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Need advise on hard drive choice for adding drives? - Printable Version

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Need advise on hard drive choice for adding drives? - jake2015 - 08-23-2021

Hi,
I have a Synology 1813+ 8-bay with 6 WD RED 3TB drives in a SHR-2 array. I've had it since 2014. I wanted to increase storage by filling the remaining two bays, and have been looking at 6TB drives to start the migration to a much larger array.

Now I'm wanting to increase storage and was considering adding two 6TB drives in the open bays to start moving toward a larger array. I'm seeing a lot of discussion about the WD Red drives being SMR instead of CMR and also 4K vs. non-4K native drives.

1) My drives are WD30EFRX-68EUZN0. Do you know whether these in 2014 were CMR or are they SMR like the ones available today? (Seems like SMR was new tech in 2015-16)
2) What would be my options for increasing storage? Can I add to my SHR-2 array? Can I add two new drive in a second pool/array in the same NAS?
3) Should I look at buying a newer NAS (Synology or other) that might be better for PLEX video transcoding?

Many thanks for your assistance

Cheers