Synology NAS

[Enquiries]

Hello, I am photographer and currently store all my images on a 8TB Lacie external harddrive which currently has around 2TB available. I am concerned that if the Lacie fails, I will loose 10 years worth of work. I am new to NAS but know that I need to invest in a NAS and was looking at Synology NASs and came across your great and helpful article comparing the DS423+ and the DS923+ systems. I learnt a lot and want to move forward. I am leaning on the DS923+. My challenge is that yes, I can order the DS923+ relatively easily but I could do with help in deciding what other items do I need. Drives, SSDs etc.

Are you able to help me? I'd appreciate also if you can direct me to your other articles and YouTube video so I can get more educated in this new field.

Thank you in advance and keep up the good work.

Best wishes
Areef

[ed]

Thanks for the kind words and for reaching out. You’re absolutely right to look into a NAS now rather than later — relying on a single external drive, even a good one like your Lacie, always carries the risk of sudden data loss. The Synology DS923+ is an excellent choice for photography, especially if you want reliability, expandability, and good integration with macOS or Windows workflows.

For your setup and budget, here’s what I’d recommend:

Use the DS923+ as your main unit. Add four drives such as Seagate IronWolf 8TB or WD Red Plus 8TB drives in RAID 5, which will give you 24TB of usable storage with one drive of redundancy. If you prefer even stronger protection (two-drive fault tolerance), use RAID 6 instead, which gives 16TB usable.

You can also install two NVMe drives in the Synology’s internal M.2 slots. These can be used either as cache to speed up thumbnail generation and previews or, in newer DSM versions, as an all-flash storage pool for faster active project storage. For photography, caching is usually enough. Something like the Synology SNV3410 400GB or WD Red SN700 is perfect for this.

For backups, I’d suggest using Synology Hyper Backup to copy your NAS data to an external USB drive (you can reuse your existing Lacie for this purpose) or to a cloud service such as Backblaze or Synology C2.