NAS Mighration

[Enquiries]

I have a QNAP TS-653D with Five 14TB WD Gold drives in a raid 5. NAS is 3 years old, used it as a Plex media server - It works OK for playing 4K movies

6 months ago, the drive in bay one failed, with read/write errors (but smart was OK). I replaced it (in bay one) with a new 20TB WD gold drive, intending to gradually install all 20TB drives

This new 20tb drive failed after six months (bay one again), again read/write errors

I purchased another 20TB WD gold drive and placed it in bay one. This brand new drive failed during the raid 5 rebuild, again read write errors. (I haven't run a disk check) - I powered it down to avoid data loss

I have concluded that bay one of the NAS is faulty and is causing drives in bay one to fail

Can I:
- install the drives in bays 2 to 5 into a new Qnap NAS
- purchase a new WD gold 20TB drive and install it in bay one
- and it will rebuild the raid?

If so, what NAS would you recommend – Ideally 8 bays, but 6 would be fine

Thanks

[ed]

It sounds like you're dealing with an unfortunate issue with bay one on your QNAP TS-653D, and I'm sorry to hear about the repeated drive failures.

Here’s what I’d suggest regarding your situation:

Installing drives from your old NAS into a new one: Yes, you can transfer the drives from bays 2 to 5 into a new QNAP NAS. RAID configurations are generally portable between QNAP systems as long as the NAS supports the same RAID type. Once you’ve moved the drives, you should be able to install a new 20TB drive in bay one, and the NAS will attempt to rebuild the RAID.

However, before proceeding, I would highly recommend running a disk check on the drives in bays 2 to 5 to make sure they are not affected by any issues from the faulty bay one. You don’t want to risk data corruption during the rebuild.

Choosing a new NAS: Since you are looking for a new 6 to 8-bay NAS, I'd recommend the QNAP TS-873A or TS-873XU. These offer good expansion options, reliable performance, and are suited for media servers, including 4K streaming. You could also look at the QNAP TS-664, which is a 6-bay model but still provides excellent performance for the price.

Important tips: When rebuilding the RAID after adding the new 20TB drive, make sure you have a backup of your important data just in case something goes wrong during the rebuild. RAID is designed to be fault-tolerant, but it's always safer to have a backup in case of unforeseen issues.

[RonnieHawklan]

Ed, thank you so much, really really helpful

I’d be happy with either the TS-873A, TS-873XU (couldn’t find that then I googled) or the TS-664
I like the idea of having 8 bays but if Transcoding would be better with the TS-664 I’ll probably go with that

In this regard, which one of them would perform better for transcoding 4K videoed in Plex?
A lot of my movies are 4K, but a few of my TVs are still 1080p. I’ve also got a house full of kids so I often have a few streams going at once

Regarding testing the drives, I’m worried about having them up for extended periods of time running a disk check with a missing disk in the raid 5. Vital files are backed up already, I planned to copy the rest to a few 20Tb drives and then transfer the5 disks to a new NAS

When setting up the new NAS I plan on installing a Asda’s storage pool one for the apps 

But before all that I’m going to buy a UPS

Thanks very much

Ron