Setting up my new Synology along with DNS 323

[Adam H]

For about 3-4 years I've been storing my data on a DNS 323. I run Alt-F and have 2x1TB WD Red HDD set up as RAID 1 for total 1TB available storage. 

I use it for exactly two things: 1) My music collection that is accessed by a separate music server and takes up less than 100GB but is slowly growing as I lazily convert my old low quality music to FLAC; 2) Backing up my wife's 2016 MacBook Pro using Alt-F's Time Machine emulator, and which has grown to about 500GB of storage because I can't figure out how to delete the oldest backups, which results in an error in Time Machine saying I don't have enough space and I respond by occasionally allocating more space since I have it available.

I mention this detail just to say that none of this is critical. I'd hate to lose my music, my wife would hate to lose her photos and docs, but our wellbeing is not dependent on these things. RAID 1 feels like enough protection to me.

Needless to say this NAS is slow when it comes to browsing music, the MacBook backup situation is not ideal (though it worked the one time her computer crashed and I had to make use of it!), and the DNS 323 could decide to crap out any day.

So I've just bought a Synology DS218play with 2x2TB WD Red HDD to better our situation. Right away I set it up as RAID 1 for 2TB total storage, copied my music over to it and have left the MacBook backing up to the D-Link, allocating yet more space. I don't really need the D-Link at this point but it's still functioning so I want to make use of it. I didn't delete anything from the old NAS yet. I would like to set up folder syncing on the Synology for my wife's computer and our phones but haven't gotten there yet. 

Last night I started thinking that maybe I could have gone about this better. What if I swapped the discs between the two machines, set up the Synology as RAID 0 with the two 1TB discs for faster speeds and the same amount of storage, used the Synology solution for the MacBook backups which I think would be easier to manage both functionally and size-wise, and with the 2x2TB discs running at RAID 1 on the D-Link use that machine to back up the Synology? This would double my storage space on the D-Link to 2TB while keeping it the same on the Synology and I would have redundancy on the D-Link. 

Which brings me to my questions.

1) Is this a terrible idea and why?

2) How would I do it? Just swap the HDDs? Would I need to reformat any of them along the way and how do I keep my music in the process? I'm not concerned about the MacBook backups because all that data is on the MacBook and I can do a fresh backup once the new setup is in place. The process in my head is to do the swap, reformat the 1TB HDDs in the Synology to get rid of the MacBook backups taking up too much space, copy my music over to the Synology from the D-Link, then reformat the drives in the D-Link and set that up to backup the Synology. Any reason that won't work? Any better way to go about it?

[Adam H]

Update: I posted this elsewhere and a person suggested running RAID 0 on the DNS323 with the 2x1TB disks instead, using that strictly to backup my Synology, and I'm liking that idea better than my initial one.

[João Cardoso]

On Saturday, 4 July 2020 16:23:47 UTC+1, Adam H wrote:

Update: I posted this elsewhere and a person suggested running RAID 0 on the DNS323 with the 2x1TB disks instead, using that strictly to backup my Synology, and I'm liking that idea better than my initial one.

I agree. Apart from functionality, your two most likely points of failure are the old dns-323 and the two old 1TB disks; distributing them in your setup distributes the chance of failure for the whole system, while joining them all will only compromise one system component.

Enjoy your new NAS and disks and make the 323 feel useful :-)

[Adam H]

Thank you as always, Joao!