Upgrading the NAS

Synology DS413 (4x3TB) ➔ Synology DS420+ (4x8TB).

My Synology DS413 network attached storage (NAS) box has 4 x 3TB drives with an available space of about 8TB (one drive space is effectively redundant and 3TB drives aren’t actually 3TB). Just over nine years of service, the DS413 keeps ticking along, however, thanks to storing photos and video streams of computer game play, we have reached 97% full. Upgrades are required! Rather than just plonking in four larger drives (DS413 can only go up to 4x4TB?), I thought I would investigate upgrading the NAS box. The amount of options available are enormous, so I narrowed the search to just Synology (sorry QNAP) because it is what I know and has worked exceedingly well for me. Still so many options that I had to build a spreadsheet, where I calculated total cost of owner ship, including electricity costs.

A very long “research and configurations” story short: I settled on the DS420+, although the DS420J was very close. The DS420+ uses less power, twice the RAM, and 2x to 3x the CPU clock speed. Calculating the drives $/TB and potential requirements – I went with 4x8TB, giving be a total space of 21.3TB, although I was very close to getting 4x10TB.

I also purchased an extra 8TB drive (Seagate IronWolf) for when things go bad. Over the 9+ years of operation of the old DS413, I had two drives fail. I always have a spare drive waiting for this eventuality. The Synology box happily re-integrated the replacement drive and lost no data, yay redundancy!

People might remember the Western Digital CMR vs SMR drive scandal? Well yes, my drives were freakin’ SMR, so much of the sluggishness was to blame on Western Digital selling drives that should not have been branded as NAS specific. When I had to replace a faulty drive the rebuild took over a week.

Comparison? Well the DS420+ has the latest version of DSM (the Synology OS) and is so much more responsive – I am very happy with the choice to upgrade. But 7+ year newer technology should be better so that really isn’t a surprise. There are also extra features that the DS420+ has which I will explore later. Right now my DS420+ is clunking away, copying the ~9TB from the DS413, after which the 413 will be wrapped up with the drives and placed in storage as a backup, labeled for deletion after 5 years. At some stage I might throw some cheapie 1TB SSD SATA drives in it to see what it can do.