storage - How do I swap a drive on my Synology NAS without a RAID setup?

I’ve got a Synology DS213j with a 2TB and 1TB drive. I’m connecting to the volumes on the NAS via a network connection (Ethernet/Wi-Fi). Today I bought a 4TB drive and I want to swap that one with the 1TB. Both drives have less than 100GB of free space, therefore a new drive.

However, as this is not a RAID setup so it’s not as simple as switching the drives and waiting for drive A to mirror the data to the new drive. That I know, yet I don’t know how to do this in my situation.

I don’t really have a spare 1TB drive to copy the data to from the installed 1TB drive.

So how do I replace the 1TB drive with the new 4TB drive, without losing the data stored?

Answer

However, as this is not a RAID setup so it’s not as simple as
switching the drives and waiting for drive A to mirror the data to the
new drive. That I know, yet I don’t know how to do this in my
situation.

I have used Synology setups before and mainly in a RAID config. I assume these two drives are being used as NAS volumes, correct? Either than or maybe iSCSI?

My only ideas are:

1. Temporarily Swap the 2TB Disk Out With the 4TB Disk: The idea here would be to do the following; I assume this should work and if not it’s a low risk test I assume since you can just pop the 2TB and 1TB drive back in anyway:

   
   
   
   
   
   
   1. Pull out the 2TB drive from the Synology NAS.
   
   
   2. Then insert the new 4TB drive into that empty slot.
   
   
   3. Setup the 4TB drive for use in the Synology NAS.
   
   
   4. Once that 4TB drive is setup, copy the data from the 1TB drive to that 4TB drive.
   
   
   5. Then when that copy is done pull out the 4TB drive and reinsert the original 2TB drive
   
   
   6. Finally, pull out the 1TB drive and put the 4TB drive into that slot.
   
   



2. Get an External USB Enclosure/Cable: The idea here would be that you would just copy data from the 1TB drive to the new 4TB drive in an external USB hard drive enclosure or connect it with USB drive adapter cable. Then after the copying is done, pop that 4TB drive into the Synology enclosure. I would recommend this NewerTech Universal Drive Adapter since it can handle drives up to 6TB and higher; many USB enclosures/cables only handle up to 2TB

But that said, my understand of Synology enclosures is they might just partition any disk it sees as “RAID” with MDADM (Linux software RAID multi-disk administration tools) even if the disk are not in explicitly in a RAID mode. So maybe the solution would be this modification of idea 2:

2. Get an External USB Enclosure/Cable: The idea here would be:

   
   
   
   
   
   1. First you would take the 1TB drive and hook it up to an external USB hard drive enclosure or connect to via a USB drive adapter cable.
   
   
   2. Once that 1TB drive connected via USB, you would then see if you could mount that in your main OS such as Mac OS X.
   
   
   3. If somehow that won’t work—and the drive won’t mount or the data is not recognizd—you can see about booting from something like an Ubuntu Live CD—or even running Ubuntu VirtualBox—and then running commands as outlined here. More details from Synology’s own web page on “How can I recover data from my DiskStation using a PC?”
   
   
   4. If you can get that mounted in some way, there you go! The 1TB drive is mounted in Mac OS X or Ubuntu and then just copy the data from the 1TB drive to the newly installed 4TB drive. Of course Ubuntu would then have to be able to connect to the Synology NAS, but this should all work.