New video going over the top 6 updates to a Synology NAS:
The very first thing you should buy is a cheap external hard drive to backup your unit!
What other value adds should you spend your money on?
Did not get the moment about the external HDD. Right now I have an external HDD for backups because my NAS has only two bays but I’m looking to buy 4 bay NAS and put the external HDD in one of the unoccupied slots and use it for backups as a separate volume. So is it fine or am I missing something?
Yes this is just as good! I just tell people “external drive” as it gets the point across a lot clearer, but as long is its part of a different storage pool then its good!
RAM and NVMe SSDs for me especially with the upcoming DSM 7.2.
Am curious, what is your opinion on getting an expansion unit for my DS1621xs+? The expansion unit port is eSATA unlike the RS models where they’ve a proprietary high speed connector. I use VMs and Surv Station with 4 x 4K cams atm with maybe 2 more being added so it might have a mix of HDD and SSD.
Currently had 4 x 8TB Ironwolf Pro in RAID5 and a 1TB mirror with SSDs for VMs and only have about 2TB of space left on the primary RAID and debating if I’m better off buying a second, larger Synology or replacing it with a larger one. Thoughts?
So the eSATA port on the expansion units leads to ~600MB/s total, which is before any parity calculations you need to send or receive. So its totally fine for hard drives, but can be a bottleneck for your SSD’s.
I would move the HDD’s to the expansion unit and then leave the SSDs locally on the DS1621xs+ for peek performance
Thanks @Will , appreciate the feedback. That certainly is an option although I might look at spending an extra $2.5k and replacing it with the RS2423+. That thing is a beautiful 2U beast with a proper expansion solution.
Then I’d turn the current unit into a backup unit and archive unit for the VMs, data and Surv Station. Or might keep one or two VMs on it and have them replicate to the RS.
Hey @Will, congrats for your amazing work!
Regarding the external drive, I’ve had a lot of issues using WD 2TB external drives connected to my NAS. Mainly when I’m transferring files I’m getting a notification saying “External device USB Disk was not ejected safely”, so somehow my NAS (DS1821+) is ejecting the USBs randomly when transferring files (This has happened to me every single time I tried to transfer big amounts of data). I’ve been reading about this and it seems that this issue has been happening for 10 years or so (https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/17/post/92125) and that might even happen with external drives with their own power supply. This is a big deal for me because I was planning on connecting some WD Elements Desktop Drives (the same one that you show but maybe 10-16TB) and using them as a backup, just like you suggest, but with this issue, I feel like I can’t rely on the USB ports of the NAS. I would really appreciate your opinion and advice about this as I set up all my NAS just by watching and following your YouTube videos!
Thank you!!