Adding USB drive to 920+

[cbpowers]

Hi everyone.

I'm enjoying my new 920+ and other than a few bumps, all has gone pretty well.

One of the "tasks" I've wanted to do is move my Plex content from an old Windows box to the 920+.
On the existing Windows box, it's all on a WD Easystore 10 TB external disk. In Windows, it shows up as exFAT.

Could I just mount that on the 920+ as an external drive without having to move the data off this drive and then back to the drive (i.e. I'd need to change the format from exFAT to something else). Also wasn't sure if 10TB would be supported as an external drive?

If needed, can probably move the content off the 10TB drive and on to other drives and then change the format when I mount it (if I can mount it), but just hoping it'd be easy...but that said, wanted to get some feedback as I'd have to try it and then quickly realize it didn't work and the data on the drive is gone.

Unless it's just going to be terrible, not too concerned with performance, there'd be only one stream going at a time (me) and 95% of the time, it'd just be that happening.

Thanks in advance!
Chris

 

[Rusty]

Just to be clear, you are asking about moving the content only, not the Plex server role as such?

 

[fredbert]

If you want to connect an exFAT formatted USB drive to DSM then you’ll have to first install the exFAT Access package from Package Center. On DSM 6 this was a paid extra of $3.99 but became free on DSM 7, regardless you have to connect the NAS to a Synology account and buy it even if it’s free.

So now you have connected your USB media drive to the NAS. My suggestion would be to first go into Control Panel and rename the usbshareN name to something useful, e.g. my media. This is useful if you ever want to swap out that drive to another one as some packages will use the shared folder name and not the file system name. For example it’s useful if you use a USB drive for a Hyper Backup task destination.

Back to Plex, you can use the USB drive as location for Plex library media. Within Plex you should set the configuration to wait before cleaning up missing media so that case of the drive not mounting before Plex starts. It’s similar to the Plex instructions for when you move the media folders en masse from one place to a new.

Rusty’s question about whether you are asking just about moving the media files or also the Plex database etc. … I’ve not done this so if this is also what you want to do then I’ll let Rusty answer.

 

[cbpowers]

So, just curious about adding the disk.

I’ve already set up Plex on the 920+ and just wanted to see if I could add the disk to the 920+. Once added, would clean up the content on the drive, get everything set in folders and such and then configure Plex to use it (and pull in the content) - hopefully easily / cleanly).

Thanks for the help!

 

[Telos]

just wanted to see if I could add the disk to the 920

I attach my Easystore to my PC and move files from there to the NAS via Windows Explorer. However, others connect Easystores directly to the NAS for backups. I'm uncertain if Synology will want to format the Easystore, so I play it "safe".

 

[fredbert]

In my experience DSM doesn’t automatically format a USB drive. If the drive is a supported format then it gets mounted and if not a supported format then it doesn’t. You can still see drives, format supported or not, in Control Panel’s External Devices.

I’ve also attached drives with multiple partitions and each is mounted, if supported format.

 

[cbpowers]

Thanks everyone. Do think I'm going to play it safe and will copy the files best I can to a shared folder (not sure everything will fit) and then mount the drive and see. If there's no problems, I can just delete the folder and if something does go sideways for whatever reason, no worries, I've got a backup. Not that I could do something wrong, but, just in case.

Guessing I could use a Synology app to backup the disk on Windows 10, but don't have that configured yet.

Thanks for all the help, I appreciate it.

-Chris