My TS651 retired itself with a motherboard fault and thanks to QNAP support and some nervous experimenting, its 6 drives are now installed in a new 664 8Gb NAS with the data intact and accessible via file explorer.on my Windows PC. I don’t know much about the 664 beyond it being migration compatible but some the the 651 settings seem to have survived the move, including some passwords, user profiles and at least 10 of the mapped drives still connect. The Plex server App didn’t make it and when I tried to re-install it, it ended up in the wrong folder and Storage Pool so I think I need to take a look at the best way to organise things… the 651 had two drives mirrored (Shared Folder- documents and Shared Folder- photographs) and the other three were: 2 for media (Audio, video Plex libraries and books) with a Standalone drive for NAS apps and System requirements. I can’t recall the raid setup for the Media but it’s of low priority. My backups were folder copies onto external Hard drives using windows SyncToy. They are kept elsewhere, but recent testing shows that at least one has failed so I’ll rethink that. Next question: NAS status shows two empty drive bays -so I assume these may be for the ssd m2 modules I’ve read about. I think the most demanding tasks the NAS faces are saving and delivering video files (without transcoding) and managing (saving, sorting, renaming serving and exporting photographs (some are fairly big and the archive is heading for 4Tb).
I’ve never had M.2 SSDs before and not quite sure how they are utilised in this device - Cache memory? and what benefits I’ll see if I install a pair.Your thoughts on size, type and Pros would be much appreciated.
Typically what the recommendation for the M.2 SSD drives be used for is the first storage group. The first storage group is what ends up being the “system” drive. Now, don’t confuse that with operating system. The OS on QNAPs is spread across all drives. The “system” drive or storage group is where applications are stored by default and some settings, etc. Some applications can be stored any place on the NAS, others are only able to be stored in the system storage group.
If you were to get SSD drives and set them up this way, you would literally have to rebuild your NAS from scratch. It is not a fun process so if you don’t need them then it may be better off not using them. And don’t get them for caching. It doesn’t work well and slows things down actually.
I don’t know why you said Plex got installed in the wrong folder/storage pool. At install time, you put it wherever you want. Don’t use the Plex App in Application Center. It’s really old. Download the latest from the Plex website and store it wherever you want.
If QNAP helped you migrate everything, I’m pretty sure your RAID configuration is as it was before.
For backups, I would encourage you to have multiple locations. External drives are great but I would also consider backing up some critical items to at least one or more cloud storage sites. I use both the myQNAPCloud storage and also iDrive. iDrive’s storage is pretty cheap. I have something like 20TB of service with them, but if you go that route use the iDrive app in App Center and do not use iDrive’s NAS service. It’s much more expensive.
We recommend you refer to this FAQ to reinstall Plex. If you still run into issues afterward, please share the details with us, and we’ll be happy to assist.
How do I update Plex Media Server to the latest version if it is not available in App Center? | QNAP