Synology Upgrade Time

Hardware
1

It’s been 6 years that I have owned my DS1513+ and it’s just beginning to act out now.
I have 2 “improper shutdowns” in the last 5 days. I have checked the logs and nothing comes up that is significant. I reached out to Synology for support.

I am beginning to prep for the worst (always safer that way) and also now that I finished installing my rack cabinet, I am interested in migrating to a rack mount Synology, I just didn’t think it would be this soon.

Since it’s been 6 years, it’s been a long time since I reviewed a NAS.

My current setup is a 5-bay DS1513+ with 5 x 3TB Red Drives with a 2 Drive Fault Tolerance, I believe I only have about 1 TB of space remaining (or a little less - still working on a project on my mac, so it’s has not been archived there yet)

All audio, video, music, movies, books, documents, projects, for the whole family and team projects are stored on there.

Any recommendations on what to look for or what questions to ask myself?

2

I understand you want to buy a rack mounted server but keep in mind that those servers are made primarily for business and are price accordingly. You would be very well served with the 2019 model in the + range IMO. I have the DS918+ at home (which is a 4 bay unit) and I managed a DS1819+ for work which is a 8 bay unit) and they are both great machine. Depending on what you use it for, you’d be well served by something like this. If you need to user Virtualisation, then think more RAM. You could also either just take your 5 drive and put them on the new DS or buy some new drives. After 6 years, I think I would buy bigger drives like 6 or 8 TB and start with just 3, with one disk redundancy. When you need the space, buy as you go. It will be cheaper that way since cost will come down. This is just my thoughts though, I’m sure others will have some different ideas.
HTH!

1 Like
3

I read somewhere that you may consider blowing air to get rid of dust in the Synology.

4

I know I probably shouldn’t, but I clean out my synology with compressed air and a vacuum cleaner every 6 months. I take the disks out to do this.

5

It has been year since I started this topic, I used this past year to go through and see if anything should be deleted and do some housekeeping in the Synology. I have now reached the critical point with my Synology DS1513+. I can probably last another 1-2 months if I force myself to buckle down before upgrading. Here are the options that I see that I really need help on for clarification.

Current Setup

Option 1 - Buy 5 new hard drives (larger capacity) and swap them into my current 1513+

Option 2 - Buy a Rack Mount Synology with larger drives, transfer the contents of the DS1513+ into the Rack Mount Synology and continue use DS1513+ (treating the rack mount as the “cold storage and not as heavily accessed”) *Some of my folders get accessed monthly, other folders get accessed weekly, or daily. They are known.

Option 3 - Keep the 1513+ as is, buy a new 5 or 6 bay (DS1621xs+ or DS1520+

Option 4 - Buy a new Synology (8 bay or larger) and sell the 1513+

Current Use Cases

  1. File Server / Sync
  2. Data Backup
  3. Multimedia Hub

Future Case (Known)

  1. Possibly redo my ext/int camera security system and have them connect to download to Synology.

Room for growth for new ideas/experimentation/etc

6

I would say option 3. I just upgraded from a 2 bay 213j to a 5 bay 1019+. I kept the old one and use it as a back up to the new one (backing up only important stuff). I plan to move the old one to a friends place just to have a the data in two different locations.