Do these Synology units allow you to add drives as you go, say start with 2 3TB drives day one and add drives as I need more space?

First, a wonderful tool: http://www.synology.com/support/RAID_calculator.php?lang=us

 

Yes, you can increase the space in your system by adding additional drives.  There are a few caveats or things of note:

- Your initial choice of the redundancy configuration has an impact on what happens.

- If you have Synology Hybrid Raid, then the new drives must be at least as large as the largest current drive.  (New space will be efficiently used if new drive is larger than your old drive)

- If you have Raid 5 or 6, then the new drives must be at least as large as the smallest current drive.  (If your new drive is larger than your old drive, some space on your new drive will be unusable; Raid 5 or 6 will use the same amount of space on each drive as the smallest drive in the RAID)

- A temporary issue is that expanding a system may take a long time depending on how much data you have (many hours or potentially many days); the system is accessible during the expansion process but will be significantly slower.

- It is also possible to increase space by replacing smaller drives with new larger drives.  You probably would not want to do this unless you have reached the max number of drives in the machine.

 

I recommend starting with Synology Hybrid Raid with 1 disk redundancy: http://www.synology.com/support/tutorials_show.php?lang=enu&q_id=492

That would however mean that if you have N drives, the space of N-1 drives will be available.  In particular, see http://www.synology.com/support/RAID_calculator.php?lang=us

Small note: in SHR, once you choose 1 disk redundancy, you cannot change to 2 disk redundancy.  (This shouldn't really matter for many people.)

 

Relevant information if you are adding drives to add space: http://www.synology.com/support/tutorials_show.php?lang=enu&q_id=559

Relevant information if you are replacing smaller drives with larger drives to add space: http://www.synology.com/support/tutorials_show.php?lang=enu&q_id=560

 

 

 

On a side note, my DS412+ died a few days ago.  It would consistently abruptly lose power about 3 minutes after booting regardless of whether any hard drives are in the machine.  Thankfully, the machine is still under warranty.  Synology technical support was quite prompt with diagnosing the need for a RMA.  I just shipped out the machine today.  Let's see what happens next.

Edited November 4, 201312 yr by Nanoha

Thanks for the info.  Can't decide if I go for the big setup or look at the 400 series with 4 drives as I am not sure 15TB is needed at the moment.  I might just put three drives in the 1513+ for the time being.

Looking for more NAS help from the storage gurus amongst us.

 

Thinking about the new DS 415+ to see how the new Atom quad core processor works but I keep reading reviews that show the QNap TS-451 is faster at most things.  Is it largely the software that makes the Synology worth the slightly higher price or is the Qnap just not at the same level hardware-wise?

 

Also, are the WD Red 6TB drives considered reliable by the computer folks?

yes only difference between the two is the software

can't speak to the 6tb drives though, I would base my decision on the number of platters inside

I have returned a number of WD Red drives and the process has been very painless. However, I have returned a number of WD Red drives. That's what RAID is for I suppose.

Jeff, here's bit about 6TB drives from folks at Backblaze.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/6-tb-hard-drive-face-off/

So a little update on my NAS. The 1512+ has worked great for the last year or so, with very little issue. One thing I would recommend to anyone with a Synology NAS is to not have it do automatic updates. I am not one to update my computers to the latest OS and I treat the NAS the same way. This is especially true of the last DSM releases, both 5.0 and 5.1 have had major issues upon first release, but have been pretty stable after 3 or 4 updates. The new software from DSM 5.0 forward also makes it super simple to set up the NAS for almost anything I wanted the NAS to do, including setting up an FTP server.

About three weeks ago, one of the hard drives in the NAS failed. I pretty much knew that would happen as about a month before that I decided to use my spare drive for another purpose so that guaranteed a NAS drive failure. The NAS did exactly what it was supposed to do and informed me via email of the failure. The nice part was that I could still download any file I wanted off of the NAS. So I ordered a new WD red 3tb NAS and installed it. Took about an hour total to repair the volume and everything Was back to normal.

I am also very happy with WD. The RMA of my drive was extremely stress free. Everything is done from their website. Just make sure to register your drives (SN and Date of Purchase). I was even able to buy a cheap 2-day UPS label from them. Took about a week total to get the RMA drive back so I am back in business and have a spare drive in hand.

Overall, very happy with this purchase and well worth the money IMO.

I just had a 3tb red drive fail too. I'm sending it back slow boat tho since I already bought a replacement from Amazon.

IIRC, Backblaze are experiencing higher failure rate with 3TB drives (at least with Seagate and WD drives).

Newegg customer support wants to verify that you can see the TV from all angles.

Actually the failure rate of Seagate is higher than WD for 3TB drives at BackBlaze and both are higher than the (albeit more pricy) Hitachi drives. If you read their reliability report they actually like the WD Reds pretty well. Anyway, I am happy with one drive failure in 1.25 years, a great RMA experience and no data loss.

 

Edit: I thought that the disk reliability statistics from BackBlaze may be useful to others (more can be read HERE and HERE)

 

Edited February 8, 201511 yr by morphsci

^ Which is what I said (except the bit about HGST drives).

4TB WD Red I've had for a while has been chugging along just fine as well.  Same can't be said about all the pre-made externals I've owned - I have only one remaining now that another one died last night (drive itself was fine, though).