I’m Upgrading my old Network Attached Storage (ReadyNAS RN212), because my new 16TB drives broke it
If you are like me, you have a trove of data that just seems to keep growing. It’s compiled of family photos, music, maybe dvds and blurays that you’ve archived. You might even have virtual machine hdds, software licenses, and software install files to keep around just in case they go offline someday. I keep the software installed files and versions around so that I can install something just as it was when it last worked. To keep data fresh, you need more than just the files, you need the applications that can read those files. Recently, I’ve even been collecting Machine Learning datasets, to practice a new trade skill. All of this data takes space and having a good backup strategy can save you a lot of headaches and time.
Back in 2018 I had to relearn this lesson, when I was doing a routine clean install of Windows to make it fresh. I was having subtle problems with my computer that I had built myself and the next version of windows had some driver improvements that the ‘update’ didn’t seem to deliver on. So, as I was doing a fresh install, windows accidentally formatted the wrong hard drive. It didn’t format my SSD as I wanted, but started formatting my data drive that had all of my family photos, and other data on. I was freaking out.
I stopped the install, pulled the drive; and then proceeded to install the OS on the ONLY DRIVE in the system, THE SSD. Ok, once I had the OS back up, I then started to use every recovery tool I could find to recover the data from the lost hard drive. Some of it I’ve recovered, some might be lost forever. Even of the recovered files, directories are scattered and rebuilding the folder structures is a pain in the butt.
After that, I knew that only having 1 data drive separate from the OS wasn’t enough. I knew better, even then, but I just told myself that I’ve recovered from a crashed HDD before, and it wasn’t that bad. I’ve swapped the circuit board from a drive that caught on fire, and recovered the data. I even once moved platters from one drive to another to recover a failed HDD. I thought I didn’t need the complexity of a backup. I thought I was invincible, but I’ve never had an OS format the wrong drive before. Oof. I learned my lesson flying too close to the sun.
I started looking for solutions. AWS was expensive, Dropbox, Google, and MS I didn’t trust. I didn’t want to host my data in the cloud. So, I found an alternative. Resilio Sync is like Dropbox, but has a 1 time software license, and doesn’t have a monthly cost. Plus you don’t store your data in the cloud, it uses the bit-torrent algorithm to synchronize files between your computers. (Larger companies use Resilio Sync to keep web servers in sync, as it’s faster than all of the servers downloading updates from a single server, with resilio it’s more like a data mesh network and each node works together to keep the data in sync. It’s impressive technology and I can imagine a few more use cases for their tech.)
Once I had Resilio Sync installed on my Desktop, Macbook, and my wife’s computer we paused in a moment of relief, until we started to see some of the limitations of a Resilio Sync network. You needed to have multiple computers awake and online for the syncing to be effective. This is when we realized we needed a NAS.
We bought a Netgear ReadyNAS RN212, as it was a NAS that supported Resilio Sync. I added 4TB, and everything got along swimmingly. The NAS was always on, and would sync with our devices when we were home, or away with good internet. Everything was great.
It was at this point that we started using more applications on the NAS, and I learned that we could use a PLEX server to transcode archived DVDs and Blurays in such a way to play back those movies on our iPads, and iPhones. We were preparing for a long trip to Japan, and we wanted to bring all of our Studio Ghibli content on our iPads to keep our 18mo occupied. We were hooked, now PLEX was a part of our life.
Data-wise, Life was good. I was sitting calm and secure.
Then in September 2020, wildfires began to ravage California. On Sept 9th, 2020, we woke up to a night sky in the day, and it was blaze orange and the air was so bad you could hardly breathe without a mask. It was terrifying. After the fires settled down, we would drive around and see the number of homes that were lost. And it just stuck in my mind, that my little Resilio network in our home wouldn’t keep all of our files safe if there was a fire and we had moments to evacuate.
At this point I wanted to go FULL 3–2–1, but the 4TB drives we had in the NAS wouldn’t have the space to keep our data, and back up our computers. We needed a bigger NAS.
After putting off the project for a year, I finally got around to buying (2) 16TB drives, and I assumed that I could just plop them into my Netgear ReadyNAS RN212 and it would be no big deal. Well, at first it was easy to migrate and expand the capacity of the RAID 1 array, replacing 1 drive at a time. The array degraded when I removed the first drive, and then took 1–2 days to sync, and then I did the 2nd drive.
But then we started to notice the “regular popcorn noises,” coming from the new drives. I did a bunch of research online, but most of the advice online seemed wrong. The HDDs sounded like they were thrashing, because the NAS didn’t have enough RAM. I was wondering if the 16TB had too much addressable space for the RN212. So I enabled SSH, and telneted in, and the VM space seemed big. (I didn’t do this right away, because Netgear warns you that you are voiding your warranty by enabling SSH) So, I assumed I was right, and for 16TB I’d need more RAM.
