Looking at QNAP and Synology question about unit failure.

[velocityg4]

I was looking at Synology and QNAP NAS and was wondering if anyone has experience with these units failing. I'm not concerned so much about the reliability of these. Rather what happens if you have a mainboard failure?

Can you just take out your drives and pop them into a replacement unit keeping your RAID and data intact? Would you lose everything and have to make new backups if it was being used as a network backup or restore from backups if being used as a file server?

What happens if the model stops being made? Can you place the drives into a newer model?

 

[baconbacon]

I own a QNAP NAS so I can talk a bit about QNAP but not Synology.

QNAP has a feature called system migration (http://docs.qnap.com/nas/en/index.html?system_migration.htm) which allows you to remove all of your hard drives from your NAS and migrate the HDD to a new NAS. Your NAS can be a different model as long as it has the same number of bays. All of your data will be safe and intact so backup will not be necessary, so basically you can just pop them into another NAS and it would be as if nothing has changed!

 

[velocityg4]

It's amazing that with 568 views only one person had an answer. I received a response from Synology tech support.

They have to send you the same model with the same firmware revision. Then you can place your drives in it in the same order and continue working as usual.