![]() Next year I need more than 10 TB capacity and I can afford one more disk. You can add drives to a ZFS pool, but you need to either replace or add them in massive chunks (or smaller chunks if you're happy buying 2x as many disks as you actually need). Yes, FreeNAS/TrueNAS is cool, but I put a Synology at my dad's house. This is done while the device is running and serving data - no downtime, though things may slow down as you would expect during migration operations.įrom an end-user perspective this is a very different experience. Or, if you've finally outgrown your 6-bay device which is full of 3TB drives, you can replace the existing drives with 12TB drives, then once they've all been replaced increase the size of the array to match the new drive sizes. You pop in another 10TB drive in your RAID6 array and you increase the size of the array 10TB as you'd expect. ![]() ![]() One of the perks of something like a QNAP or a Synology is the support for simply adding a single new drive to an existing RAID5 or RAID6 array, and having the storage box add it transparently while data is migrated to the new, larger RAID array. ZFS is sexy, but it requires planning and understanding and (as stated by another poster) adding storage in pairs of drives if you want to increase storage incrementally and maintain drive redundancy. User of both QNAP devices and one of the iX systems devices here. ![]() But for the use case of me and the small businesses I support, ZFS has been a non-starter due to the costs. I would prefer to not have to rely on Synology's cost-cutting hardware and raft of probably not very secure software. Unfortunately they haven't contributed it to free software so nobody else can have it (specifically the part of passing through the parity data so that checksum errors in BTRFS can be fixed with mdraid knowledge). Synology's configuration of mdraid+BTRFS makes way more sense than ZFS. So if I want to be able to add a single drive and expand my storage at any time while keeping the same level of redundancy, ZFS makes no sense. ZFS can't do that, since it does't support modifying vdevs. I can lose any one disk, and lose no data. So I can go from an array of 3 x 10 TB disks where one is parity (20 TB usable storage), and then just pop in one more disk and now I have an array with 4 x 10 TB disks (30 TB usable storage) with the same one-disk parity. On a Synology NAS (which just uses Linux mdraid underneath the hood so this part isn't exactly some proprietary magic) if you have an array with parity (the equivalent of raid-z/z2), you can add a drive, and it expands the array with that one drive, keeping the parity and recalculating it for the new configuration of drives. But I still want to keep the data security of one or more parity drives. I'd need to get the 10TB tier if I had to back up all the photos I shot over the last three years in native resolution, and that comes out to $49 a month, or $600 a year - that's the cost of two 18TB Red Pro drives, and I know what I'm buying.I want to add a single drive since I can't afford more than a single drive. As we're on that subject, the cost of storage adds up very fast if you need a lot of it on Google Photos. This makes a big difference for my particular use case as I tend to search with file names when looking for product shots. Then there's the fact that Synology Photos has better photo management, and you get the ability to sort photos by location, camera, file name, and more. Synology Photos gets a lot right, and it now works natively on the best smart TV platforms. ![]() Synology Photos is insanely fast at uploading photos, and as you're only doing so within your home network, it has a distinct advantage over Google Photos in this regard - particularly if you're working with large albums with hundreds or thousands of photos. The move coincided with Google killing off unlimited storage with Google Photos, and having used Synology Photos soon after it launched, there was a lot to like. To its credit, Synology did a fabulous job collating all of its disparate services into a unified entity for backing up photos and videos, dubbing it Synology Photos. As the data never leaves your home, you have full control over your photos and videos, and I wrote a guide breaking down why a NAS server is the ideal offline Google Photos alternative. There are a few advantages to using a NAS server for storing your media, key among them being data security. I've been using the DiskStation DS1019+ and DS1520+ to back up full-res photos and videos from all the phones we have in the house, so it was pretty straightforward to consider the brand. It didn't take long for me to figure out that Synology Photos is a viable solution. ![]()
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