NAS Newb - Quick Q's

immortalbjr on 05/04/2017 - 21:38

I ordered a Synology DS416 with 2x 3tb WD red drives to get me started.

I have a 3tb WD elements in a external caddy with its own power adapter. Can I pull it apart to throw into the nas to add more storage and help with the redundacy? I understand i'll have to back it up first before converting it all into a raid thats no problem.

I think I read quickly somewhere you can run virtual machines on these things, however it only has 1gb ram and I've read if I allow half of that for a virtual machine, it will take that half away from the NAS is that correct? I dont really have any plans right now but I would have possibly liked to run some form of linux on it at some stage if its possible or should I just forget it unless I can upgrade the ram? I haven't looked into it alot yet.

Computing

Comments

  • CyberMurning on 05/04/2017 - 21:52

    so DS416 is 4 hds nas, correct?
    yes you can pull that external hdd and put it inside nas, no problem.
    beauty about synology is you can combine different sizes of hdd and dont loose a lot of capacity, compare with other brand nas.

    read this
    https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria…

    and the calculator:
    https://www.synology.com/en-global/support/RAID_calculator

    sorry dont know about VM

  • Timbomcsporran on 06/04/2017 - 07:32

    As previously said, yes you can add the hard drives.

    As for virtual machines - no, not in the sense I think you mean. You can on some models run a virtual DSM (the NAS operating system) to essentially run multiple instances of DSM on the one NAS (if you wanted to host sandboxed DSM's for other users/customers). You can use the NAS to store the actual virtual hard drives to be run on other hypervisors (typical in corporate environments), but the virtual machine can't be run natively on the NAS.

    Edit: I re read your post re running Linux, you can install docker, which can install Linux images. You may want to upgrade the ram to do this, but not sure if this model supports it.

  • immortalbjr on 06/04/2017 - 11:00

    Thanks for the tips guys. Just wanted to make sure my external can be pulled apart and used before I went ripping it apart.

    Looks like my model has soldered ram and cant be upgraded, where as the + model has ram that can be upgraded. Oh well I have a little intel nuc im currently using just for apache so my nas can take over that job and free up this one to play with something else :)

    cheers

  • immortalbjr on 06/04/2017 - 14:52

    Ok turns out I dont have the room free I thought I did to backup the 2tb of my existing drive :) if I put it into the nas will the nas format it to make a new raid, or will it be able to keep the data and still make the raid? planning on using synologys raid, never done anything with raid before.

    Will it at least give me a warning it will erase the data before doing it

    • immortalbjr on 06/04/2017 - 15:37

      Nevermind im a bit stupid. I just remembered I purchased new drives with the nas so ill install those first, copy over, then install the old one. Either way i'll work it out.

  • futaris on 29/04/2017 - 11:17

    If you want real virtual machines, you are better off running something like Lime UnRAID. NAS and VMs with passthrough GPU etc support.

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