DS920+ setup confusion when adding third drive independent of two existing drives (2 currently setup as SHR)

[David087]

Hello everyone, I want to make sure I have this right before making a mistake. I have a DS920+ with two 3TB drives currently installed with SHR. I have a third 4TB drive installed but not initialized yet. I was planning on making the third drive independent of the two SHR drives. I also want to make sure if the third drive ever crashes it does not take the two SHR drives down with it.

Go to Storage Manager, Create Storage Pool, set up as a basic drive (not JBOD). Am I missing anything?

 

[Telos]

I was planning on making the third drive independent of the two SHR drives

Then you would create a new storage pool. But why would you not add this to the existing pool/volume... bringing you to 6 TB with one drive redundancy?

 

[fredbert]

But why would you not add this to the existing pool/volume

• Cos 7 TB storage, with 3 TB having redundancy and 4 TB without.
• Could be the 4 TB is purely for backup of something that doesn't need further redundancy.
• Keeping a two drive array for now allows for migration to a two-bay NAS if there's a need (which are cheaper if it's a forced event).
• Just playing with pools and volumes to see how they work.
• 4 TB could be an older drive and may just want to use it will it works.
• Plan for building a bigger second two drive array.
• ...something else.

 

[Telos]

That's all hypothetical. Let's hear from the OP.

 

[David087]

Hi everyone, thank you for the input. I have had this NAS for a year and I am only using less than 5% of the 3TB so expanding the 3TB seems silly to me. I primarily use it for photo and some video (Synology Photos) and some File Station files. The current 3TB SHR is double backed up on two external drives.

The 4TB would be for something that does not need redundancy, even then I would likely back this up on a WD Passport or similar drive. The 4TB is to play around, maybe run some stuff in Docker, to learn things I have never done or learned to do.

I do plan on adding a 4th drive for surveillance station and I know I do not want the constant read/write on my 3TBs plus the file system used is different as I recall. That is future though, right now I am focused on the third drive which is setting unused.

I appreciate the input, if what I am saying makes no sense I would rather know now than later. I also want to make sure if my third drive crashes it does not corrupt my photos because of the way I configured it.

 

[Telos]

In that case, I would create a new pool, and an SHR volume, btrfs formatted. Doing that gives you the flexibility of adding another drive to that pool to create a mirrored volume later on, if you choose.

Just be certain to create a new pool, otherwise Synology will add the 3rd drive to the existing pool, and once done, it is not easily undone.

And just FYI... But all drives spin and sleep together as the OS and swap partitions are mirrored across all drives... Even with separate pools.

 

[David087]

Thank you so much!