Best Upgrade Path From DS220j - Basic Home Media Server Requirements

Synology
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I need some upgrade advice. I want to move up from my very first Synology NAS into something a little more robust now that I’ve seen what a home NAS can do for me.

Unsure of whether this was really for me, I kept my initial investment low - I started with two of the very bottom tier, white enclosure models (2 bay, 220j with 512mb of RAM) and a remote site backup, single bay 120j with the same 512mb of RAM.)

Right now I am running a pair of mirrored 6TB drives on the 220j, giving me a 6TB storage pool, with the same 6TB available on the remote backup.

Surprisingly, this existing setup will still do basically everything I need, storing documents, photos, videos and music. Its primary use is as my home media server, hooked into the home theater through an AppleTV, iPads throughout the house, etc. For now, about the most demanding thing I ask it to do is stream one 1080p video at a time with no transcoding. And I am using DS video rather than Plex in a pretty lean install. But boy is it ever dog slow. Everything takes forever to load up, the interface is slow, DSVideo is slow, etc.

I assume it is largely the tiny 512mb of RAM that is making it so slow, but I don’t know enough about the architecture of a NAS to know where the chokepoint is here. Does DSVideo start to choke if you have too many video files in its index no matter the hardware? I’ve got about 4TB of video files, mostly my large collection of ripped DVDs and home movies so it comes out to a few thousand mostly relatively small video files.

Anyway, my 6TB pool is also now down to about 1TB free, so I am starting to think about the upgrade path. For future-proof reasons, I’m imagining something with enough horsepower to easily stream 4k, and support for a storage pool up to maybe 12TB initially, with a max ceiling of no more than 20TB. When I upgrade, I will probably move the 220j into the remote backup role, potentially moving it to a RAID 0 configuration which would give me 12TB of backup off the two existing drives.

What is the most cost effective way to upgrade from where I am now, to something I won’t have to replace for at least the next few years or more?

What Synology model would you experts recommend?

4 Bays vs 2 Bays?
Minimum RAM?
Minimum Processor?
Do I need to care about Intel CPU if I don’t plan to do hardware transcoding of video?

Bonus points for low power usage/quiet. This is a home NAS, so it inevitably sits idle a lot, but will occasionally get hit hard with multiple users watching movies at once.

Thanks for any help you can offer!

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I think a DS224+ (2-bay) or DS423+ (4-bay) are great upgrades from a DS220j.

1 Like
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Hi. Thanks for the advice for the DS224+. I consider switching to this model for the same reason (also have a very slow DS220j).
Would it be possible to buy a DS224+ NAS without the hard drives, and move the hard drive to the new NAS without data loss? If yes, what would be procedure?
Thanks for any help.
Best

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Yes, you can buy the DS224+ without disks and move the disks from the DS220J to the DS224+. This process, called HDD migration, is supported between these models.
You are advised to upgrade DSM and installed packages to the latest version.

Do you plan to keep the DS220J as a backup NAS? Or do you already have a backup solution?

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Not much response to BigW on this topic. I’m about to undertake exactly what
fl2024 asked about. Purchasing DS224+ and migrating my 2 4TB drives into it from my DS220j. My main issue it that even just looking at photos or videos stored there is pretty slow. My guess is the RAM as BigW had suggested.
Going to start out with my old drives and if everything goes smooth and works as I hope I will most likely add RAM and upgrade the HDs.
fl2024 if you have already done this upgrade I’d be interested in how it went.
Thanks Everyone…

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I went with the DS224+. It is a significant speed improvement and you want the Intel processor if you are doing any transcoding of video. My strong suggestion to you is just buy the upgraded drives now, and turn the old system into a backup/mirror of the new drive. It is enough of a hassle to set up the new NAS, migrate the files etc. that you will not want to do it again in a year. I do like having a second, immediately available backup if anything fails on the main system, and as slow as the old unit is, it is absolutely fine in the role of a backup. I will say the only caveat I have is that Synology dropped DSVideo, which has several advantages over Plex, etc. most critically that it is not as resource intensive and allows the drives to spin down when idle, which they frequently are, since it is just a home server. So I was frankly pretty annoyed that they dropped it. It would not surprise me greatly if some of the other Synology provided, consumer focused software disappears eventually, because the company is clearly shifting its focus away from users like us and towards larger corporate/small office customers. If you just need a place to store files that may not matter much to you, but if you are relying on any of that software being there in five years, it should give you pause before you spend the $$ and lock yourself into the Synology ecosystem even further.