Naah. It ate shit. Not before I put a cage extension on it for another five drives, though, thereby putting me in a frame size that doesn't integrate cleanly. I had a choice: buy another 8-bay and another 5-bay extension? Or go stupid. Fortunately some hospital in the midwest somewhere thought they were going that way and then changed their mind so I got it refurbed off newegg for like 50% off. It was still damn near $2k.

I've had to rebuild SHR2 twice now. It's entirely drama-free. I have had hot-swap drives kick over and rebuild automatically. It has also been drama-free. I even had to move an entire array from one Synology to another (11 drives worth!!!) and it was surprisingly drama-free. Never even needed to get into command line.

Rebuild speeds are hella faster, too. It'll cook over a 4TB in like a day. The 10TBs take like two and a half days. I'm nervous as shit while it does it? And I'll, like, disconnect it from the network so nothing can write to it while it's doing it? But I'm running a mix'n'match mishmash of horsepower that I think is good for 60TB and that doesn't include the two hot-swaps I have sitting in there.

That's just the media monster, though, with all the samples and photos and work product on it. Every time I do a full backup of Plex it's 8TB. I've got a little 8-bay for video surveillance and laptop backup at work, and then I've got a little legacy 2-bay that I run Drive for, like, 12 computers on.

I have opted to keep Plex off the Synology because Plex, in a real-life environment, does a lot of video transcoding. Synology does not do video. You can get a -Play or whatever but still, a legit video card is useful. The video card on the monster I'm running Plex on is like a 9-year-old 1730 or something and it doesn't like AVI files? But what I've seen of transcoding on Synology has kept me clear.

Video surveillance will tax them. I was running eight HD cameras on the 2-bay guy and it was running at like 80%. 15 cameras on the 8-bay is like 8%. I have 4 cameras on this quad-core Xeon monstrosity and it could care less. Mostly it does backups all day every day and it does them with aplomb.

I wholeheartedly recommend redundancy. The ability to go "hard drive crash, oh well, guess it's time to buy another drive" is entirely worth it.

All the original drives in that array are now a RAID5 array sitting in my pro tools machine. I keep Plex on there. They've been going 24-7 for... more than 3000 days. I retired two of them for SMART status, and two of them crashed.