I have been a user of a Drobo for several years now. It meet my storage needs even if it wasn’t anywhere near as fast as i wanted it to be. I used my desktop computer as a server and had at one point two Drobo’s attached to it. This year my old one started acting up so I am down to one Drobo. I had been slowly upgrading the storage on it but it has become apparent that I needed an upgrade. Jayson suggested Synology since he loved his Synology NAS. I had read good things about them in the past but I wasn’t really sure I wanted a NAS. I ended up buying a much cheaper Transporter in an attempt to solve only one of the storage issues I had. I wanted a private cloud solution. That was a mistake. The Transporter was nice but I had issues with the software. It didn’t do exactly what i was looking for. It was close but just not enough. At that point I started to research all the things i could do with a Synology and I got very interested. It does what i want with private cloud storage as well as tons more features. I was sold and made the investment in one.
Today I received my Synology DS412+.NAS along with 2 4TB drives. I will upgrade to a 3rd drive after i get the system setup. 4TB of usable space wont be enough once I get started. I have already started copying my files onto the new NAS. I also got Plex configured but need to wait till I get my media moved over. That means it will be a few days as the transfer takes a long time.
Once I get all my data on the Synology I need to setup backups of the data back to my old Drobo so I have an extra copy. Once that is done I also have plans to try a cloud backup service. Backing up to one hard drive a year and putting it in offsite storage at my dad’s is not going to work anymore with this much data to backup.