Are all 3 of them the 8 bay model you wrote about before? I'm pretty sure a 4bay DS420+ would be more than enough for a bunch of years. Wouldn't allow as much redundancy as a larger one ... Though I don't think the extra redundancy is necessary, I'm not doing anything critical and I've been using no redundancy for years. Have you been pushing the CPU or memory limits of yours? I don't think I'll be doing anything CPU intense.
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.
Hmmm. This is a case of anything-is-a-massive-step-forward vs more-is-more-better. I can't see myself needing your storage capacity, definitely not any time soon. I'd try Plex on it to see if it works, my Plex use is less intense too, 99% is to a Roku in the next room and the very few things which need transcoding i generated an optimized versions already... And if it's a disaster I can move it back. I could fit an 8 bay one in the budget, and having the drive bays for double redundancy and a hot swap is real tempting, but I'm also still pretty sure it'd be happy with the 4 bay. The main goal is making automated backups easier than my Frankenstein pi setup, and everything else is bonus.
The smart money runs Plex on an NVidia Shield. Play around here and see if four drives makes sense. I went bigger because in RAID5, you start hitting efficiencies at 5 drives and in RAID6, you start hitting efficiencies at 6 drives. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up Macs and Macrium Reflect to back up PCs.
Today 4 is fine. I need to sit on this decision a few days and weigh current size vs future expansion. Just found out that the model I mentioned isn't one that can be expanded though, their model numbering is a pain. Macrium Reflect looks good, thanks.
A couple considerations: - 8 drives is the number where Synology firmly separates "hobbyist" from "SOHO." 12 drives is where they separate "SOHO" from "Enterprise." - The numbers you care about are DS2-, DS4-, DS6-, DS7-, DS9-, DS15-, DS16-, and DS18-. That stands for "Disk Station" where 2, 4, 6 are basic-bitch with that many drives, 7 and 9 are value-add with expansion and 15, 16 and 18 are their SOHO sizes that expand a lot. The numbers after the dash (which is a convention I have added for simplicity) is generation number. Thus a DS214 is a 4th generation 2-drive model. A DS214 plus is a 4th generation 2-drive model with slight revision, like maybe a little more memory. Thus, the 1813 plus I was running is eight generations older than the 1821 plus they're currently selling, but they're both 8-drive, fully-expandable models. Things only get tricky when you buy expansion chassis, because some expansion chassis bridge generations but it's not obvious. - Synology, if they aren't dead, go for a lot used. It's like they're Macs or something. A 1621 is a thousand dollars off Amazon. A 1618, which is three generations old, is $700 rode hard put away wet on eBay with no pedigree. I sold my busted one for $250 (I think?). I sold the expansion, which I bought used, for more than I bought it used for, having used it for four years. DS214s go for around $150 used; I bought ours new for $179? $229? seven goddamn years ago.
I decided a DS15- fits a nice balance of doing everything I want without going wildly overkill, but I can expand it in the future if needed. I'll see if I can get the newer 22+ without too much backorder delay. Thanks for the help