Preface
For an analysis of average users' needs for NAS, please refer to my other article (Tips & Tricks Series: A Brief Discussion on How to Choose the Best NAS for You), so I won't go into detail here. The main target audience of this article is people who have a demand for massive NAS storage space, including but not limited to: PT players with a hoarding habit (like me?), photographers/videographers, video editors and producers, game developers, etc.
Actually, for many years (at least 7 years), I have been exploring large-capacity storage solutions suitable for home use (back then, hard drive capacities were too small; I started buying in bulk from 6TB, nothing like the satisfying 22TB starting point we have now). Friends reading this might wonder, what is there to explore? Isn't it just buying a multi-bay NAS and then buying hard drives? In theory, yes, but in practice, it's not that simple. You need to strike a balance between expandability and cost-performance. To explain this clearly, we need to start with conventional NAS solutions. By comparing them, it will also explain why I chose QNAP over Synology.
Note: The only brands mentioned in this article are Synology and QNAP, because I have only used these two brands. The prices are sourced from official flagship stores on JD.com, solely for the convenience of comparison and to increase practicality, with no advertising intention whatsoever~~~. You can use the logic below to find similar solutions for your preferred brands based on your actual needs.
Discussion on NAS Solutions
NAS Purchase Solution 1 (Standard Version)
For example, if you want to buy a NAS to centrally store your family data (photos, videos, work files, etc.), following the normal logic, buying Synology's cheapest 2-bay NAS (such as the DS223) and then buying two 4TB hard drives would be enough to last an average user for a long time:
Total price (including two 4TB hard drives): 2299 + 599 * 2 = 3497, which is quite acceptable for most people.
Directly buying a 4-bay NAS is also an option, but 4-bay NAS prices are slightly more expensive than 2-bay ones, such as the Synology 4-bay NAS (DS423):
Total price (including four 4TB hard drives): 3199 + 599 * 4 = 5595, which average users can still afford if they stretch their budget a bit.
Actually, excluding the cost of hard drives and looking at it from another angle—just the ”NAS price / number of bays” to get the price per bay—the 2-bay Synology is ”2299/2 = 1149.5”, while the 4-bay Synology is "3199/4 = 799.75". This also shows that the price per bay of the 4-bay Synology is more cost-effective.
NAS Purchase Solution 2 (Premium Version)
However, if you suddenly fall in love with space-consuming hobbies like downloading movies shortly after, you will find that even 16TB (four 4TB drives, without RAID) of hard drive space won't last long before it's full. What do you do then? Even if you buy larger hard drives, you have to copy the existing data off the current NAS before replacing them, but where can you copy it to?
Do you buy another NAS? And then end up with another NAS and four more hard drives? But what happens when that gets full too? Therefore, this solution of only considering buying a new NAS + hard drives to expand storage space has no scalability.
Some friends might ask, can I just make a larger one-time investment, buy a multi-bay NAS, and spend a lot of money on the most expensive hard drives currently available? Of course you can! For example, a direct 8-bay NAS:
Eight 22TB enterprise-class hard drives:
Total price: 8899 + 3099 * 8 = 33691, boasting a massive 176TB of space.
To be fair, for wealthy people, this solution is highly efficient and will last a long time. However, it is not friendly to average people at all. It is clearly unsuitable for ordinary families and completely lacks the cost-performance ratio that ordinary people require, so I skipped it directly. But actually, I am very envious of this solution—it's just a pity I don't have the money~.
(Bonus Chapter 1) Tips for Buying Mechanical Hard Drives
Besides the NAS, the price of hard drives also determines the cost of the entire solution. With the continuous improvement of single-platter capacity, the capacity of mechanical hard drives increases year by year. However, theoretically speaking, at any given point in time, there will always be a hard drive capacity that is the most cost-effective and easily accepted by everyone, such as right now:
Obviously, buying a 4TB hard drive is the most cost-effective. The capacity is doubled compared to 2TB, while the price is only 160 more than 2TB. Meanwhile, a 6TB hard drive only offers 2TB more than a 4TB one, but the price is 400 more expensive.
Therefore, in theory, even for a multi-bay (4 or 8-bay) NAS, unless there are special needs, buying hard drives to fill all bays at once is not a good choice. You can buy one to start with and buy more when the capacity is no longer enough. By then, you might be able to buy a drive with 2TB or more capacity for the same price. After all, the price per TB of mechanical hard drives will only get cheaper and cheaper (except for needs that require multiple drives for RAID).
For myself, the last time I bought was when it was 14TB:
I held out for over 3 years and only bought this month (finally waiting for the price of 22TB hard drives to come down; actually, they were even cheaper a few months ago, but they went up a bit recently, which is annoying). So this week I bought four 22TB drives all at once, which is equivalent to 8TB more per drive, and 32TB more across four drives. This is the result of waiting patiently for 3 years:
As for why I bought four at once, it's because I like to merge all hard drives into one large volume for easier file management. It's actually not very economical, and I don't recommend doing it this way.
