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+--- Thread: looking to upgrade my DS412+ (/showthread.php?tid=12472)
looking to upgrade my DS412+ - Enquiries - 11-14-2025
I was moving to an ASUSTOR given the hard drive policy but I've just wantched Robbie talking about how it's been uturned (Huzzah!) so I'm doubling down on Synology because they're great otherwise.
RE: looking to upgrade my DS412+ - ed - 11-14-2025
Hi, and thanks for the message. If you are upgrading from a DS412+ and want good Plex performance plus fast and accurate Synology Photos facial recognition, the best current options in your budget are the DS425+ or DS923+. Both now fully allow third party HDDs, and Synology has confirmed this policy remains in place on all 2025 Plus series units. You can move your existing drives into either model and migrate without wiping data.
Between the two, the DS425+ is the more modern option with a stronger CPU for photo indexing and a newer platform overall. The DS923+ is still very solid but a little older. Both will run Synology Photos much faster than the DS412+. Plex will run well at native playback, and you can add an NVMe cache later to speed up the Photos database.
For your use case, four bays are enough. If you want more expansion headroom, the DS925+ gives you a newer CPU and M.2 storage pool support, but it is more expensive.