fortunately for you now there are some good price to performance stuff out there like Ryzen 5/7 that will keep costs lower while also giving you a world of possibilities.

 

Questions you need to ask yourself:

 

1) I have 8 drives right now but need capability to restore two failing drives -- so do I want to have 6 data drives and 2 parity drives from my current 8 drives or do I want to keep 8 data drives and add two new parity drives?  If you need to keep your current 8 drives then you need to buy 2 new 8TB drives also (parity drives must be as large as the largest drive in the array).

 

2 failing drives at the same time would require 2 parity drives.

 

2) Do I want to have cache drives?  Cache drives usually are ssd/nvme for fast access -- i.e. your docker appdata, fast write speed to the array (data goes to cache first then moves to array).  I'd suggest plan on having a cache drive even if you don't initially plan on using it.

 

So those two questions get you to a minimum of 8 SATA ports, up to 10 with 2 parity drives, and another 1 or 2 with dual cache drives or alternatively 1/2 nvme slots.

 

So motherboard with enough SATA ports or plan on using a addon card.

 

Then you have to circle back around to are you actually only going to use Unraid for a NAS, or will you start using it for other things too...  that's going to determine your CPU and RAM options.

[maverhick]

@Energen , I hear you.  I always end up more processing that I intend to. Soon I'll be thinking of using the box to process stream data from the cameras and so on. You are right. I should get a Ryzen 5 w/APU ? so that I can make sure I am protected for future use cases. I would be OK with 6 drives to store data and 2 x 8 TBs for parity. I might later upgrade the 4TBs to 8 TBs and call it complete. 

What is the cache drive size I might need for this kind of a setup? 

Unraid calls for a USB bootable disk, is that a pen drive (?) or say a USB driven SSD? I am a bit unclear on this. Can you tell me a bit more about the right away to do this?

I've mostly seen micro motherboards with under 8 sata ports - are there any suggested boards I should look at? For RAM - I am ok to spend a bit to get to 8/16GB - However, I. don't know if I need ECC or not. Are there some use cases where ECC RAM is required for sure?

 

Thanks

[Energen]

Ryzen 5 or 7 should suffice and give you enough processing power for a lot of things.  Motherboard isn't too important since you won't use 80% of the features.  You need USB/LAN/SATA ports, and not much else. NVME if you want to use them.  The number and type of PCI slots might be considered for future upgrading to add SATA cards for more ports.  RAM you should at least start with what you're willing to spend right now with ability to add more later. 

 

I'd personally start with no less than 32GB (2x16) so you can add another 32 later if you find that you want it.  There are people that run on 16GB but that's not going to give you a ton of availability for different dockers/vms/whatever you end up doing.  And I'm just old school so I still think that more RAM is better even if less RAM is more efficient than it ever used to be.

 

ECC is mainly only for "peace of mind" that any memory errors are corrected but the odds at actually needing it I don't think anyone actually knows. ECC is more expensive and both the motherboard and CPU have to support ECC.  Is it worth it? Can't say for sure.  I have ECC but no idea if it actually does me any good.

 

Cache drive size isn't too important as generally it doesn't store a ton of data at a time.  500GB would most likely be more than enough.

 

Unraid needs a flash drive, a pen drive. 16GB is enough, 32GB for the fun of it.   Use a quality brand name drive like Sandisk, and think about the back of your case where the USB ports are and the "bumpability" of a flash drive sticking out of the back.  You don't want to hit it and break it.  I use an Ultra Fit drive like this so nothing is sticking out https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/usb-flash-drives/sandisk-ultra-fit-usb-3-1#SDCZ430-016G-A46

 

 

[JonathanM]

1 hour ago, Energen said:

think about the back of your case where the USB ports are and the "bumpability" of a flash drive sticking out of the back. 

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/99877-how-to-move-config-to-new-usb/?do=findComment&comment=940089

I don't recommend super tiny USB drives, they tend to run hotter and die sooner. Better to mount a regular size drive inside the case.

[maverhick]

@Energen,  I always read that the flash pen drives tend to die out soon. I have had Raspberry Pis and one of the ways to keep them chugging along for longer has been to make the SSDs bootable via USB.  Do these pen drives last long enough? Also if the pen drives have an issue or crash, is it easy to replace them later and continue using the unraid license?

 

Is there a longer term solution? Don't really want to keep updating/fixing/changing the pen drives if I can avoid doing that.

 

Appreciate your views on RAM. I think I'll pick up 32 GB RAM and a NVME drive (500 GB) and then put together the machine.  Are there any scenarios under which a Graphics card is required? And is there a power supply wattage that is required for 8 drives?

