Should I get the 920+

[Enquiries]

I come from 2 bay DS213 and one of the slot has since become unresponsive. I was doing Raid 1 on the NAS previously and now with just 1 Slot working, I cannot achieve redundancy of my data.
initially I thought it was the HDD that broke down so I ordered 2 new HDD without checking the warning, only to find out the slot was the issue. I end up now with 4 HDD.
with that I thought I might as well upgrade to 4 slot NAS to make use of all the HDD. my use case now would be mostly an iCloud replacement to back up my photos of all my family iPhones. also as a media server for videos and music. my current DS213 is really slow with photo station. takes forever to load an album or to load a video. making it really unpleasant to use. I hope the new NAS would give better loading speed. I am also planning to run home assistance with the Synology NAS as a HomeKit hub. I am looking at long term and future proofing because I believe this NAS do last long time and getting the best now will definitely keep it relevant for longer. will this 920+ fulfil my use case and should I wait for next upgrade. at the moment I am really not in a rush to get a replacement NAS too.

[TribalHound]

Part of your performance issue will be related to the fact the NAS is running with a Raid in a damaged state, so it's probably slowed itself down. If not by choice to preserve your one good drive (at least it thinks there's only one good drive) but because it's struggling to cope.

First things first - if you're not ready to choose your next NAS just yet (it's not in the basket waiting for you to checkout) - get a USB HDD enclosure and use one of those shinny new HDDS as an external disc to backup your data - BEFORE the other one fails, or the other SATA slot goes. Your data risk is hanging by a thread right now. Being external and formatted not as an extension to your NAS will mean you can read it from any device if (when) your NAS dies.
Your current system isn't running healthily. It's not just a NAS that doesn't have redundancy anymore - it's a NAS with a limb missing that's trying to run a marathon & if you can't get the other SATA slot working it'll only take a twisted ankle to end the marathon completely & first aid is at the finish line. You need a solution, quite promptly & your whole family's data depends on you finishing.

Now I'm guessing you bought your two main discs around the same time as your old NAS, so they're getting older and since you bought them together their life expectancy will be about the same. What we don't know at this stage - Is that 2nd disc any good? And you won't know until you can plug it in with it's Raid1 partner.

You could go for another 2 bay and try to migrate from one Synology to another (if it lets you do it with a degraded system) and then you have your external backup (you took from my earlier advice that you'd keep updating) plus the other new HDD as spare to replace the first one (of now 3 in use) that fails. This all depends on how much space you have left now & if you'd prefer to entrust more data to bigger drives in the future or damage limit loss to smaller drives and more of them.

Going for the 4 bay solution (you can still migrate from 2 to 4 bay with 2 empty slots) you can keep your Raid1 you have - use it for your NAS O/S, any apps you've installed and maybe add your HomeKit hub. Once it's up and running, and healthy, you can slot those new discs into Slots 3&4 - create a new Storage Pool using another Raid1 configuration. Then migrate just your data to that 2nd pool.
What you achieve is a divided system - one half for operational and one half for data, with independent redundancy for each. Increased speed because every time your family access their data its not retrieving it from the same disc that's trying to run your system.

Getting the 920+ will give you a similar long life as you've enjoyed with you DS213, which now 10 years old will likely fall out of support soon, if it hasn't already. Another reason to bring that upgrade forwards.

Hope the information has been useful - I'm pretty sure Robbie has a referral link for the 920+, so drop him a line if you can't find it on the site or in his many youtube videos about it.