Securely replacing 8 drives on 2 Pro Nas ?

volpone wrote:
OK , so i only have to plug the 4 unformated WD red on the pioneer, boot and factory reset ?

Power down, remove the existing drives (labeling them so you preserve the slot number). Then install all 4 new drives and power it up. It should automatically do the reset, as the drives are blank - this looks like an out-of-the-box install to the NAS.

volpone wrote:
My only concern is i would prefer to use the new WD red disks on my Pro 6 for performance and cooling reasons because Pro 6 is always running (Pioneer wil run only time to time for backups) ... Is it possible to follow your process and then to swap the 4 disks (on same slot location): WD on the Pro and Hitachi's on the Pioneer ?

I think this should work since the Pioneer and the Pro are both x86 platforms. Though I have no experience with the Pioneer - maybe someone who does will chime in... That would be an ideal approach if it works.

One way to test it - try putting the WD's into the pro (powered off), right after you have done the factory reset with the WD drives on the Pioneer. If if boots properly, then the disks can be migrated. If not, you haven't lost much, all you need to do it put the WD's back into the pioneer (and possibly do another factory reset there). Be careful not to migrate drives with the unit powered up, as it will assume it should reformat, etc.

volpone wrote:
...Is using frontview backup OK to get a perfect mirroring from the Pro6 to the pioneer including database, addons-config ..?

Frontview backup can update the volumes on the pioneer, but not the configuration, add-ons, or anything else that is on the OS partition. So you need to do handle those things manually. You can save the configuration on the Pro and restore it on the Pioneer - the main gotcha is that you need to manually install the addons on the Pioneer before you restore the config.

You can backup the entire C volume, though personally I use different backup jobs for each share. (I need to back up to 2 smaller NAS; neither backup device can hold the full volume) The fastest way is to use NFS for the initial backup, and then edit the backup job to use rsync. rsync is faster for updating, but is compute intensive, so it is not fastest for the initial backup.