Many consumer grade starter Synology NAS products are DS213, DS218, and DS216. DS stands for DiskStation. The 2 stands for 2 hard drives bays or slots. The 13, 16, and 18 is the year that the model was produced. The additional item you should always be aware is the + at the end and the memory. The + indicates a higher processing power, while the base memory is 2 gig and should ideally be at least 8. Here’s another example for the DS2415+. This offers 24 max bay, produced in ’15, and is a + series. The The latest hardware that is equivalent to DS2415+ will be DS2419+ . The DS2415+ obviously offers a heck of a lot more storage capacity and can be configured for better protection against drive failure. It is ideal for a small business environment.
RAID 6 is Better Protection Against Drive Failure
Most people will choose SHR or RAID 5 which will allow 1 disk failure. You will want to choose SHR 2 RAID 6 if you are concerned about potential disk failures. Please refer to the link below if you would like more information on RAID. This post allows you to choose a RAID Type, understand the benefits of one RAID vs another, and discusses volume capacity.
How much Storage for Standard Photos, Videos, and Documents?
Depending on how much files you have and photos you have, the drives capacity will choose will be different. Same goes for if you are utilizing the DiskStation for backup. The HDD/SSD compatibility list below will give you what drives are known to work for DS2419+.
Check out the hard drive compatibility and capacity list for the DS2419+ and other Synology product models.
Max Storage Capacity is Reduced by Your RAID Configuration
RAID redundancy is necessary for avoiding catastrophic drive failure. You will be able to get a approximate RAID storage capacity from the RAID calculator below:
https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator
We chose 16TB drives x 12 of them in our default pic with a RAID type of SHR-2, RAID 6. This gave us a grand total of 160 TB. The DS2419+ was offered as a recommended NAS for its scalability plus the configurator offered plenty of other solutions. Please do note that true capacity will be around 90%-92%ish.
What is the best Synology for me summary
There are obvious many other variables for making an informed decision on a Synology but I think every starter Synology should be something like a DS219+. Need additional resources? Check out our Synology IT support blog post or start window shopping today.
