Finally, Network-Attached Storage

After more than a decade of losing a couple of days a year to fighting with and backing up crappy (but cheap) external hard drives, I have caved and purchased a good, redundant network-attached storage device. This is a Synology DS920+  (Amazon) with four hard drive bays that accept both 2.5" and 3.5" drives, as well as two slots for M.2 formfactor SSD Caches.




I'm currently running:
  • 2 x 4 TB Seagate Ironwolf hard drives in a RAID configuration to automatically back up all of my computers (three macs, two PCs, and the Linux-based Roon ROCK that drives all of the streaming media players around my house).
  • 2 x 16 TB Seagate Exos Enterprise-grade hard drives in a RAID configuration set up as a network share drive so that I can stop e-mailing documents back and forth between machines.
Is this overkill? Probably. But as the keeper of all of my dad's photos and documents for my family, I feel much better knowing that three different hard drives would have to fail in order to lose anything (the main computer drive, the 4 TB main backup, and the 4 TB RAID mirror). Same for the FLAC files I've spent a couple of years ripping from my CD collection (which now includes my dad's CDs).

I'll do a full review at some point, but a couple of initial thoughts:
  • It's really a relief, after a near miss a few months back when I thought my iMac had died at the same time as my main backup drive, thinking I lost all of Dad's photos.
  • This device supports hot-swapping drives, so I may snag another of each of the hard drive types that I have and keep one cold either in my fire safe or at a different location in the event that my century old home (with some original wiring) burns itself down.
  • The setup is not super intuitive, but both Synology and the larger web have a lot of really helpful tutorials on setup. I think that I'm going to do a deeper dive on the security settings, particularly re: backing up computers that have a greater threat exposure.
  • I asked my dear friend (and network guru) Robin a few weeks ago what the difference between enterprise-grade (read: commerical) hard drives and consumer-grade hard drives was, and as far as I can tell the biggest noticeable difference is how loud the enterprise grade drives are. I think I'm going to have to build out my AV closet sooner rather than later so I don't have to listen to the hard drives constantly thunking while backing up.
  • A giant middle finger to the 10+ Seagate external drives that I've had go belly-up over the last decade.

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