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Last year, my Synology DS918+ NAS died. 3 drives had gone bang a few months prior, and it finally got just a "bad beep of death". Trying to get a fix or replacement from Synology was an exercise in futility, so I pulled out the drives (which were still OK).
I decided to build get a decent spec i5 based "server" tower that enough room for the 4 drives. I got everything up and running and turned it into my own cloud server as described above. I set the 4 drives up as a 24TB Windows Storage Space, and all was well. Until...
About a month ago, I got a notification of some sort of corruption on the storage space. I sorted that out by deleting a couple of files. Then I got a notification that the storage space had gone read only, again with some corruptions. I didn't know what to do at this stage, but I needed to get rid of the storage space if it was unreliable.**
After contemplating for a while (I'm unemployed
), I bought another Synology DS918+
I then needed to get everything onto that somehow, whilst transferring the disks from the existing server. There was only about 4TB of data on the storage space at the time, so my plan was :-
- Remove one drive from the storage pool and set it up as a standalone drive, giving me about 5TB to play with. This took about 2 days.
- Copy everything from the remaining 3-drive storage space to the orphaned drive. This was quite quick and uneventful.
- Remove the 3 drives that made up the storage space, and put them into the NAS, and build a SHR array. After a quick download of the latest firmware, the NAS was up and running and available on the network. I set up a couple of shares and users and set the correct permissions.
- Copy everything from the server to the NAS. Again, this was quick and uneventful.
- Set up the NAS to backup to iDrive.
- Pull the remaining drive from the server and put it into the NAS. As the NAS was still doing its initial low level parity check, it wouldn't let me add the drive. It took about 2 days for this to finish. After that, I was able to add the drive to the array, and after another 3 days of parity checks, the extra space was available.
So, I now had a nicely working NAS and the server connected to it. Except...
The server was actually huge, and had a noisy/whiny CPU fan as well as an overly-beefy power supply. There were now no physical drives in there, so I considered getting a smaller case with a silent power supply.
But then, I happened to see a review of a 10th Generation Intel NUC. I went onto eBuyer, and found it would cost £500 for the NUC and 32GB of RAM and I could use the 1TB NVMe from the server. The "Good-DYKWIA" was saying "step away from the keyboard" (I'm unemployed
), but the "Bad-DYKWIA" won out (I got paid a redundancy payment), and I ordered it for next day delivery.
It was easy to set up, and after downloading the various drivers I had a replacement for the server. It seems to run just as quick as the previous 9th generation i5, and I've had a couple of VMs running.
Both the NUC and the NAS now live in a small cupboard in my office - and are effectively silent. I sold the old server for £400 on Facebook the very next day.
** I later found that I was not alone with Storage Space issues. It appears that Microsoft has introduced some sort of a bug in their Windows 2004 update :-
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/...ting-to-window
The great advice they offer is to make the storage space read-only to stop corruption.
