A few months ago I became twitchy about my aging Synology so I replaced it with an old Mac Mini. The idea was that I understand how Macs work and if something breaks I can more easily deal with it.

I never unplugged the Synology, though. You know, just in case.

A week ago I started getting emails from the Synology that Drive 1 was failing. What I should have done is to unplug the thing and move on. But what I did was to order a new 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drive.

Yesterday, I powered down the Synology, pulled out the bad drive (it required no tools) and put the new drive in its place.

I booted it up and was told that the pool was degraded and needed repair. I clicked Repair and 8 hours later everything is running smoothly. I didn't need to restore files from a backup or anything.

Of course this means that I'm second-guessing my move to the Mini. The Synology has always been easy to manage and has just worked. My unease about how to fix it if something breaks is probably unnecessary.

Great, now I have two servers to deal with. This is how I "fix" things and I need to stop it.