How To: Migrate To a New Synology NAS using Synology Migration Assistant

Here we take a smaller 2-bay Synology NAS, the DS712+, and migrate the data to a larger 4-bay Synology NAS, DS918+. This is less about capacity, as the need for capacity and the general use of the NAS were met by the 2-bay, and more about modernizing the technology. Aside from more bays, the DS918+ has a newer Intel Celeron J3455 CPU and up to 4GB of DDR3L RAM, versus the DS712+ that has an Intel Atom D425 CPU and only 1GB of DDR3 RAM. Another big benefit is that the DS918+ is two M.2 NVMe bays for caching, giving an extra performance boost.

Here we take a smaller 2-bay Synology NAS, the DS712+, and migrate the data to a larger 4-bay Synology NAS, DS918+. This is less about capacity, as the need for capacity and the general use of the NAS were met by the 2-bay, and more about modernizing the technology. Aside from more bays, the DS918+ has a newer Intel Celeron J3455 CPU and up to 4GB of DDR3L RAM, versus the DS712+ that has an Intel Atom D425 CPU and only 1GB of DDR3 RAM. Another big benefit is that the DS918+ is two M.2 NVMe bays for caching, giving an extra performance boost.

Aside from switching out to a more modern NAS, we are also putting in the right drive for the job, as we choose WD Reds, built for NAS versus the old WD Green that weren’t meant for 24/7 use and have logged 71,573 power on hours. We will quickly step through the physical process of swapping the drives and adding the M.2 NVMe SSDs (in this case we are using the Kioxia [formally Toshiba] XG5) for caching in the new NAS.

After the hardware is straightened out we will move on to DSM to finish setting up the new NAS. For the migration process we will be using Synology’s Migration Assistant tool.

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