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!

  • @rhacer@lemmy.world
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    114 months ago

    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.

    • ScrubblesOP
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      34 months ago

      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.

      • @rhacer@lemmy.world
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        24 months ago

        Will that sounds like the perfect “Gee I have to spend this money on something bigger and better” reason!

      • @TedZanzibar@feddit.uk
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        14 months ago

        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

    • @just_another_person@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

  • @kalleboo@lemmy.world
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    44 months ago

    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…

    • ScrubblesOP
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      24 months ago

      Well, it’s in my back pocket if it comes to that…

    • ScrubblesOP
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      14 months ago

      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

  • Ebby
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    24 months ago

    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.

  • @catloaf@lemm.ee
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    -14 months ago

    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?

    • ScrubblesOP
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      -14 months ago

      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.