Hi there,

I'm an amateur (formerly pro) photographer, and research historian. My day-job is working in healthcare, and these are "very serious hobbies" for me -- My work as a historian helps support and recognize the work of a large international medical charity.

I've got several hundred GB of archived photos, another few hundred gigs of scanned books and archival material, and a few hundred more gigs of various... stuff... including backups of my wife's computer, old academic work, historical research... It's a long list... Much of it represents a decade-long photography career, and years of research-time. Nearly all of it is largely irreplaceable.

In total I have about 1 - 2 TB of data that is very, very important to me, though some projects I'm working on now could see that grow to 3 - 4 TB in the next year or two...

Right now, I have a small stack of ... 6-ish mis-matched hard-drives on the desk beside me that I manually copy things to to maintain backups, with a running Google Drive sync for about 100GB of offsite backup of the really important stuff... Everything is redundant across multiple drives, and it's just mayhem. It's clearly time to get a NAS...

Access speed is of moderate concern to me. I'm NOT going to be streaming anything (We just watch Netflix on our laptop in bed, and don't even own a TV!), but I will be opening, viewing, editing and saving, large files and large groups of photographs representing a few GB at a time. Ditto for large-ish (900MB+) PDFs. I also sometimes do video editing of educational video content, though I'd probably move what I'm working on onto a local SSD, and then archive to the NAS when I'm done.

Being able to access everything remotely while I'm on the road is a huge benefit to me, and while I can't do it right now, I suspect that once I can, it will become an essential feature to me.

Almost nothing I do is time, or up-time, sensitive, at least not compared to most IT infrastructure use-cases. I can usually tolerate a few days of downtime with a shrug and a "Well, guess I'll go work on some projects around the house." ... That doesn't mean I WANT downtime, but I'm not Google or AWS, and my head won't implode if I have to slow down to handle a drive failure or something. Again, long-term data-security is most important to me.

I live in a rural area with occasional (4-6 times per year) power outages, especially with winter storms. I can tolerate "Oh, my computer shut off, I lost a few hours of work" or "I came home to find my computer had rebooted itself" power outages, but I can NOT tolerate anything that will compromise my archived data.

Please remember that I'm a historian and nerd, not an IT specialist. I want to make these decisions now and then probably not think too much about my storage ever again, unless I have to restore/rebuild something, or upgrade in 5 - 10 years.

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I think I've settled on a Synology DS420+, mostly for the price-point and the four-bay capacity. I plan to run SHR (Or maybe even SHR-2?) for ease-of-use and data redundancy...
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SO... That's my use-case... And the NAS I think I'm looking at...

Now, my questions, sort of in reverse order:

1) Is SHR or SHR-2 the best option for me? I feel like these are more idiot-friendly than RAID 5/6? And more flexible if I want to upgrade individual drives in the future. Am I correct here? or am I missing something?

2) How will a Synology 420+ "at rest" (i.e. when I'm not around) running SHR/SHR-2 handle an unexpected power failure? How about mid-file-transfer? Or during other functions? I presume I'll be adding a UPS system to drive the NAS, but would like to know the answer to these questions...

3) How about if I have a power-failure mid-file-transfer?

4) What drives to populate the NAS with? I see so many options, and while I'm somewhat tech-savvy, there are so many possibilities to wade through. What actual physical drives offer a good blend of performance and reliability for this sort of use-case? From what I've read (mostly various analysis of the Backblaze stats from 2021), I feel like I should avoid Seagate drives, but beyond that, I'm again overwhelmed by the dizzying number of options.

5) What about file systems? BTRFS sounds like the coolest thing since sliced cheese. Is it really that good? Should I care?

6) How does this all work if/when things do actually go bad? I understand that SHR (or probably SHR-2) will provide data security in the event of a drive failure, but I'm not clear on how much of a pain-in-the-@ it is to recover from such a thing... (Will the software *warn* me when a drive fails? I presume so, but ... How often does it check? Might a failure go unnoticed for a long time, and have a second drive fail in the interim? )

If I have a drive failure and I'm running SHR, can I just pull the bad drive out, shove a new one in, and wait for it to rebuild/repair? Do I even have to push buttons? Go through a data-retrieval service? Or ?

7) I think an array of 4x 6GB (or maybe 4x 8GB, to give me room for growth) drives with SHR-2 makes sense to me... Does that sound right? Am I missing anything?

I have an approximate "comfortable" budget of $1000 Canadian Dollars, but that number is flexible. I have a decent-paying day job, and can easily work some overtime to save up a bit and get the right solution. $1500 is probably a sane upper-level cap.

Thanks so much for any and all input!

I have the DS1821+ under control for file sharing and wanted to start leveraging Plex media server etc.

I'm watching this (albeit a little dated):

"Synology 2020 NAS PLEX - First Time Setup Guide with the DS420+" (sorry unable to post URL).

I've gone to the Plex site to download the latest version and I see this (again unable to post a URL to the image):

   

I've assumed that "x18 series" is not for me and got the 64 Bit option, since "AMD Ryzen V1500B" isn't "Intel" nor "ARM"?

