Expanding into a NAS setup for first time - eep!

[Cpt Shredder]

I currently have 3x 18TB HDD in a RAID 0 config within my tower PC.

 

For the last couple of years, it's worked well to just store lots of information without external hard drives etc. However, I am now expanding this to get a NAS system, specifically the QNAP TS-873A. 

 

I am keeping the existing 3x drives and want to move them into the NAS along with 5x more of same size HDD and create a RAID 6 (6 drives storage and 2 redundant). I will also be putting 1x NVME 1TB SSD as cache into the system as well.

 

So that I don't loose any of the information (much of which is critical to my work), are there any steps I need to consider doing? Will I need to re-format anything? Can I just pull them from the tower (SATA connections) and plug them directly into the NAS with the new 5 and just change the RAID?

 

I'm probably just being a bit paranoid, but I just want to be certain that nothing will be lost in the transition.

 

Thank you in advance.

 

NAS - QNAP TS-873A

HDDs - Western Digital Ultrastar 18TB (3x existing, 5x new)

SSD - Kingston ck3000 - 1TB

[Electronics Wizardy]

How is the raid setup on your desktop currently? You probably can't keep the same raid setup and move it to a nas, and you would need to wipe all the drive and make a new array on the nas.

 

Do you have a backup copy of the data? Id make one now if you don't already.

 

You should be able to add more drives to the raid 6 array. So you could seutp the raid 6 with 5 drives, copy the data, then add the 3 more drives.

[Cpt Shredder]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How is the raid setup on your desktop currently? You probably can't keep the same raid setup and move it to a nas, and you would need to wipe all the drive and make a new array on the nas.

 

Do you have a backup copy of the data? Id make one now if you don't already.

 

You should be able to add more drives to the raid 6 array. So you could seutp the raid 6 with 5 drives, copy the data, then add the 3 more drives.

Don't have a backup of the data at the moment (i know...), that's a partial solution i'm looking to achieve by expanding to the NAS setup.

 

Regarding your potential solution (thank you by the way, hadn't thought of doing that), if I was to setup the 5x new drives in the following process, would it work?

 

Put 3x drives into NAS in RAID 1, copy data across, reformat HDDs in PC to clear data, remove HDDs from PC and insert all 8 drives into NAS, convert to RAID 6

 

....yes?? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Cpt Shredder said:

 

Put 3x drives into NAS in RAID 1, copy data across, reformat HDDs in PC to clear data, remove HDDs from PC and insert all 8 drives into NAS, convert to RAID 6

3 drives in a raid 1 doesn't make sense. 
 

Id put the 5 drives in the nas as a raid 6, and then add the 3 drives from the PC later on to expand it for the 8 total drives.