Since my old consumer-level 8-bay Synology box needed its OS reinstalled. as I said in the reviouls post, I decided to retire it, and replace it with a dual power supply rackmount Synology box. While I was at it, I replaced all the other consumer-level NAS boxes. I used the fancy Rackstation with the fast processor (which I don’t need) and the redundant power supplies only for Elsie, the new main file server. I figure that, if there’s a problem with one of the backup servers, I’ll be able to restore with the server offline and not affect users.
The new 12-bay Rackstations are very well designed, with some clever touches. How do you get 12 drives in a 2U box? There’s no room for even a power switch. Synology managed to put two pancake collapsing-dome switches and two indicator lights on the rack mount ears! Talk about using all the space avaiable.
Of course the new drive sleds are incompatible with the old ones. They’re very functional, though, with sheetmetal frames that are sturdy enough for the job, but just barely. They couldn’t be much thicker and still allow 12 drives per box. The metal is so thin that it’s not going to be a very useful conductor of heat. Still, I’ve noticed that drives in Synology boxes tend not ot get too hot.
Opening up the top cover reveals very clean power and signal wiring, with a motherboard that all the disks plug into. Nice.
Synology has come a long way in making its OS installation process painless, You go to a web page, and download a helper app to find your Synology boxes:
It downloads a copy of the right version of the OS (no more poking through endless varients):
You enter some setup information:
The installation begins:
During the reboot the progress bar runs backward:
When you log on, the first thing you need to do after downloading and installing a new OS is download and install a patch. I guess Synology can’t be bothered to put new versions of all their OSs under control of the installer:
The first installation, with all new disks, went swimmingly. For the second box, I started out with four fresh disks. After the OS was installed and happy, I shut down the box with the semi-trashed OS and took eight disks from there and put them in the Rackstation. This caused some confusion when I powered the box up again:
Upon closer inspection, it seems the system was trying to use the data on the old disks, and failing:
Creating a new volume and incorporating the old disks into it fixed things:
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