Transfer Data between two NAS

Bronco may be able to lend you a floppy disk.

 

Unfortunately, as you are one of the many who has been seduced by WD getting into the NAS space and cutting corners you don't really have that many choices. Some of their models have included USB connections that when plugged into the computer show up as an external drive but your old one has no USB ports and the new one does but they are for connecting other devices to it not for connecting it to something else.

So your only option is to connect both to your network and then copy the files from the old one to the new one. across the network. Your computer will be acting as the middleman so it will need to be left on and make sure any sleep settings are turned off (if you are on a mac I recommend the app amphetamine which allows you to click a button and it will keep the mac awake until you unclick it, there may be an app similar for the PC but its easier to turn off all power saving features in windows anyway)

In future though for yourself or anyone else who might be thinking of getting a NAS I would recommend staying away from the likes of WD and Seagate when it comes to NAS devices. These may seem good value but as far as NAS devices go they are cut down ones that are really designed for a few of years of use before throwing them away.

Dedicated NAS devices from the likes of Synology may be more expensive, especially as they don't come with disks but they have way more power, more function and if you need more space you don't need to buy a one, you just buy two bigger disks, remove one of the smaller ones and put the bigger one in, let the RAID rebuild then take out another of the small ones and put in the second and now you have more space (and two disks that you can buy a cheap USB hard drive caddy for and then plug them into the back every so often and back up the most important files and then place these backups in a fireproof save or off sight so if there is a fire you have an additional copy of the most important files that's safe because the important thing to remember with NAS is that while if you are running them in a mirrored RAID it gives you data redundancy so 1 drive failing doesn't cause you to lose all your data, redundancy isn't backing up. If both drives go which is especially with these WD type ones where the drives are the same age and from the same batch happens way more than people realise; you have lost all your data).

And if you do later decide you want a more powerful one or one with more drive bays as long as you go with the same brand you can just take the disks out of one, put them in the new one and it will rebuild your storage array and if it doesn't support that or its from a different brand then you can run both and they have software that will let you copy files between the two directly without a computer in the middle which is much quicker)

I run 3 Synology NAS's myself. I have a 6 bay Synology one in my office, then a 4 bay rack-mounted one in my network rack. The one in my office is the main one, that backs up all the files nightly to the one in the network rack. And then I have my original 4 bay budget Synology at my sisters and this also backs up all new/changed files every night. The main one also backs up to a cloud backup service. That way if my main one has a catastrophic failure I can rebuild it from the rack-mounted one pretty quickly. If something happens to both I just have to go round my sisters and grab the disks. And if the worst happens and all 3 NAS have issues I can grab it off the cloud (although 30TB's of data would take a long time to download)

Oh and as I mentioned above drives from the same batch are prone to fail around the same time as each other. My advice when buying NAS drives is not buy all of them from the same place. In fact what I generally do is I buy 1 WD red drive from different places and also look for deals on 8TB or bigger WD Mybooks and buy a couple of these from different places (WD Mybooks bigger than 8TB have white label WD Red drives in them which you can pull out of the enclosure and put in a NAS. And cost a fraction of the price of standard reds). That way you have all your drives from different batches

 

disc or dick

 

Yeah you have been lucky as even commercial drives designed for NAS usage such as the WD Red's only come with a 3-year warranty as the average hard drive life comes in at about 3-5 years before it is generally not fit for purpose for critical files. The ones they throw in their NAS range only come with a 1-year warranty as they put the drives that fail the tests for Red certification

Suppose though with just pictures and audio you probably aren't writing enough for it to be a major issue. Mine last about 4 years on average as I write so much data to them between all my work files and it also runs all my security cameras which 30 days of recordings from 4 cameras in 4K ends up being a lot of data being constantly written. Costs me a fortune in hard drives as there are 14 of them across the 3 NAS's and I try and always keep 3 or 4 spares so I can switch out a disk at the first signs of it producing errors, thank god it can go down as a business expense and save me a bit of tax to reduce the blow

It Will be much better when high capacity SSD's are being made in such high quantity that prices call as the newer higher-end ones can do 10 years under high load without much problem, they just cost about 10 times the same sized normal hard drive right now and I think 4TB is the largest they come in where as we have 18TB normal hard drives now