There was really nothing wrong with my old NAS. It was largely underlutilized, other than I had hit the limit on how many cameras it could record in Surveillance Station because Synology is smart enough not to oversubscribe the hardware’s capabilities and limit the DS120j to 5 cameras. That was really the main thing I wanted to upgrade for and even that wasn’t a big rush.
Still, I had planned to upgrade once I paid off my Amazon credit card and since I had done that…
I did some comparison shopping and finally decided that I would get the most bang for my buck with the DS220+. I wanted the ability to add a 2nd drive and the Intel Celeron in the DS220+ with only 2 cores running at 2.0 to 2.9 GHz could still outperform the DS218/DS218play and had an expansion memory slot. That feature alone would turn out to be handy for me.
Well, it would be once I got the right memory module. I ordered the right stuff, DDR4. The labelling on the packaging was correct. The module in the package was a DDR3 SODIMM, different pinout. I processed the return to Amazon thinking I just ordered the wrong thing, before I looked at the packaging carefully. No matter, it’s sorted out now and the DS220+ is no maxed out at 6GB.
It was not clear ahead of time whether I could swap the physical drive from my DS120j into the DS220+ and have it work correctly. I seem to recall that once I had the hardware in hand, it became obvious that it could be done, but that the performance would suffer because of the differences in the newer and older file systems. I chose what was probably the best way, though it would turn out to be very slow. I set up the new unit fresh, then did a backup of the old unit’s files, using a share on the new unit as the destination. Then I could restore the old unit’s files from that now local source.
It took a surprisingly and irritatingly long time for that backup to complete. Then the local restoral wasn’t a whole lot faster. The whole process was most of 48 hours. On the other hand, it was also completely trouble free.
When everything was restored and settled down, I was able to move my camera license pack from the old NAS to the new NAS and although I didn’t have one immediately available, it did not complain about it when I attempted to add one more camera. Mission accomplished!
I have currently set up the old NAS as a backup target for the new NAS and set up a schedule. It just runs. I am not backing up the surveillance footage simply because that is just huge and pretty perishable anyway.
Soon, however, I would find an even better reason why I am glad I went for the more powerful CPU and full boat of RAM.