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A Little Weekend Upgrade Project

I’ve been meaning to give my Synology NAS some love. It’s time for a capacity boost and a quick tune-up.

WHAT NAS ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

I’m running a Synology DS920+, which has been reliable and easy to use.

Specs:

  • Two 8 TB drives
  • LAN only
  • Auto-updates
  • A healthy layer of dust that definitely needs attention

So, this isn’t just a capacity upgrade, it’s also a cleaning and maintenance day.

THE PLAN

  1. Update the OS
  2. Shut it down
  3. Give it a good cleaning
  4. Pop in new drives
  5. Bring it back up and expand the pool

The new drives? Two 12 TB Seagate IronWolf disks, a big addition and 12 TB seems to be the current sweet spot for bytes per dollar.

PROGRESS NOTES

STEP 1: UPDATE IT
I fired up the Synology OS tool and, sure enough, there was an update waiting.

  • Started: 12:26 PM
  • It warned that it might restart and take 10–20 minutes
  • Finished: 12:44 PM

Everything looks good after the update.

STEP 2: SHUT IT DOWN
At 12:46 PM, I powered down the DS920+ and unplugged everything:

  • Ethernet 1
  • Ethernet 2
  • USB
  • Power

STEP 3: BLOW IT OUT
Grabbed some compressed air and gave it a good cleaning. Much better.

STEP 4: POP IN THE NEW DRIVES


Installing the new drives took a bit of finesse, those side rails are always a little fiddly, but it’s done. Powered it back on at 1:25 PM and plugged everything back in.

STEP 5: ENABLE NEW DRIVES IN SYNOLOGY OS
The system immediately detected the new 12 TB drives.
They were ready to format, though I wasn’t sure yet how I wanted to configure them.

After a little reading, I decided to just add the new drives to the existing Storage Pool using Storage Manager. The setup was surprisingly simple.

Now all four drives are part of Storage Pool 1, totaling 26 TB in a Synology SHR Type 1 RAID array, basically giving me a nice balance of redundancy and space.

It’s still initializing the new drives as I write this, and it’s taking its sweet time. I think that’s my cue to call it a day.

Mission accomplished: the NAS is updated, cleaned, expanded, and humming along. Now it just needs to cook for a while.

REFERENCES

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