Migrating from one QNAP NAS to another.
I purchased a QNAP TS-419P+ nearly a decade ago as my primary storage device using NFS to share files between different computers. This devices houses media for my Plex server, backups, and other digital junk.
The device worked without issue until around 2014, when I had one of the 2TB drives fail. I was running RAID 5 across all 4 drives so I just needed to locate a new drive and replace it. Instead of just replacing the drive with a similar drive, I took the opportunity to expand the storage by acquiring 4TB hard drives. Backblaze does a great job of publishing drive failure data and this helped influence my purchase decision on both manufacturer and model and I ended up purchasing Hitachi HDS724040ALE640 drives. I was also aware that there is anecdotal evidence of drives that fail in batches. My RAID 5 couldn’t suffer more than one drive failure so began replacing my original 2TB dives with 4TB drives purchasing one every few months. Once I had all the drives replaces, I was able to expand the storage space and realize a full 10TB of RAID 5 storage.
Other than upgrading my drives and expanding the storage, the device has run without issue. In early 2019 I was reviewing the release notes from a new software update to QTS and read that some devices would no longer be supported on up coming versions of QTS. Reviewing QNAP’s product support status page
Scrolling down about halfway, I see my unit.
So the last QTS version my existing TS-419P+ would support is 4.3.3. The final version of QTS was released for this hardware in September of this year.
I’ve had a great experience with QNAP and wanted to see if there were options to migrate drives from one chassis to another. I was pleased at how easy they made it migrate. This wizard shows that my choices are compatible.
My choice of the new NAS, a TS-473, was governed by a few things. I don’t need HDMI or video output, headless is fine. I wanted to ensure I had similar performance as my existing NAS was able to effectively serve media to my Plex server. Both devices were similar with the largest difference being architecture. The TS-419P+ was an ARM architecture and the TS-473 was an x86. I was a little concerned about how the migration would work given this.
Drive order
Preparing to do the migration, I wanted to ensure I could follow the instructions on moving drives between the two units. One of the most important aspects of the type of migration I was performing was drive order. I couldn’t find any information on the order of the drives for the TS-419P+. Reading several posts similar to this one led me to believe that the drives were ordered left to right with Drive 1 to the left and drive 4 to the right. I was able to confirm this in my subsequent removal of the drives.
If the labels are a bit hard to read, that’s because NAS was … well, let’s say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
So, I guess I need to vacuum out the NAS once in a while.
Drives
Once I established the source drive order number, I could read on the new TS-473, the order of the drives in the chassis. I powered down the old TS-419P+ and carefully removed each drive, labeling each one as I went. I took care to vacuum and wipe each drive. The pictures below show one of the drives as I extracted it.
One thing to note on the drives. I have an ultrasonic humidifier in the same room as the QNAP. I often find residue from the ultrasonic vapor that looks like a white powder on the legs of furniture. I was surprised to see, what appeared to be, the same powder in very uniforms lines on the drive boards. This was a little concerning as this powder could create a short on the drive. I’ll have to plan to clean the drives on a periodic basis, I’ll also visually inspect the drives looking for this type of build up to prevent a failure. Clearly my NAS location isn’t quite as clean as a data center.
Installation
After completing the extraction and cleaning, I mounted the drives in the trays for the TS-473. I didn’t take any pictures of the installation process, I was a bit anxious to see if I could boot the device in the new chassis. I loaded the drives in the corresponding order on the TS-473 that they were extracted and powered up the device.
One of the most notable physical differences between the TS-419P+ and the TS-473 is the absence of a display on the latter. Shortly after powering on the device all the drives quickly came alive and began to constantly click and flash the drive activity light. I feared that the drives were being formatted as I watched.
After what seemed like 30 minutes (more likely less than 5) the device politely announced that it was operational. I navigated to the previous management IP address to see If I could get an admin console and it worked! I was able to see my volume and the data was still in tact. After mounting NFS exports to a few machines and opening some files, I was becoming more convinced that everything was successful.
Results
There was absolutely no issue with the migration process. I’m not 100% certain on why the architecture didn’t have an impact. I believe the kernel or system volume is located on a partition mirrored across all of my drives. My guess is that the system volume contains kernels for both architectures. I didn’t dig into this too much but I found a few posts that seem to support this.
There are plenty of benchmark tests for this device. The folks at techpowerup have the most comprehensive review.
After using the new TS-473 for more than 6 months, I’m very happy with the migration and the new device. This is a screen shot of the latest QTS 4.5.1.1495. I appreciate the update to the UI and the ability to see the drives by number in the visualization below.
I also like the ability to use the “locate” to ensure you are pulling the right drive for replacement.
I’ve begun to integrate it into both my monitoring strategy using telegraf and sending logs to the graylog instance I’ve setup.
One of the final tasks I haven’t tackled yet is updating Entware. My old system was ARM based and this new one is x86 so the binaries are incompatible.
