I hope you will be able and willing to answer my question. I have a DS218+ with 2 8TB seagate iron wolf harddrives. I want to have an upgrade so I’m buying a DS420+ nas and 2 18TB seagate iron wolf harddrives. My plan is to replace my 2bay synology to the new 4bay synology and I want to know if I can just put the 2 8TB drives into the new synology and then also add the 2 new 18TB drive in bay 3 and 4.. More disks is more power draw, more vibrations more heat production and more physical space used. With the added redundancy comes less capacity as the redundancy means disks are there just to cover the situation where one or potentially more disks fail protecting you from data loss in those cases. IF I “HAVE TO” BUY A BRANDED NAS BOX, I’d spend my money on the biggest NAS with the max # of BAYS possible. Cuz you can always buy cheap smaller drives at first, but if you get a small NAS and used up all your bays from the begining it won’t grow more bays in the future and expanding more capacity means you have to discard your smaller drives, and that is a drive doing nothing loosing it’s value as redundancy.

Unlike the best external hard drive or the best portable SSD, NAS devices offer a unique advantage: internet connectivity. This allows you to access your stored files remotely, ensuring you have the convenience to retrieve data from anywhere in the world. I had arguments where someone in the company had a PC from a brand 20 years ago in their old company. In meetings ANYTIME that brand comes up the person that would call tech support for the smallest problem with their work PC, will keep telling you that THEY had a problem with that brand and that they’re basicly an expert now on that brand and that there is no way the company should go with that brand, because THEY CAN TELL YOU how bad their products are. This remote accessibility feature of NAS devices trumps traditional storage methods. Rather than carrying around an external hard drive or the best flash drive, you can securely retrieve files from any internet-connected device. Additionally, NAS devices can serve as a centralized storage hub within your network. Whether for work or personal use, every computer on the network can utilize the NAS as if it were an internal drive. This centralized approach ensures that even if one PC fails, the stored data remains intact and secure in the NAS. Thks again Robbie & it’s nice to see synology supporting the home/office/prosumer market a little more. However let me remember us ;So.. can I just take the 2 older 8TB drives (in SHR) out of my 2bay synology and put them together with the 2 18Tb drives into the new 4 bay synology without losing my data or without having to figure out a way to transfer the data off the drives first.. I do not have the external drive space to temporary store 8Tb worth of data. I don’t really care all that much about any settings from my old nas, all I want is to keep all my own data safe when transferring to the new nas.

As an Arch Linux user, I was torn between buying an expensive (new) tiny RAID machine with 4 x new HDD’s or using an old (but free) monstrous 12 bay Supermicro server with 12 (free) smaller HDD’s. Business-wide you should replace your HD’s every 3 years (5 years, max) but for the average user at home, you replace when really needed. (or after 10 years?) But more drives also means more power-use as you already indicated and also more heat. (more cooling might be needed) There is most certainly a clear design choice here to mirror that of the existing regular-class server drives on the market right now. The Synology HAT 3300+ series has been reported several times, not just here on the blog, to be built using Seagate Iron Wolf drive media with specific Synology firmware on board. Arriving with 180-terabyte annual workloads, 5400rpm, 256-megabyte cache, arriving in a CMR architecture and air-sealed – the specifications we see here are all quite standard. The 12TB benefits from an increased RPM and helium sealing, as per most 12 TB drives in the market, but apart from that the Synology Plus hard drive series are going to run quieter than most pro or enterprise-class drives, as well as have a slightly lower power consumption, but are also going to have a slight performance decrease than that of the HAT5300 and HAT3300. But that is only going to be of significance in larger RAID configurations realistically.

Easy file access with QuickConnect

SATA – Despite it’s age, SATA still remains the most popular connection of HDDs in 2023/2024 (despite the rise of M.2 NVMe SSD use in NAS). SATA allows up to 6 Gigabits per second throughput. However, mechanical HDDs rarely exceeded 280MB/s. By 2023/2024, while SATA remains prevalent, advancements in connections like SAS, NVMe, and U.2, particularly in SSDs, have become more significant in enterprise settings. I assume the home/office/prosumer market is all-but free-riding on their megala-enterprise/corporate market success.