I suspect you'll need to write the data to another drive before rebuilding the RAID to new config. Could be wrong (and I'm sure someone will correct who is more knowledgeable!) but I wouldn't want to risk losing the data either, so belt and braces approach is to copy it off before building the RAID.

If you're needing new drives anyway to increase capacity it's not such an issue. Depending on how complex the file structure is you could move bits to other computers to free up space. Whatever you have left you need to be able to copy to a USB HDD or if space is a problem you could create a rar archive of it, but that's going to take a good few hours if it's TBs of data.

If you copy it off and rebuilding the array doesn't lose you data then happy days and delete the backups. If it doesn't at least you're not attempting to recover them from borked drives.....

Yup Del, as Adrian says, you'll need to transfer all the files off first unfortunately.

Depending on the NAS features, you can sometimes do some certain RAID configurations 'online', such as storage capacity 'expansion' (when replacing drives individually), but even then it's safer (and sometimes quicker) to just backup the data and reinstate it afterwards. If the data is important, you should already have it backed up elsewhere.

I run an 1814 (now replaced by 1815) and also a much smaller 214 play

The 214 play is a 2 bay, but the 'play' gives it extra CPU grunt that can help with many apps, media transcoding etc.

Enterprise storage is my bread and butter, Netapp specifically, but I replaced all my Netapp kit with synology as the functionality and power savings were irresistible....

For SOHO / SME , I can't fault it.....

So have had a little play with Microserver testing and now have transferred my stuff over to it, I have some software still to install and still waiting for another 4GB of RAM to arrive. 8GB should be enough for my needs as the Dell had 16GB but was normally using 4.6-4.8GB

One issue I had was with 2.5" HDD that I was using for OS as it was running rather hot 45-50C and causing fan to spin 50-54% speed at idle making it rather loud, still nothing comparing to Dell server, but that was living in the loft due to noise so could not be heard much but I was going to use HP in under stairs cabinet so wanted it to be more quite. Swapped HDD for 500GB SSD that I had bought with intention to fit in one of laptops and this has resolved fan speed /noise issue, now fan is down to 6-10% in idle and pretty much quite.

Also updated from Celeron G1610T 2 core with no hyperthreading CPU to Xeon E3 1265L, 4 cores + hyperthreading.

Currently running 4x2TB Seagate HDD's in RAID 1+0, 1x 500 GB Samsung Evo 850 SSD, Xeon E3 1265L CPU, 1x 4GB original RAM, soon to be joined by another 4GB.

Power consumption with original CPU, idle 48-54W, full load running Crystal disk mark locally on RAID array to load HDD's, another Crystal Disk Mark from another PC over network for SSD and Prime95 running full load on CPU power consumption 70W.

Interestingly with Xeon CPU while it brings full load power consumption higher than Celeron as expected being 45W part instead of 35W Celeron CPU it does jump by more than 10W difference to 93W but it is lower at idle 42-44W. Highest power consumption is 144W during startup for a second or 2 while HDD's spin up.

The costs including VAT and shipping have been:
Server (new, 1 year warranty) - paid £173.88 ( expecting £55 rebate so should be £118.88)
Xeon E3 1265L CPU (used) - £150
Extra 4GB of RAM(used) - £25.99
Samsung Evo 850 500GB SSD (new, 5 year warranty) - £118.70 ( this was a bit unexpected and could have used smaller/cheaper disk but this was what I already had bought and will need to buy another one for laptop now)

HDD's were transferred over from Dell server.

So total comes to £413.57. If I sell Dell for £100 it will take about 1.6-1.7 years to recover remaining costs in power savings. I am expecting it to run at least 3 years so it was worth doing and while the performance is lower than Dell server it is still sufficient for me now with Xeon CPU.

I'd just buy a really small SSD and mirror the drive so you can use the 500GB in your laptop - bit of a waste otherwise. I ran the software on my server for over a year on an 8GB USB stick in the MOBO lol

It needs to be fairly spacious due to software that only installs to C: drive and it cannot be be 2.5 " HDD because they run too hot, make fan to spin too fast and make too much noise. I could probably get away with another 240-250 GB SSD (I was using about 200GB on system drive on Dell) for cost saving but probably not worth reinstalling everything. Another option is to run hypervisor off SD card or USB with the image stored on RAID array but again cannot be ar$ed

PS.
At this point I guess it's gone from asking for advice more towards giving feedback and while I appreciate any suggestions that follow, it's unlikely that I will make any fundamental changes at this point. My question was if it is sensible to use 2x2TB in RAID 0 and then mirror it to single 4TB disk in RAID1, while I did not get certain answer it made me believe I would be better off with 4x2TB in RAID1+0 which I have done now.

HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 is on sale with £55 cashback again if anybody else is interested in them. Mine has served very well so far and I did get my casback without any issues.


http://www.serversplus.com/product.a...sp_serversplus

Glad i stumbled across this some really good info that has helped me with a couple issues i have been having. Also nice set up there

Seeing as I forgot about this thread, I thought I would provide an update.

We are just commencing a datacenter move of the above, but none of the existing kit is being retained. We've just setup the new kit, 3 hosts are replacing the four but we now have dual 8 core CPUs in each with 512GB ram in each box. So now if anything it will have loads of spare capacity. We also have SAN redundancy with the whole lot being mirrored in addition to the normal RAID setup.