02-18-2021, 03:38 PM
The main benefits of having 4-bay NAS are price per terabyte and expand-ability. If you buy a NAS you will very likely have a RAID. Unless you have a backup in place and time of restoring backups do not bother you.Mirror or RAID1 will keep a copy of a first drive. This means that you can only use the storage capacity of a single drive. With a 4-bay you can set up RAID5 on the first 3 drives or all four. This means that you lose only one drive and protect the other 3 or more drives.If you wanted 12TB capacity. With a two-bay it would look like this :2 * 12TB (one drive used for redundancy) = £274 * 2 = £548with a 4 bay it would look like this :4* 4TB (one drive used for redundancy)= £89 * 4 = £356More drives you add, cheaper it gets.You can even start with one or two drives in a 4 bay. This allows you to upgrade to RAID5 later when you add a third or fourth drive. You can also use extra bays for caching you you use it for virtualization, webserver or multi-user environments. Or as per DS918+, you get nvme cache slots built-in.DS220+ would be a good solution, but there is no option to expand apart from replacing drives or a new NAS. DS420+ or DS920+ would be a better option.I hope this helps.