2 x DS1821+?

[Enquiries]

Hi,

I'm loving the site & the youtube channel! It's invaluable for non-specialists like myself so please keep it up!

I'm looking to consolidate a couple of old DS1812+ (16TB each) along with a pile of external G-Technology hard drives into a new larger NAS.
By rough estimate I currently need approx. 64TB of storage (plus the same as backup) with room to grow into so am looking at 128TB options.
My use case is 3d animation/rendering where the NAS would house everything. I have around 10 render nodes which would be accessing the NAS for source files & saving rendered images to. I plan to connect my editing workstation (HP Z820) directly to the NAS over 10GBe.

So, to my questions:

1. Is there a better option for this than the DS1821+?
2. For backup I plan to run a 2nd DS1821+ for the reason that if the main unit goes down, the backup can just take over. Is this idea reasonable?
3. As I plan to run 2 identical units, is there any downside to using RAID 0? I could do with the extra space & hopefully a bit more speed. Am I missing something here?
4. I've found a good deal for a unit including Seagate Exos x16 disks - would you recommend these disks in my case?
5. From what I've read, the NVMe cache wouldn't really help my use case - is that correct?

Many thanks in advance!

Kind regards

[ed]

Yes, combining all this into a single solution would help a lot and keep things tidy. Synology DS1621+ is a very good NAS, but if you want to get the very best speed then DS1621xs+ would do a better job. Xeon processor can prepare network packets much quicker and also maintain a RAID at the same time. But if you do not need maximum possible performance via 10GbE then DS1621+ would perform fast enough for a 1-2 users working on the same project. The XS series features 10GbE card built-in whereas other model requires an upgrade. You can also have one of each if you want to set up high availability. It doesn't need to be the same NAS.Setting up RAID0 would be an option. But sooner or later one drive will fail, and then everything will need to be set up from scratch and data copied over which might take days.Having Seagate Exos drives is a good choice. Same like WD Red Pro and WD HGST / Ultrastar these are enterprise drives. They are louder but access speeds are much quicker.NVMe cache would help. If you work with projects including small files this can really slow down HDDs. SSD can access these file much faster.I hope this helps.