Tell you a joke: I once attended a channel conference organized by Hitachi Storage. When their engineer was introducing Hitachi's storage solutions, he mentioned many pain points in SMB (small and medium-sized business) storage, including long data migration times, difficulty in online expansion, and many other points that I deeply related to. After the meeting, I chatted with the engineer for a while and asked him if Hitachi had any solutions suitable for home use. He replied that my scale had already exceeded that of many SMBs, and they only had commercial solutions with quotes directly in the hundreds of thousands or millions. I was speechless. Since then, I have always wanted to find a solution suitable for a home environment that supports large-capacity storage expansion.
Also, speaking of data migration, people online often say that the most efficient data migration is simply shipping the hard drives, which is indeed true. Average people don't know the pain of transferring massive amounts of data over the network. Since I only have a 1Gbps backbone network (after all, the house was renovated 13 years ago), transferring 11TB of data (even large files) over the network would take at least around 27 hours. Taking my case this time as an example, the time for one of the 11TB data migrations was as follows:
Not to mention last year, in order to hold out for another year, I migrated over 30TB of data over the network. God knows how long it took to transfer, and how worried I was about power outages during the transfer~~.
What Are the Ways to Expand NAS Storage Space?
Earlier, I mentioned that expanding capacity by buying a new NAS lacks scalability. So, without purchasing a new NAS, what are the ways to expand?
Budget-Friendly Method: Hard Drive Enclosure (Box)
Budget-Friendly Method: Hard Drive Enclosure (Box)
This is actually quite good in terms of cost-performance. Taking a 5-bay hard drive enclosure that supports RAID as an example:
A 5-bay enclosure supporting RAID is only 859 RMB. Isn't that much cheaper compared to a 4-bay NAS? I also adopted this solution in the early stages. The biggest advantage of this solution is that it is cheap. However, everyone should note that generally, the price of a 5-bay enclosure with RAID is the most reasonable. If it's an 8-bay enclosure, the price goes way up:
For just 3 more bays, the price is more than doubled, which is enough to buy a new NAS, leaving no cost-performance ratio to speak of.
The advantage of this solution is that it is cheap, but it also has quite a few disadvantages:
The USB interfaces are generally USB 3.1 Gen 1, while some NAS devices already provide USB 3.1 Gen 2 interfaces or even higher speeds, making the hard drive enclosure the speed bottleneck.
Power supply is an issue; if the power supply of the hard drive enclosure is unstable, its impact on the lifespan of the hard drives remains an unknown.
This issue is the most critical. When external RAID devices are connected to the NAS via a USB interface, SMART information cannot be seen on the NAS (online sources say this is related to the chip used in the hard drive enclosure and the SATA-to-USB solution, but in reality, it is very difficult to achieve). This is the most important reason why I later completely replaced them with the NAS brand's official expansion storage: I need to know in advance when there is a problem with a hard drive so I can transfer the data.
Of course, I am still using the hard drives I replaced before and third-party hard drive enclosures to store less important data, because it won't hurt as much if something goes wrong with this kind of data~. So if the frequency of use is not high or the data is not that important, you can consider this method to save money.
Official Expansion Storage of the NAS Brand Used
This is actually what I think is the most reliable way, because as long as the quality of the NAS brand itself is excellent, then the quality of its expansion storage will not be an issue either.
In terms of usage, compared to using a third-party hard drive enclosure, the only disadvantage is that it is expensive, while the advantage is that none of the 4 disadvantages faced when using a hard drive enclosure before exist anymore (to emphasize again, the NAS brand itself must be excellent).
Below, I will take Synology and QNAP as examples to compare the total price and expansion capabilities of the official expansion storage devices of the two brands and the minimum required NAS models for your reference. In actual use, you can use this approach to find the corresponding solution on the NAS brand you use.
Synology
Expansion Storage Models
First, let's look at Synology's official expansion devices, DX517 and DX1222:
There are 5-bay and 12-bay options, which is quite good, better than QNAP's 4-bay and 8-bay options.
Supported NAS Models
Then let's look at the compatible models (there are requirements for Synology NAS models):
Budget Solution
To calculate the price, let's take the cheapest NAS model that supports DX517 as an example, and choose the DS723+ in the image above (this is already the lowest-end and cheapest model on sale that supports DX517, and it's only a 2-bay model...):
Plus the DX517:
4099 + 4049 = 8148 (excluding hard drives), which gives an expansion capability of 2 + 5 = 7 bays. After checking, the DS723+ can only connect to one DX517:
I don't want to look into it anymore, it's too expensive, I can't afford it, and it has absolutely no value for money (compared to QNAP, which will be discussed below).
QNAP
Expansion Storage Models
Next is today's main character, QNAP's expansion storage. There are the following 3 common types of USB interfaces (there are other types of interfaces, but average people won't come across them, so I won't say much):
First, let's look at the prices of several expansion devices.