Projects like this are costly from a time perspective, so I don’t like having to do them yearly if I can avoid it, and prefer to spend a bit more money and get a longer life out of my decisions. So, I did a ton of research on available NAS devices, and settled on one that would have good 4k PLEX performance, was a 2 disk array, and supported expandable RAM, and NVMe drives for read/ write caching or as a 2nd high speed volume.
I settled on the ASUSTOR AS6602T. It has the features I wanted, and ASUSTOR is really ASUS under the hood. I had been impressed with my recent switch to ASUS Mesh AI for my WiFi 6E setup, so that gave me a lot of confidence in the brand. The hardware was also better than the comparable Synology DS720+, and didn’t have the cyber security ransomware issues that QNAP had recently. The AS6602T has dual 2.5 Gbps Multi-Gigabit ports, caching, and a growing community. Synology seems to deliver a bit better Synology Software, but that software is targeted to businesses and small workgroups, whereas ASUSTOR seems to focus a bit more on open source and 3rd party applications, and putting their engineering resources into supporting 3rd party hardware, software, and improved specs.
At this point, I had 16TB online with the RN212, and I needed to migrate that to the AS6602T, but I didn’t have 2 more 16TB drives laying around. I wanted to do this efficiently, but I also didn’t want to risk my only complete copy of my data. So, I bit the bullet and signed up for a cloud hosting provider. The cheapest one I could find that was supported on the RN212, was Wasabi. Wasabi provides cloud storage for $6/TB per month of stored data, and they don’t charge for expensive ingress, and egress feels to upload and download your data. They support encryption at rest, an AWS compatible API, and they offer a free trial. I easily configured the RN212, and started uploading data from the folders I had.
This is when I had my first issue with Wasabi / RN212. My RAM was already so strained that the backup just couldn’t complete. Between 16TB, Resilio, PLEX, and Wasabi the little RN212 was choking on data so badly that it just wasn’t working. I had to start turning off services, one by one. Even that wasn’t enough for Wasabi to complete the 4–5 root folders I wanted to backup. I had to resort to 1 backup at a time, so the little guy could get all of the object meta data in RAM and perform the backup. Oof, so after a few days of that, we got everything backed up online just in case everything went south with the next part. I now had about 3–4TB in the cloud, and I wasn’t fully sure I could easily restore the data on the new device, but I knew I could get it if I had to, and that’s all I needed.
It was now time to start migrating data from the RN212 to the AS6602T. I first tried to see if I could reduce the Volume size on the RN212, but X-RAID doesn’t support volume shrinking, consolidation, or downsizing. I tried to put the 4TB drive next to the 16TB volume, but that also wouldn’t work. X-RAID wouldn’t even try to sync with the 4TB drive because it was smaller.
Moving on, I decided the safest course of action would be to set up the AS6602T as a 4TB RAID 1 array, and then expand it into the full 16TB volume size later. I had read online that putting a drive with data into the ASUSTOR ADM software, would just format it and unpack the ADM OS and install it onto the primary volume. (some people use the SSDs as the primary volume for this reason, but then can’t use them as the cache)
With the 4TB RAID 1 array set up on the AS6602T, I had to start getting the files from one system to the other. After looking at a few options, I decided that the best approach would be to just use Resilio Sync. This way the files would download not only from my other NAS, but from all of the computers in the network. I also linked and bonded the two ethernet ports on the RN212, and the AS6602T with my switch so I could have much more bandwidth. In theory the RN212 and AS6602T had 2 Gbps available (technically, the AS6602T could have peaked at 5 Gbps doing this, but my switch only had 1 Gbps ports available). Next, I upgraded and added the cache. The install wasn’t too bad, but it took a bit of work to add both NVMe cards. Once the machine booted back up, I added the cache to the existing volume in the ADM Storage Manager. During the transfers I saw the NAS and my Desktop each peak at 50–70 MBps (400–560 Mbps), but the AS6602T sustained over 100 MBps (800 Mbps), and had peaks matching the full 2 Gbps.
This would work for all of the Resilio managed files, but it wouldn’t help with the Window’s Backups. After Resilio completed, I checked if the Windows Backups were working anyways on the RN212, and oof, again it seems that Windows was angry with the old backups. I was so glad my wife’s computer didn’t have any issues during this fragile data time. I conceded that I would just have to start fresh with the Window’s Backups on the new NAS.
For the Window’s Backups I created a new group and folder with the name “Windows Backups.” I then created a user account for each person in the family that needed to backup their machines, and added them to the “windows backups” group. This will do for now. Later on I might micro manage them a bit more and restrict each user a bit more, but I wanted to keep things simple until I was at full at a 3–2–1 solution again. It took another day for the WinBackups to complete.
