8TB NAS – Upgrading the Primary Synology NAS Volume

After you have your new array, then it’s time to fill it up! Take out all of those spare hard drives, Blu ray discs, DVDs and start copying like a madman!. You probably want to remove any symbolic links that you may have set up (if you read my last article on the subject).

You may think that physically attaching a drive and then copying them to the volume via a command prompt or File Browser utility would be quicker, but that greatly depends on the file system of the source drive.

Copying files from an external USB drive like this might seem faster than the network… but you could be wrong

Although the version of Linux used by the DiskStation can read files from an NTFS drive, it is painfully slow to access (as in 1MB per second slow). It would be much quicker to copy them from your Windows PC to the DiskStation over the network. If your data is stored on FAT32 or EXT3/4, then the file copy process will be as fast as the drives can write (like 80MB/second or more). Note that FAT32 does not support files over 2GB, so those large MKVs cannot be transferred in this way.

The only real shortcut to rebuilding a RAID 5 array is using a more expensive RAID card or faster host processor (if using software RAID). Most NAS boxes do these parity calculations in software, which accounts for the performance difference between these appliances and a powerful server. You’ll just have to be patient and realize that upgrading and migrating your data will take up most of your weekend. The beauty of RAID 5 is that you have access to all of your media during the entire process.

I hope this article takes the scare out of upgrading your Synology Diskstation NAS. It can take a while, but the satisfaction of having instant access to everything is well worth it.