| I just have a Synology DS1821+ which has (8 * HDD bays) + (2 * M2 slots). The bays I've filled with 18TB HDDs (I chose Toshiba N300 as they do not use SMR). The M2 slots I've put a couple of 1TB M2 drives in as an SSD cached (they better allow the HDDs to hibernate for frequently accessed files like music). I've got these in an SHR configuration (Synology Hybrid Raid with 1 disk of protection) which means about 115-6TB of usable space and allowing for single drive failure. The filesystem is BTRFS ( https://daltondur.st/syno_btrfs_1/ ). I upgraded the RAM (Synology will forever nag about it not being their RAM https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/kaq7ks/how_to_dis... ). I have the option in future to purchase the network card to take that to 10Gbps ports rather than 1Gbps ports. So that's the first... but then I have a second one... which is an older DS1817+ which is filled with 10TB HDDs and yields 54.5TB usable in SHR2 + BTRFS... which I use as a backup to the first, but as it's smaller just the really important stuff and it is disconnected and powered down mostly, it's a monthly chore to connect it, and rsync things over. Typically if I want to massively expand a NAS (every - 10 years) I will buy a whole new one and relegate the existing to be a backup device. Meaning an enclosure has on avg about 15y of life in it and amortises really well as being initially the primary, and then later the backup. I do _not_ use any of the Synology software, it's just a file system... I prefer to keep my NAS simple and offload any compute to other small devices/machines. This is in part because of the length of time I keep these things in service... the software is nearly always the weakest link here. You can build your own NAS, TrueNAS Core (nee FreeNAS) https://www.truenas.com/freenas/ is very good... but for me, a NAS is always on and the low power performance of this purpose built devices and their ability to handle environmental conditions (I am not doing anything special for cooling, etc) and the long-term updates to the OS, etc... makes it quite compelling. |