After I got all of the data running on the new NAS (AS6602T), I received the upgraded RAM DDR4 SODIMM I had ordered. I wasn’t sure it was going to work, but I had seen a number of people report online that they were able to upgrade their ASUSTOR and Synology devices above the specified 8GB limit. It seems that the Celeron J4125 in theory has an 8GB RAM limit, that is contractually enforced with vendors like ASUS, but it doesn’t seem to be any hard limit. Many have postulated that the limit is arbitrarily for market segmentation purposes. A few people have reported getting 2x 16GB DIMMs working, but I didn’t want to push my luck. So, I bought 1 16GB DIMM and figured I’d try to get that working for a total of 20GB of RAM. After much research I noticed that DDR4–2666 CL19 Dual-Rank DIMMS seemed to work the best. Once I took everything apart I realized that the memory in the device is DDR4–2400 CL19, but I don’t know what Rank it is.
At first it didn’t work. I put the new 16GB DIMM in the empty slot and many had reported that you needed to wait a long while for the ASUSTOR AS6602T to possibly do a memory test, and on 20GB that takes awhile. However, after a few hours I called it, and pulled the machine back apart. This time I figured I’d try the 16GB DIMM alone and where the 4GB DIMM was. This was much more involved to pull apart, but after some effort I got the DIMM in the 4GB primary slot. The system booted after a few min, and sounded a loud “B-E-E-E-P!” Woot, it worked. I logged into ADM to see the full 16GB online. Now it was time to push my luck one more time and see if I could get to 20GB. I turned the machine off, installed the original 4GB DIMM in the secondary slot, and booted it back up, and sounded a loud “B-E-E-E-P!” WOOOOT, I got the full 20GB working. ( as I get used to the new NAS and my application load I’ll consider seeing if I can get to a full 32 GB with a 2nd matched DIMM, even if I don’t need it I might do it now so I don’t forget what I’m doing ).
So to recap, now I’ve got 2x 240GB read/write cache running and 20GB of RAM, with 4TB of storage. I needed to complete the final 2 steps of migrating to 16TB and getting Wasabi back up and running.
To upgrade the drives, I was going to have to go one at a time, and as I went, I’d lose the data from the old NAS as the new one (AS6602T) would format the drive. The process was pretty easy, and I did one drive at a time.
Now that both drives were 16TB I kind of expected ADM to extend the volume size automatically, but it didn’t. It was at this point that I decided to upgrade ADM from the latest 3.x version to the beta 4.0 version. The best part of upgrading to 4.0 was DARK MODE could be enabled. The next best feature was that Netdata seemed to work better, and had fewer bugs. YEAH. Wins all around. :-)
The downside was that the one thing I wanted to work on, still didn’t. I couldn’t get the volume to extend. I finally figured out that maybe the read/write cache was holding back the extended operation. So, I disabled the cache, waited a few min, and then was able to use the Storage Manager to Extend the volume. It took a few min, as it extended the volume size a little bit at a time.
So, now that everything is how I like it, I thought now is the time to focus on getting Wasabi up and going. After a bit of research and guess work, I found an article on how to get Wasabi working with Synology, and it gave me some ideas. So in ADM App Central I searched for AWS, and I found a beta app from ASUSTOR called Cloud Backup Center. This app only works on ADM 4.0, but it allows you to back up folders / paths to several cloud providers that support AWS apis, or other popular formats.
Within “Cloud Backup Center”, I selected “Amazon S3,” and then changed “Server:” to “Optional Server.” I set the server address to “s3.wasabisys.com”. Then I created an access key at Wasabi, and entered the “Access key:” and the “Secret key:” to the ones from Wasabi. PRO TIP: save your access key, and secret keys as you can not get your secret key again from Wasabi, if you lose it, you’ll have to generate a new one, which might not be a big deal, but that’s up to you. I stored my keys in an encrypted note in my password manager.
I scheduled my jobs, and then it looked like everything was going to work, but I got an error on the backup job. I tried a number of things on Wasabi’s side to get it working, and realized they have a somewhat confusing UI, but then realized that what worked on the RN212, was when I had the NAS backup app create the folders within the bucket. I then tried this approach within ADM, and WOOOT, that worked here too. I hope Wasabi fixes this! So, remember to let the access key create the folders, and or bucket or the access keys might not have owner rights to access them.
That’s my tour de force in getting my new 16TB NAS drive setup. I hope this helps someone do this much more quickly, I’m also loving the AS6602T, and ADM is great. I don’t know how it compares to Synology, but ASUSTOR seems to be racing to 1:1 features with Synology and they are doing a great job. I’d highly recommend ASUSTOR ADM going forwards. I hope this NAS lasts me a good while!
