Went through setup of 1522+ with 2 12 TB Iron Wolfs before watching your videos. Big Mistake!
Set up as RAID1 with intent to backup Mac desktop and archive large Lightroom photo collection.
Subsequently, as I watched your Lightroom Part 1 and other videos, I realized I would be better served by adding drives and setting up as RAID5 or SHR1.
Currently have nothing saved on the NAS except an empty “Photography” folder. All other settings changed to your recommendations.
I see I can upgrade to RAID5 from RAID1 by adding a drive. I have no problem adding more than one drive to expand my starting capacity which would apparently save me on time and wear and tear when later adding to RAID5 with lots of saved data.
What is the most efficient way to add multiple drives and change to RAID5 or SHR1 with no data currently in RAID1.
From RAID1 you can switch to RAID 5 easily. To switch to SHR 1 you will need to reinstall and reconfigure you HDDs from scratch. See Knowledge Center here
The main benefit of SHR over RAID 5 is that you can periodically add more drives of equal or greater capacity and SHR will figure out how to squeeze the most memory space out of them all. As for any RAID config, you are limited by the capacity of your smallest HDD in your volume; but with SHR volume creation will minimize unusable disk space. What is SHR?
Got my additional drives. Now will have 5 with two already installed. How would I reinstall and reconfigure my existing HDDs? Can’t find that in Synology help.
If you remove the volume(s) you created, open Storage Manager > Volume 1 go to the three dots on the right side, click and select Remove in the drop down menu. Follow the prompts. When the volume(s) are gone you can go to your Storage Pool and click on the three dots on the right and select Remove in the drop down menu to remove the storage pool. When you have no volume(s) and no storage pool(s) you can power down the NAS and insert all of the drives you have. Then start the NAS and go through the storage pool and volumes creation just like you are doing it for the first time.
Synology has decent instructions and Will should have a video on it. Just be sure what you want, SHR or RAID 5. My advice, if your HDDs aren’t all the same volume, go with SHR. If you go RAID 5 the smallest HDDs will determine what is the maximum volume to be used on all HDDs. Meaning, if you have one 500 GB HDD and four 12 TB HDDs, the pool will only have 500GB available for each HDD.