7 hours ago
the DS124 is a very quiet and efficient little NAS, but the IronWolf Pro 8TB is one of the loudest drives on the market and its vibration can absolutely overwhelm a single bay unit. The slowdown you are seeing with two users is not the NAS CPU itself, but the heavy workloads landing on a mechanical HDD. Moving to SSD is the right idea for what you described, but you don’t need enterprise class SSDs. A good high endurance SATA SSD will transform DSM responsiveness, eliminate noise, and easily last your planned five year lifespan.
For your mix of tasks daily phone backups, 4K local playback (the DS124 can only do local streaming, no transcoding), and a few docker containers the sweet spot is a 4TB or 8TB SATA SSD rated for NAS or heavy write duty. Two of the best choices in your price range are the Seagate IronWolf 125 SSD and the WD Red SA500. Both deliver silent operation, instant UI responsiveness under load, and far better parallel access than your current HDD. Even with multiple users backing up at once the SSD will stay reactive because access times are near zero.
For your mix of tasks daily phone backups, 4K local playback (the DS124 can only do local streaming, no transcoding), and a few docker containers the sweet spot is a 4TB or 8TB SATA SSD rated for NAS or heavy write duty. Two of the best choices in your price range are the Seagate IronWolf 125 SSD and the WD Red SA500. Both deliver silent operation, instant UI responsiveness under load, and far better parallel access than your current HDD. Even with multiple users backing up at once the SSD will stay reactive because access times are near zero.