To ensure that we won’t run out of backup space, we went ahead and bought a new NAS. Our previous NAS was a QNAP TS-269 PRO, but that model only have 2 bays and that was certainly not enough for our needs. Our new one have 8-bays and is equipped with two 10 GBe SPF+ NICs as we plan to upgrade our whole network infrastructure piece by piece.

Migrate old data

At first we thought we had to backup everything, format the drives, and then restore the backup. But with QNAP it’s really simple. The only thing you have to do is to move your existing HDDs to the new NAS and QNAP will take care of the migration for you. It’s updating to the latest firmware and migrates all the data onto the new NAS.

Migrate RAID 1 –> RAID 5

Our next concern was to migrate from RAID1 to RAID5. Normally you have to rebuild the drives (which means formatting the drives!) but with QNAP it’s as easy as just pressing a button. QTS will expand the new drive(s) to a RAID5, and keep the existing data. That’s just incredible.

So if your current setup is RAID1, you can easily upgrade the pool to either RAID5 or RAID6. We chose RAID5 as we wanted more space. We will also add a SSD Cache to speed up the transfers even more in the future.

From QNAPs manual:

You can do the following with online RAID level migration:
• Migrate the system from single disk to RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6 or RAID 10
• Migrate the system from RAID 1 to RAID 5, RAID 6 or RAID 10
• Migrate the system from RAID 5 with 3 hard drives to RAID 6

You need to:
• Prepare a hard drive of the same or larger capacity as an existing drive in the RAID configuration.
• Execute RAID level migration (migrate the system from single disk mode to RAID 5 with 4 hard drives.)

1. Go to “Storage Manager” > “Volume Management”. The current disk volume configuration displayed on the page is single disk (the capacity is 250GB).
2. Plug in the new 250GB hard drives to drive slots 2 and 3 of NAS. The NAS will detect the new hard drives. The status of the new hard drives is “Unmounted”.
3. Go to “Storage Manager” > “RAID Management”, click “Action” > “Migrate”.
4. Select one or more available drives and the migration method. The drive capacity after migration is shown. Click “Migrate”.
5. Note that all the data on the selected hard drive will be cleared. Click “OK” to confirm.
6. When migration is in process, the required time and total drive capacity after migration are shown in the description field.
7. The NAS will enter “Read only” mode when migration is in process during 11%–49% to assure the data of the RAID configuration will be consistent after RAID migration completes.
8. After migration completes, the new drive configuration (RAID 5) is shown and the status is Ready. You can start to use the new drive configuration.

The process may take from hours to tens of hours to finish depending on the hard drive size. You can connect to the web page of the NAS to check the status later.

Speed

The overall speed of the QNAP TS-831X-8G is decent. Though we got the late model with an Alpine AL-314 Quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A15 processor (the newer models have 1.7 GHz) we must say it’s doing its job very good. Compared to our TS-269 PRO the TS-831X is actually feeling snappier. It also comes with the latest QTS 4.3 which may have an impact on the snappiness as the code has improved since QTS 4.2.

That was just a small post about our new backup NAS. We will update this post when we have tested it thoroughly as we just got it today. Meanwhile you can find more information here.