Synology advice?

[Enquiries]

Hi Robbie
I need some advice , by the way love your videos very interesting
I have the Synology 918+ 8gb Ram a few questions I would like your opinion on if I could, I basically use it just for running Plex , (lots of 4K content) , would I see much benefit from increasing the Ram to 16gb also wondering the same thing about the ssd cache is it worth it or not
The Main thing I need advice on is I need to increase my storage , while getting bigger drives is one option it is expensive here in Australia and then I have the spare hard drives of witch I already have 2 from my last upgrade
I was considering the expansion unit , but their is so many confusing options on getting it and then the people that say yes get it are divided and say never create 1 volume using the expansion unit if , it fails you lose you whole volume
Others say you should create a second volume
I’m looking for somebody’s option that I trust if there is another solution let me know perhaps utilising the USB slots
Also I read that you ship overseas and the cost might be surprising if you think the expansion unit is the best option please give me your best price shipped to Sydney Australia
Thanks
Gary Poole

[ed]

Yes, having an expansion box would be on an option or getting a cheap second hand NAS would be another option.If you replace few existing drives with bigger capacity and gain some extra storage space this way, you can use replaced drives in some old J or value series NAS. You will have a separate RAID/Volume and IP address, but this is an option.Otherwise, if you want everything under one IP address then an expansion unit is an option. Create a separate RAID/Volume and you don't need to worry about losing data.Connecting an external storage device via USB will not increase storage space. You can only copy to/from this USB drive, not usable for network access.Adding more RAM will not increase the speed unless you actually run low on RAM space. Then it would help. Simply having more RAM without using it is not beneficial.Adding cache will speed things up. But this is something to consider if you do access the same data often. So if you have 5+ users connecting this could help or if you run a web server or virtual machines where small files are often generated and accessed.I hope this helps.