Migrating From Disk Station To Rack Station With “Unverified Drives”

[marcusd]

Hi There!



My DS2413+ has bit the dust. I had it sitting on a rack shelf in my rack and have decided that I'd rather install a Rackmount Unit as opposed to a Disk Station on a shelf to save a bunch of space in my Rack. Right now the DS2413+ takes up like 7 or 8 "U" Spaces. I thought I was all good when the RS2421+ was announced. It's a "Plus" model like my DS it supports SHR too, and it has 12 Drive Bays. Perfect!

Unfortunately this model appears to have the same issue with the "Incompatible" and "Unverified" drives as the higher end XS and XS+ models. I'm a little mad because it is essentially a DS spec'd unit in rack mountable format.

My question is... will I have any trouble pulling the drives from the DS2413+ and putting them into the RS2421+ and letting DSM migrate? Currently I have 7 - 4TB WD SE drives (from before the Red Pro era) and 2 - 6TB WD Red Pro (9 Drives In Total). I'm OK if the drive status says "Unverified" just want to make sure that the unit will rebuild the array without crapping out on me? I will gradually replace the WD Drives with Synology ones as my drives are already getting older and they are smaller in size. Just don't want to have issues migrating from a DS2413+ to a RS2421+ and getting up and running again!

Thanks for any input or real life experiences!

 

[Rusty]

My question is... will I have any trouble pulling the drives from the DS2413+ and putting them into the RS2421+ and letting DSM migrate?

High chance you will. If you have checked the compatibility list you will see that drives for this model are all from ENT range and most of them are Synology branded drives.

Regarding whether you can pull off running with your current drives, you should be, but there might be problems (your drives will be in the unverified category).

Meaning they will be usable but your Stroage Pool will be flagged as "Danger". Also, no technical support will be given.

Considering that the new HDD policy started in January and applies to all drives from that point forward (for certain classes of devices), this will apply to this model as well.

More details on the compatible/unverified/incompatible drives are here (internal Syno document rewritten as the PDF was not allowed to be published in its original format): Synology HDD compatibility policy explained

 

[marcusd]

Thanks Rusty! I appreciate the reply.

When you say that there is a high chance that “I will have issues” are you saying that I will have issues migrating the data or that my issue will be that my drives will be in an unverified state in DSM post migration?

I’m ok with them being in an unverified state after migration because I will gradually replace the old drives with new Synology branded ones. But I’m not OK if I can’t even migrate the data. I’m dead in the water with my DS2413+ as the motherboard has failed in it. The drives are all fine as last I checked before the motherboard failed everything was healthy.

Just want to move these drives to a new Synology box get the Array rebuilt and get up and running again. Not concerned with the unverified state more concerned with accessing the data.

Thanks

 

[Rusty]

that my issue will be that my drives will be in an unverified state in DSM post migration?

This. Long term it could get more ugly but if you will rotate them out guess for the time you will be ok.

 

[marcusd]

Thanks Rusty!

Appreciate the help & insight. I agree that likely Synology will clamp down more and more as time goes on but I'm hoping to have cycled out my existing drives for new compatible ones by then. Just didn't want to have to replace them all at once and with a dead NAS unit right now my main concern is with getting things back up and running even if it isn't "perfect."

Thanks Again!

 

[Telos]

Let's review what is meant by "unverified" drives. In short., any drive that has not been tested by Synology is defined as an unverified drive.

Unverified drives are usable in an unsupported state with the following constraints:
• An unverified drive’s status will appear as "unverified" in DSM's Storage Manager
• Warnings will display when selecting unverified drives to create a storage pool
• Storage pools containing unverified drives will display a danger status
• DSM will send warning emails when unverified drives are in use
• Drive information like allocation status, bad sector count, temperature, serial number, 4K native may not be displayed
• Synology support will be limited if the support issue can be tied to the unverified drive
• Use of unverified drives has no effect on the Synology's hardware warranty

 

[marcusd]

Thanks Telos!

That makes sense. And I can somewhat see Synology’s stand on this as I’m sure they field a lot of support issues related to hard drives that should not have been used in a NAS unit in the first place.

I also feel that this is a bit of a cash grab on Synology’s part too by forcing people towards more of their products (i.e. RAM And Now HDD)

I am a little mad that they did this with the “Plus” models that are Rack Mountable though. To me NO Plus Model should be classified as Enterprise. They classified their units as enterprise based on the form factor and number of drive bays and not based on specs (i.e. CPU, Pre Installed RAM, Pre Installed Networking Speeds, Redundant Power, RAID Options, etc.)

I’m any case I like the product, I like DSM, it works with very little babysitting which is good too. So I’m fine upgrading within their architecture even if it means I have to buy the Synology Branded HDD’s for full functionality.

What I was very concerned about was if this new unit would even accept my drives and rebuild the array. And it seems like it will accept them, it will rebuild, however I will have the limitations that you have stipulated above.

Thanks Very Much!