Is it possible to add drives to a JBOD NAS without formatting?

[AndreasNGA]

Quiestion in title. I'm looking at getting my first NAS. I have two nearly full 8TB drives in my case. Since it's getting crowded I'm thinking og getting a 4-bay NAS for expansion and easy network access. I have the ability to backup everything in the cloud, so redundancy isn't crucial.

 

So can I buy a NAS (specifically looking at the Synology DS418j), insert my two drives, set it up as JBOD and be good to go? I guess the other option is to buy an extra drive right away, create the JBOD with just that one, copy over files from one of my existing drives, then add/format that, then do the same with my second drive. This just seems very tedious.

 

I'm completly new to NAS and have been trying to serarch for this, so forgive me if this is already answered lot's of times

[Mihle]

I am not sure, but my guess would be that it depends on the file system and if Synology supports that file system.

[AndreasNGA]

The drives are formatted in NTFS.

[Electronics Wizardy]

If you put those drive in a jbod array it will wipe then.

 

You really want anouther place to store the files in the mean time, your gonna want backups anyways and you can use those old 8tb drives for backups.

[AndreasNGA]

Thanks for the response. I will have all crucial files stores in the cloud, but I don't have 8TB free anywhere to store files in the meantime. Could I put just a single, empty drive in the array first, copy the files from one of my existing HDDs to that and then expand the array with that drive without losing the files copied over to the new drive/array?

 

Another question, is there any downside for me going with JBOD if I can backup everything (at least verything important) to the cloud? 

[AbsoluteFool]

19 hours ago, AndreasNGA said:

Thanks for the response. I will have all crucial files stores in the cloud, but I don't have 8TB free anywhere to store files in the meantime. Could I put just a single, empty drive in the array first, copy the files from one of my existing HDDs to that and then expand the array with that drive without losing the files copied over to the new drive/array?

 

Another question, is there any downside for me going with JBOD if I can backup everything (at least verything important) to the cloud? 

You kind of already answered your question yourself.. JBOD is normally used by systems to get speed not really for storage.. People who use JBOD normally have the data other places and don't care if the data in the JBOD is lost. That's the downside of JBOD for you.

[Net Runner]

What kind of data do you have on those two 8TB drives? You can theoretically try to deduplicate or compress the data on both of the drives and if you are lucky those deduplicated/compressed data may fit into one single drive. Try analyzing your existing data with this small free tool https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-deduplication-analyzer and see if is doable. This way you can pack the second drive into Synology, add another two drives of the same size and create a RAID-protected array within the NAS to move the data into it. After data is inside the NAS you can add the fourth drive that was holding your data and expand your RAID array from 3 drives to 4 drives. This can be done without data loss.