Moving RAID 1 drives from NAS to Desktop

[joedoh85]

I have been using two 2TB drives in a RAID 1 array with my Synology DS211j for a little over a year. The performance has been so poor with the NAS (2mb/s max write speed) and no matter what I try I cannot improve speeds. I'm now looking to simply move the drives into my new desktop (OS is on a separate SSD) and setup the same RAID 1 configuration as my NAS.

Based on reading the forums here, it looks like there's no way for me to setup a RAID array without first wiping out the disks. Any thoughts or suggestions for what I can do? My SSD (and other portable drives) are not big enough to backup data before I wipe my RAID drives.

My desktop has an MSI A75MA-G55 motherboard.

 

[Nothing_But_NAS]

Synology uses Linux on their NASes. If you already running Linux, you should be able to pop the drive in and access the data. You can test this removing one drive and connecting it to your computer. Since the disk are mirrored, your data will remain intact.

If your OS cannot read ext[34] filesystems, you should still be able to transfer the disk without data lost. Using the same method above, remove one of the disks from the Synology box and install it in your computer. Prepare the disk on your computer (ie, partition, enable RAID, format, etc). If you are going to use RAID1 on your computer, your system needs to be able to create RAID1 in degraded mode. Fire up the Synology and copy the data from the single disk to your computer. Once copy complete, installed the other disk from the Synology into your computer. If you setup RAID1, add the remaining disk to the RAID volume to start the mirroring.