Migrating from DS416j t0 DS923+

[Enquiries]

Hello,

After a few months of receiving your advice, I went ahead and purchased the Synology DS923+ (Advice below in italics).

I told my son that I should be able to take the drives out of my Synology 416j and place in the same order in the new DS923+. It should boot up without needing to do any changes. My son said not it will not work like that. Is it possible to place the drives in the same order in the DS923+ and it will come up?

One last question, my understanding is that I can replace a 4 TB drive in the unit with a 6 or 8 TB drive and I can slowly increase the size of my storage. My plan is to get a DX517 expansion for the DS923+ later.


"If your main usage is plex, a NAS with Intel CPU would be preferable. The AMD chips in Synology, does not include iGPU for hardware acceleration. So if you need to transcode, it's going to be slower, use more power, and get warmer. But it will work.
Synology does not currently offer a 4bay with Intel combined with more than 1gbps etherne

[ed]

Your son is correct. You cannot move the drives directly from your DS416j to the DS923+ and expect it to start normally. The DS416j uses an ARM processor while the DS923+ runs on an AMD x86 CPU, and Synology systems only allow direct migration between models with the same processor type. If you insert the drives, the new NAS will not recognize the existing volumes.

The best method is to set up the DS923+ as a new NAS, install DSM, and then copy your data from the DS416j over the network. You can use File Station on the DS923+ to connect to the old NAS via SMB and copy the folders directly, or use Hyper Backup to transfer everything with permissions intact.

As for expanding capacity, yes, you can replace your 4 TB drives with larger 6 or 8 TB ones over time, provided you are using Synology Hybrid RAID or RAID 5 or 6. The system will rebuild after each replacement and automatically expand when all drives are upgraded.

Adding the DX517 later is a good idea. It connects directly to the DS923+ and can be used to expand your storage pool or as a separate backup destination.