Question: Trying to brush up on my general understanding of hard drives and partitions…
I have an old SATA hard drive with a load of stuff on it. As far as I’m aware it wasn’t the OS’s boot drive before I yanked it out of its bay and sold the computer. The fact that it wasn’t used to boot the OS means it can be accessed via another OS on another machine (need clarification on this?).
I’ve recently bought a Synology NAS. Is it possible for me to spin the said old hard drive within the NAS, and grab some old files off of it (before I plonk my WD Red’s in there more permanently?).
I’ve not attempted it yet, but I don’t want to spend hours tiptoeing around an unfamiliar system if it simply can’t be done.
One worry is that the NAS will ask me to format the drive before installing…
Further Clarification
After a bit of soul searching I can sum up the question better:
Is it possible to put an old hard drive into a Synology NAS without formatting it? Or does the Synology OS (I imagine: some flavour of Linux) require a formatting procedure in order to mount the drive to the network?
The fact that most OS’s are able to at least read from multiple filesystems (Fat32/NTFS/HFS+), surely means it would be possible to just mount a disk to the network through the Synology NAS? I only need to temporarily grab some stuff from the disk, not make use of the rich feature set offered by the NAS.
Answer: The easiest way to read the disk is to attach it to your regular machine (Desktop, Laptop, does not matter). There are too many things to consider when trying to access the disk from within the NAS and to be sure that it does not modify the data in any way.
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The fact that it wasn’t used to boot the OS means it can be accessed via another OS on another machine (need clarification on this?)
The fact, that a machine uses a disk to read it’s boot data from it does not matter at all. All you need to access the data on the disk is .. the disk. (This is true for any storage medium)
The data is put onto the disk in a structured manner. This is usually called “the filesystem”. If you know the filesystem you can extract the data, allthough slowly. If OS xyz knows how to read from the filesystem it can extract the data. If your Synology NAS knows the filesystem of the disk in question AND is able to mount it .. then your NAS will read the data.