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
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    1122 hours 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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      319 hours 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        113 hours 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

      • @rhacer
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        217 hours ago

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

    • @just_another_person
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      20 hours 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.