[Discuss] Mothballing Synology NAS

[Richard Pieri]

Finished the migration this morning. Some of my thoughts about the process.

Debian 9. While I don't like the direction Debian has gone with the last
few releases it remains the distribution I can most quickly stand up and
configure. The system drive still has plenty of room for some other
distro which may end up being Void once I get some familiarity with it.

I cheated a little on the physical drive moves. The Synology had one
system drive and four data drives, all 4TB WD Red, so I bought one
additional 4TB data drive, swapped out the system drive for something
smaller, and used the two 4TB drives for the first mirrored vdev. rsync
data over, evacuate two drives from the Synology, make a new mirrored
vdev, rsync the rest. Including snapshots.

I need to rework my external backups. The script uses Btrfs snapshots
and rsync. It needs to be adapted to use ZFS snapshots and zfs
send/receive. I also need to get a USB3 cradle because the ASRock board
doesn't have eSATA.

> Case: Fractal Design Node 304. Mostly for the six drive bays in a Mini
> ITX form factor.

This case is huge for a Mini ITX. It's easily three times the volume of
the 5-bay Synology. This because it can accommodate six 3.5" drives, a
high-end graphics card and the power supply to run them all. And it's
fanned and vented for all of the above.

> Motherboard: ASRockRack C236 WSI. One of the few Socket 1151 Mini ITX
> boards out there with ECC. Also, eight 6Gb/s SATA III ports on the board.

ACPI is still a nightmare. In this case ACPI would (I think) cut power
to the drives while they were in operation which generated write errors.
I'd intended to turn ACPI off anyway but it's "good" to know that it's
just as much a problem today as it was when it was first pushed on the
world.

-- 
Rich P.