Question Help me make the right choice in upgrading

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Question Help me make the right choice in upgrading

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NAS
DS415+
Mobile operating system
  1. iOS
I currently own a DS415+ filled with 4x6TB WD RED drives, bought ~ 5 years ago. Recently, after 5 years one of my drives is saying "An I/O error occurred to the drive." and "I/O Errors", which after 5 years is acceptable.

Since now WD RED drives go up to 14 TB, I would like to replace the failing drive with a 12 or 14 TB drive. In know that the volume won't be expanded until I upgrade at least 2 drives, and eventually I will upgrade all the drives, but I don't want the 6 TB drives to go to waste just because I am changing them with 12/14 TB ones.

Hence, I was thinking of possible solutions:

1. Buy a Synology extension box, but the 5-bay one seems to be highly unreliable and nobody recommends it
2. Buy an 8 bay Synology, move the 4 drives to the new one and try to sell the 4 bay. Question is, will Synology upgrade the existing 8 bays? Should I wait? Also, will my configs migrate also? I have several docker containers and plex running.

Don't see a third option here.

Thoughts?
 
Welcome to the forum!

As I posted on my blog, there is no apart announcement for the new 8bay model just yet. If there will be, my guess is we won't see it this year.

Buy a Synology extension box
Personally I wouldn't recommend it. They cost almost if not exactly as a fully independent unit and it would be a shame not to go with a new separate unit.

Should I wait?
This depends on your needs (current and future). This is really a question that you should/could answer. If your storage space requirement is still fine and you see no immediate problems with it, I would say, wait. On the other hand, you could upgrade the drives 1st and then at some point the unit as well.

Also, will my configs migrate also?
Most units are compatible with the "in-place migration", so NAS units from the same range should be just fine. In some cases (and this is only when CPU arch is in question), DSM will after you migrate, ask you to upgrade/reinstall some packages (those that were installed via Package Center) considering that a different CPU was detected. In your Docker case, there will be no problems as you will be able to migrate containers and volumes regardless (as long as Docker support will remain on the new model),

In this article, you can get more details on NAS and data migration.
 
For what it's worth... I've used DX517 and DX1215 expansion units in the past - primarily for backup. They were both reliable; but very disappointingly slow. Over the years, individual HDD capacity has increased much faster than our data. So I've been on the path of changing over to 8-bay and 12-bay - using the extra bays for scheduled backups and one-off copies. If recovery (or backup) speed is a concern, this is by far the best approach. For example: a ~30TB copy takes just under 24 hours with source and target volumes in the same NAS. That would take over two days with 10GB Ethernet; or 5-7 days over gigabit Ethernet.

Ron
 
Primary question is not the size of the disk or expansion module reliability. Because no one knows your business model.

Primary question is, what is your data model operation in current NAS and what is your expectations to next 6y? Why next 6y:
- lifespan of any HW boxes (new NAS or expansion box) when it will be necessary to decide
- lifespan of disk drives (in case of such part you can calculate 5y as optimal period for replacement due cost of TB decrease).

Then you can get answer for all mentioned ideas here.

You need start with an useful homework:
What kind of data I have, for what kind of purposes, do I need separate performance for part of them, what is my yearly capacity increment of such data, do I need spare disk feature, .... this is better approach for a satisfying yourself in final decision.
Just use SEARCH tool here and you can find many reliable recommendations for such stage decision. Or just ask for a help.
 
Good point regarding 3-2-1, @Telos. I should have clarified that our 12-bay NAS has two storage pools - both are used only for backups from a primary NAS. Backup pool 1 is maintained with Shared Folder Sync - so it can be quickly switched into service in place with a few permission and linkage changes - or it can be HDD-migrated to the primary NAS if the situation allows. The second pool is a versioned HyperBackup from the primary NAS. We then have the ability to rotate offsite backup HDDs into the Backup NAS for updates from the alternate backup storage pool. R
 

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