Hi Robbie,

Which SSD would you buy right now?

firecuda 530

WD850x

Samsung 980 Pro

Thanks

Doug

I’m am/was Drobo user 5N2 and had to purchase new technology as Drobo is not supporting 5N2 in new Apple OS environment.

I watched your videos and decided on the Synology DS1522+. I’m a retired IT professional Retired for 6 years and I’m looking for simple solution/maintenance.

I was planning on buying Seagate Ironwolf Pro 6TB but am leaning for Synology 4TB after hearing about compatibility of non-synology drives……. In my previous life as a Chief Information Officer (n0n-technical) integrated vs. not integrated makes for a happy life. I did call Synology and Seagate about the comparability of the 6TB pro drive but I didn’t get a worm and fuzzy response as the drive is not on their list.

So the question is in todays world is the firmware on the drive something to be concerned about around Synology NAS? I would guess if you buy 5 6TB Pro’s the luck of acquiring drives with the same firmware would be lucky and I wouldn’t have any idea how to update it vs the Synology drives are fully integrated and Synology handles the firmware upgrades internal to the DS1522+.

It sounds like I answered my own question e.g. go Synology drives but I thought I would ask Synology experts the question.

Last but not least I am planning to use SHR vs RAID 5.

Thank you in advance

Wayne

Hi Nascompares,

Thanks to your youtube videos I've finally decided to buy my very first NAS Server. I went with the QNAP TS-464 4G.

I was only looking for a 2-bay NAS but having watched the video on the 464 made me buy this instead.

But now I spent way over my budget on just the NAS (but no regrets)

Due to this, I have decided to delay buying HDDs and was thinking of buying:

2 x WD Red SN700 NAS NVMe SSD - 250GB each
2 x RAM sticks 8GB each
.. first

I am coming from a NAS setup (if you could call it that) of:

1 x NVIDIA Shield TV pro with two External Portable HD (5GB each) attached

My setup before is just to access my files via LAN and access my multimedia and personal files via smb (samba) to interact and backup files on it.

This will also be my initial use case for my 464 except I can have a Plex Server now, Access my files via Internet and sync my photos (once I have the money to buy HDDs) and use QuMagie

Given my choice of buying ssds first, I am planning to do the following (if possible)

1. Install QTS on SSDs
2. and also use it as cache acceleration moving forward
3. use SSD as the metadata storage for Plex
4. Attach the 2 x External HD (5TB each) on USB ports and serve as my main file containers. I can have PLEX use these drives as my main multimedia folder

I wont be performing any heavy I/O operations on my NAS in the near future (by the way)

Could you let me know your thoughts on this?

I understand that I'm way under-utilising my NAS at the moment, but that's the situation I am in.

Thanks

Ben

HI, I would like to upgrade the 8gb of ram in my DS1522+ I have followed some link on you website. They seem to be out of date. Do you have a link to compatible. Cheers Jamie

Hello, I'd like to know if you've seen the latest ps5 heatsinks on the market, such as the Graugear PS5 M.2 Heatsink w/ mesh metal heat dissipation dust filter cover and copper heat pipe or the comparatively designed Ineo Heatsink with copper heat pipe and mesh dust cover both sold on Amazon for under $25 US? I'd like to know if either would be an upgrade to the Elecgear you've reviewed on your YouTube channel? I've based my ssd and Elecgear purchase off of your YouTube channel before and would appreciate your opinion on these devices, if you'd be so kind to grace me with your knowledge. Thank you very much for all that you do.

See attached graphic of my idea for utilising old HDD NAS with new super fast SSD NAS!
Will this work?

Also can disk size vary within multi-raid volumes on a NAS pool. So in my example all raids are 4TB SSD. What if I wanted 2 x 8TB SSD in the Raid 1 volume?

Thanks
  Skiboz Network idea.pdf (Size: 59.58 KB / Downloads: 12)

Can anyone suggest me the most budget synology model with 1080p 10bit x265 encode decode supported model?

I have a grand workflow / backup plan to use my old very slow DS1511+ 5 bay, purely for daily overnight Hyper Backup of two other NAS' and Time Machine, avoiding high online Cloud backup charges and other benefits.

I will buy a new 8 bay NAS, RS1221RP+ (or hopefully an upgraded RS1223RP+) if I wait for Synology to follow their normal timeline.  I also have a DS716+II 2 bay which will be used primarily for some light Surveillance Station and media storage (I will run a PLEX Server on my intel MacMini)

I will need 30TB maximum for the two full backups some way down the line. The Data Sheet for the DS1511+ from 2011 mentions maximum 5 x 3TB HDD. The Synology Compatibility Chart lists, amongst others; Seagate 6TB Iron Wolf Pro ST6000NE0023 - 2EX110 3.5 Inch HDD SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 256MB. Also Seagate 10TB Barracuda Pro – 3.5 Inch HDD SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 256MB.

If anyone has experience, I would be grateful for feedback. can I use 5 x 10TB (Raid 6) Iron Wolf Pro ST10000NE0004 HDD in this old 5 bay? Would I have issues from new HDD firmware or having to use DSM 6.2.4 on the DS1511+ with DSM 7.1.1 on the other two NAS'?

Thanks