Hey folks, happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating today!
I have a Synology DS1821+ that I have completely filled. I’m looking for expanding, but I don’t really want to completely replace the Synology yet.
Does anyone know if there is a way to expand the number of drives? I’ve heard murmers that I can use a DAS, but nothing for sure. Wondering if anyone has attempted this before. Thanks!
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Just in case it matters for you, the max single volume size for your NAS is 108TB
When I was following Synology communities closer, the common wisdom was that the expansion units weren’t great in either performance, stability or cost, and you were better off buying a new, bigger unit and then selling your old one used to recoup the cost difference.
I’m also in the same position, I have a DS918+ that is full. It’s also 6 years old and probably on the tail end of getting software updates so I’m weighing my choices…
Upgrading by replacing your drives one at a time will likely get you where you want to go. When I upgraded my 6Tb drives in my 920+ to 12Tb drives it took about a week.
Yeah, I wanted to and tbh that was my first approach, but I’m already at 16TB drives in there, even if I shell out a ton of money for 24TB drives I’d only add 33% more storage, so I think I have to look at either a bigger box or some sort of expansion.
That’s… A lot of storage. I’d say your options are, in no particular order:
- buy a 12 bay NAS.
- expansion unit. Do it as a separate volume and shuffle cold data onto there.
- upgrade the drives.
Failing that you could just have a bit of a purge? If not straight deleting stuff, move things onto an external drive.
You could also try deduping. There’s a script that’ll add any drive to the internal “supported” list and also enable dedupe on mechanical drives. The savings were minimal on mine but you might have more luck. https://github.com/007revad/Synology_enable_Deduplication
Will that sounds like the perfect “Gee I have to spend this money on something bigger and better” reason!
This is the answer. Just buy bigger drives, and replace them one at a time and let them resize.
Anyone saying to buy expansion units is wrong. It works like ZFS or btrfs, and very seamlessly. I’ve upgraded my drives 4 times with zero issues.
What everybody else said plus
https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/migration
Synology will migrate all of your data from one device to another if you just want to get a completely new device.
Well, it’s in my back pocket if it comes to that…
You can use an expansion unit DX517 to add more dives or upgrade existing to larger ones if you use some form of Raid/SHR.
The swap-drive-and-rebuild-array route can take it’s sweet time.
There are expansions for Synology: https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/accessories?tab=nas&category=expansion_units
Probably most important is the 5-drive DX517 that will definitely work with your 1821+ https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DX517#specs
Thanks, I saw some of those, the prices seem… extreme for what is essentially a JBOD enclosure. It’s definitely there as a backup, but I’m hoping for something that won’t be that much… but maybe I’m dreaming
Literally on the product page, first result when I googled the model number:
DS1821+ comes equipped with 8 bays and can scale up to 18 bays with 2 DX517 expansion units as your data needs grow.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1821+
Honest question: did you do any investigation on your own, or post here first?
Hey, thanks for the mean answer.
Yes. I had seen that, I saw the price too. I saw on Reddit that people had had luck using QNAP expansions, or just anything that supports JBOD. I thought I’d ask here because people are usually nice and may have creative ideas. Note other people here giving answers that don’t have the attitude.
I think you’d just have to buy another Synology with more bays.I guess not
