Should I start from scratch?

[Enquiries]

Hello,
I own aQnap 251D. I have had it for 5 years but haven't done a lot with it and have maybe a 100gb or less of photos and home movies.

I purchased a TR 004 so I now have 6 drives so 48TB of disk space and would like your thoughts on what to do.

I am thinking a full re-fresh, just backing up the photos etc.

In the future I would like to use the NAS as a media server, plus personal cloud for all of my photos & my family.

What would you suggest to do??

Thoughts on the best way to run the bays & if I should get anything else to help make is run better.

The old drives were 2x4tb Irnowolf.

[ed]

The best approach with the six drives is to put them all in a single RAID configuration. If you use four drives inside the TS 251D plus the two in the TR 004 as one pool, RAID 5 is the usual choice because you gain good capacity and still have protection against a drive failure. RAID 6 is also available but you lose more space and the TS 251D is not powerful enough to benefit much from the extra safety. If you want a simple, reliable setup, start with RAID 5 on all six drives after the refresh. QNAP will handle the pool and volume automatically once the disks are inserted.

If you want the NAS to feel faster for photos and video scans later, adding a small NVMe SSD via a USB enclosure does not help the TS 251D because it cannot use NVMe caching. The upgrade path for more speed would be a newer model from the QNAP TS x64 or TS x74 ranges which support NVMe caching and faster processors. Until then, your current system will work well for backups, remote access, family cloud and direct play media streaming.

Here are a few options if you ever choose to upgrade in the future.
Synology alternative DS224 Plus
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Synology+DS22...=ncmail-20
QNAP modern replacement TS 464
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=QNAP+TS+464&l...=ncmail-20