Rich's Tongfamily

Argh, what a pain, I had thought I could just swap disks to different Synology machines, but it turns out my software on my flavors of Synology NAS (RP2423+, DS2413+ and DS1811) are all different enough that none of the SHR drives are compatible. And I get the dreaded. These each run different versions of the DiskStation Manager, DSM 7.1.1 and DSM 6.2.4 respectively

Disk Not supported by this version of DSM

This is probably a pretty good reason to choose RAID6 instead because those drives are supposed to be readable everywhere with the proviso that you have to have drives are all no smaller than the original array. You can’t grow array sizes dynamically.

On the other hand, you are less likely to get stuck when you upgrade or move drives around, so this is a hard choice. I typically avoid the heterogenous drive problem, so I think for me vanilla RAID 5/6 might be better and I can test compatibility.

To Get these disks running but you lose all the contents!

OK, you will need SSH access to your Synology, but the quick is to look for a particular file in the file system parameters sys_not_support and delete it

sudo rm /run/synostorage/disks/*/sys_not_support

Change to a “standard format”?

In the end, I’ve never really used SHR2 and assumed that this wouldn’t be a problem as disk formats don’t change and SHR2 is just another way to manage Linux logical volumes, and they make it easy to go to Storage Manager > Storage Pool you Want > Action > Change Raid Type for DSM 6.2.4. For DSM 7.1.1, the action button is not `

Note that unfortunately with SHR on DSM 6.2.4, you can’t so your only option is to reformat and start over which I can find. (Good thing I had not put anything on that disk array yet!). Also, RAID5/6 disk formats are not standardized either so the controllers have to be the same. For whatever, I just assumed these were standard on-disk formats, YMMV, I’ve been able to move Storage Pools between DSM 7.2 and DSM 7.1 when I was using RAID10 but have not tried RAID5, so time to try it. RAID10 should be easier since it is a simple stripe and mirror while RAID5 has a parity drive.

Note that if you choose to rebuild from SHR to RAID5, then you end up with Consistency check hell which can last for days. This is the mdstat command running in the background. This is basically Multi-disk status and seems to be about doing consistency checking. That is creating the parity drive. I normally wait for all this to settle down before adding data, because otherwise it is going to keep computing and recomputing the parity. Note that on our 13 year old Synology DS1811+, this can take two weeks!