Is it worth adding a USB My Book to my Synology NAS?

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Is it worth adding a USB My Book to my Synology NAS?

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DS218
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I see Best Buy has a good deal on a 14TB WD Easystore USB 3.0 for today's deal of the day and it got me thinking. It seems pretty cheap for 14TB of storage. My current Synology DS218 only has 4TB, and is getting a little fuller all the time with photos and videos. Is it worth adding something like this 14TB Easystore and maybe using it for all my pics/videos? That way I'd probably never have to worry about running out of space. Then I'd probably just use the Synology NAS for my Time Machine backups, documents, etc. I don't know what type of photo/video viewing experience WD has with that Easystore, but I like the new version of Synology Photos, so maybe someone could chime in here. Maybe this is a really bad idea all around? Any input is appreciated.
 
The WD Easystore (which I think is the same as WD Elements beloved by drive shuckers) isn't a MyBook. But they are a good, simple USB enclosure with no limiting, enforced encryption, unlike the MyBooks, and you get a well priced WD drive too. I've tried to juggle good drives between MyBook enclosures, even with password security disabled the data is written scrambled based on the enclosure's interface board. So if you just want a well priced equivalent of buying separate enclosure and drive then I've been really happy (so far) with the Easystore/Elements.

I've got a 12TB WD Elements which had a white label drive. Prior to this I've had 2TB to 6TB Elements with WD Green (when they existed) to Blue inside. Never actually put them in the NAS but people do. I mostly use them for Hyper Backup destinations as USB shared folders on the NAS.

I used to use an external drive on the DS218+ to hold a video + music library (not Photo Station/Moments as they have specific folders). The main pain was if Video Station ran and the drive wasn't mounted... VS would forget all the library, which is why I used to export .vsmeta files very regularly. Plex was a lot more forgiving as it has a time-out if not found before it cleans up missing items.

I also use WD Elements on the Mac Mini to hold its 'iTunes' Media (6TB) and a 4TB data/dump. The iTunes disk is organised so that it can work with Mac Music/TV apps but is well structured so its backup (using CCC, with safety net feature) to the NAS is ready to be used with Plex, Media Server, Audio Station, VS (as a Plex backup), Photos etc.
 
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I did the same. As long as you don't expect speed records, it's OK. Also, the USB drive is just that, the one drive. So no raid or SHR or any other extras that you may expect from a NAS. I use mine only as a target for HyperBackup. One of the targets, because the drive is still in the same location. So I have another backup target in the cloud (C2).
 
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I would never trust just one drive to my data so consider that first.

As far as a backup drive, they're great--I have two of them that I've actually formatted MBR and FAT32 so I can back up certain older drives for a safe identical backup. I rotate them regularly in a safe deposit box.

As far as shucking them for internal use, I would never do that. Mainly because they're not explicitly designed for it and the cost savings compared to a full-out enterprise drive isn't worth it since I've bought my enterprise drives at the same price per TB. And today it's even easier to find drives that hit those price per TB metrics, so it's a no brainer for me--enterprise quality with a 5yr warranty vs unknown quality with a 2yr warranty and I have to break it open to use it? Forget that...
 
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I figured you knew that ;)
Nearly commented on MBR, but thought you had a reason, which you did.
Yep, very specific use case. Cool thing is that most nas units will still recognize it properly even though it takes time to mount the drives since the fat tables are so large. :) Even xp recognizes it since it's MBR.
 
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