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Synology DiskStation DS1621+

My Drobo died…

<sigh>

I tried everything, replaced drives, cleaned it out, banged on it, everything I could think of and every idea I could find online. But it’s dead. It did last 7 years, but it sure feels like it should have lasted longer.

Drobo has not had any devices for sale for a long time now, and in fact they don’t even have anyone answering the phones anymore. So time to look for an alternative.

After a lot of research I narrowed my choices down to a Synology device and more research drove me to picking a DS1621+ for the following reasons.

  1. 6 Drive Bays
  2. 4 bondable Ethernet ports
  3. Up to 32 GB of RAM
  4. SSD Read and Write Caches
  5. The ability to run VMs and Docker containers

Coming from the 5-bay Drobo I was excited about having 6 bays, if I was buying it now I would have bought the 8-bay as it is not much more expensive. But 6 bays is pretty good and gives me plenty of space with Synology’s SHR single disk redundancy.

Bonding Ethernet ports can be a really big deal, it doesn’t make copying or writing any faster, but it allows multiple machines to be able to read and write to the NAS at faster speeds which in the real world can be a huge performance boost. If you have Plex running the performance can take a big hit with a single Ethernet connection and multiple devices watching movies and uploading/downloading files, but with 4 bonded ports the performance hit is noticeably less.

If your going to run Virtual Machines more RAM is always better and 32 GB is overkill for most home uses, but why not?

Having read and write caches can really boost the performance of a NAS, I saw that with the Drobo so I made sure to put them in my Synology. The only concern is the longevity of the cache drives, they have a limited lifespan with the number of writes, so in a high-use environment you may be better off without a write cache.

I want the flexibility to run a Windows Virtual Machine to reduce the number of physical machines I have in my office, but I am still reluctant to use a NAS for it. I am pretty old-school in the way I think about computers, I prefer my NAS just be Network Attached Storage and not a jack-of-all-trades with a lot of software running on it that could cause a problem later on, so I have yet to set any VMs up. But I might. One day. Maybe.

I am running Plex and it is working great, even better than when I had it running on an iMac. We have 3 TVs in the house and are regularly streaming from Plex to 2 of them at once with no problems.

I am also running Synology’s Photos app, it is kind of terrible, so I may remove it at some point.

It is not a quiet machine, especially once there are 6 Seagate IronWolf Pro hard drives in it. The machine sits in the corner of my office surrounded by sound proofing squares and I can still hear it whirring and clicking all day long. Its not really loud, but loud enough to be distracting.

Overall I am very happy with the Synology DS1621+ and after 3 months of using it I recommend you consider it as an alternative to a Drobo, QNAP, or building your own NAS.

P.S. A NAS is not a backup solution unless you have 2 of them backing up to each other. One is none, two is one, and three is adequate. You should always have at least 3 findable and proven good copies of any important data. At least one of them should be off-site at a location other than your home or business.

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