 

 

@jonathanm Thanks for the link, there is a some info on your link on how to move licenses too.  Can a small SSD be made USB bootable and would that work? I have a 40 GB SSD lying around that might be far more reliable than the pen drives. 

 

 

Finally, in my original post, I had asked if there is a way to salvage the data from my Synology drives. Is there a software that can help with that?

 

Thanks

[JonathanM]

10 minutes ago, maverhick said:

Can a small SSD be made USB bootable and would that work?

No, the thumb drive is necessary for the license, it's tied to the GUID. However, the thumb drive is not actually used like a normal boot drive, as Unraid actually runs entirely in RAM, and the only writes normally done are when you change configuration. The boot process copies the OS into RAM, then reads your license and customizations from the USB, and that's pretty much the extent of its usage. I've had the same USB thumb drives in use for many years, a couple have been in use for close to 10 years.

 

Almost all of the USB failure threads are about those super tiny sticks.

 

I don't believe there is a direct way to get Synology disks to mount, but it's not an insurmountable issue. You could set up an Ubuntu virtual machine and pass the synology disks through to the VM and use the directions published on synology's site to access the data. You will need to first set up the Unraid array with enough free space to hold the data you want to recover, there isn't going to be a way to use the synology disks in unraid without erasing them, so you will need the extra drive space to do the migration.

[Energen]

18 minutes ago, maverhick said:

 I always read that the flash pen drives tend to die out soon. 

A quality brand flash drive should not give you any problems.  I've been using my Ultra Fit since 2017 (the same one, never changed) and have not had any issues with it.  Any anecdotal evidence to the lifespan of mini drives I would imagine relies heavily on outside factors.  I'm just guessing there.  But since purchasing my first license on 5/20/2017 I have not had any problems with my Ultra Fit 16gb mini usb flash drive.

 

 According to the sales page of Unraid, you cannot use any other USB based SSD/drive as the boot drive.

[quote]Unraid OS is only supported to boot from USB flash-based storage devices. Other boot devices such as SD card readers, HDDs, or SSDs are not supported at this time.[/quote]

This really is not a concern you need to think about --- I'd guess that very few people have actually had a flash drive fail on them through normal usage.

 

If the drive actually did fail, you can transfer the license to a new USB relatively easily with a short amount of down time. 

 

Graphics cards are generally only needed if you plan to use a dedicated VM and need graphics passthrough, or if you want a card that will transcode for Plex/media players.  Other than that the only time you would really need any kind of graphics is to initially set up your PC BIOS for booting from the flash drive.

 

As for moving the data it's going to be a completely manual process --- you will do what you have to do in order to -- at the very least, to start --- move all data off one or more of your drives so that they are empty and can be moved to your Unraid box and added to the array. Unfortunately this is the most tedious, time consuming, aggravating part of the process.  When you aren't starting with new empty drives it's a pain in the rear end.

 

The order in which you do things is dependent on how much data is actually on your drives.  Ideally I would want to be able to clear off two of the 8TB drives and add those to Unraid.  Then I would move the data from the 4x4TB drives onto Unraid onto the 2x8TB drives. Then add those 4x4TB drives to Unraid and move the rest of the remaining data to them.  At that point I'd probably shift some of the data around to balance out the drives a little bit (using Unbalance plugin scatter the data) and finally add the last 2x8TB drives to Unraid as your parity drives and create your parity.  The reason I'd do the parity drives last is to have full(er) speed for moving data between disks without creating parity at the same time.  In my experience moving data without parity drives assigned (with Unbalance) is around 140mb/s compared to 80mb/s with parity. 

 

If all your drives are completely full of data, well you have yourself an issue that will require 1) deleting data to be able to move empty drives over, or 2) buying new drives to use in Unraid.

 

[maverhick]

@Energen Thanks, this is a very helpful explanation. I have enough spare space, but no spare drives. I could pick up 2 x 8 TB Drives to make this happen. I don't have a need for Plex, but would like to experiment with image recognition with a few cameras that are at home.  

 

I don't think I articulated my challenge with Synology properly. The challenge is this :

 

1) From my 2 Syno machines, I have a total of 8 drives. 4 from each machine. Both machines are dead.

2) So how do I take these 4 drives from each machine and even read the data? Synology has this thing called SHR (Some raid variant), would my drives even be read by Unraid? OR is there some software that will allow me to pull the data from these drives and move them elsewhere?

 

[Energen]

Ah, I'm not familiar with the Synology hardware.  Seems that jonathanm has a solution for you to try in his post above.  Sounds like it could be quite a process.