Price of TR-002:
Price of TR-004:
TL-D800C:
Note: TR-004 is only 540 more than TR-002, but it has 2 more bays, which is very cost-effective, so the following will take TR-004 as an example.
Supported NAS Models
Taking TR-004 as an example, let's look at the requirements for NAS models:
The red box indicates the 2-bay models currently on sale that I saw on QNAP's JD.com self-operated flagship store. Among them, TS-216 is the cheapest, TS-262C is a bit more expensive, and TS-264C is even more expensive:
Budget Solution (Not Recommended)
Since TS-216 is the cheapest, we will use this model as an example for the budget option. First, let's see how many expansion storages TS-216 supports connecting:
It can only connect to one TR-004, costing: 1499 + 1860 = 2359, which gives an expansion capability of up to 6 (2+4) bays. Although it has one less bay than Synology's 7 bays, the cost is 8148 - 2359 = 5789 less, making it much more cost-effective.
However, since TS-216 only supports connecting one TR-004, although it is much more cost-effective than Synology, I still do not recommend it because the expandability is too far behind another solution, and the price difference is not that big.
High Cost-Performance Method (Recommended for Average Users)
This time, choosing the TS-262C NAS model, the price is 500 higher than TS-216, but the expandability is much higher:
TS-262C can support TL-D800C, and since TS-262C has two USB 3.2 Gen2 ports (which is USB 3.1 Gen2, I hate this naming convention), there are two choices:
You can connect two TR-004s, costing 1999 + 1860 * 2 = 5719, obtaining an expansion capability of 10 (2+4+4) bays.
You can connect 1 TR-004 and 1 TL-D800C, costing 1999+1860+3600=7459, to get an expansion capacity of 14 (2+4+8) drive bays (compared to Synology's 8148 which gets 7 drive bays of expansion capacity, doubling the number of bays—needless to say which one is more cost-effective~). Calculated with current 22T hard drives: 14 * 22 = 308T, which is completely enough for average users.
Maximum Expansion Capacity Solution (Recommended for Advanced Users)
In fact, we can see that the biggest problem with the TS-262C is that it only supports two USB 3.2 Gen2 ports. If a NAS could support three USB 3.2 Gen2 ports, it could connect two TR-004s + one TL-D800C, such as the TS-564:
It has 5 USB ports (1 USB 2.0, 2 USB 3.2 Gen 1, 2 USB 3.2 Gen 2)
Therefore, the TS-564 can theoretically connect 1 TR-002 + 2 TR-004s + 1 TL-D800C, with a price of 2500+1320+1860 * 2 + 3600 = 11140, in exchange for 21 3.5-inch drive bays + 2 2.5-inch drive bays. The 2.5-inch bays can be used with SSDs for system drive RAID 1, which we won't count for now. But what does 21 3.5-inch drive bays mean? If calculated with current 22T hard drives, 21 * 22 = 462T, which is already hard drive freedom, okay! Moreover, this expansion doesn't need to be done all at once. You can start by buying a TS-564 for just 2500, and then gradually buy TR-004s or TL-D800Cs as needed, and finally the TR-002 (buy the TR-002 last, because theoretically the previous ones are already enough). And by then, you might even be able to buy 26T or even 28T hard drives for the same price~~.
Comparing them like this, if we look solely at hard drive space expansion capability and cost-effectiveness, how can Synology compete with QNAP?
Note: You can also choose a NAS with more bays (such as 8 bays or more) to improve expansion capability. Of course, the price will definitely be more expensive, so this depends on your own financial situation.
My Real-Life Case Study
I currently have 2 setups (due to historical reasons, this expansion solution wasn't out yet back then, so I had to resort to the suboptimal choice of buying a new NAS for expansion~~):
TS453Bmini + 1 TR-004 + 1 TL-D800C
The TS453Bmini also has four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, and can also plug in 2 TR-004s + 1 TL-D800C + 1 TR-002, so I can still expand by 1 TR-004 + 1 TR-002 = 6 3.5-inch drive bays.
TVS-951N + 2 TR-004s
The TVS-951N also has four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, and can also plug in 2 TR-004s + 1 TL-D800C + 1 TR-002, so I can still expand by 1 TL-D800C + 1 TR-002 = 10 3.5-inch drive bays, leaving plenty of room for expansion. In total, the 2 setups can still be expanded by 16 3.5-inch hard drives. I'll wait a couple of years for hard drive prices to drop before doing another round of upgrades~.
Note: Previously, I actually had TVS-951N + 2 TR-004s + 1 TL-D800C. Later, seeing that the TS453Bmini was idle, I migrated the TL-D800C over. Now, I've added a newly purchased TR-004 with four 22T hard drives.
(Bonus Chapter 2) QNAP TR-004 Initialization
Adding a TR-004 to expand capacity on QNAP is very easy (the steps for the TL-D800C are the same, just with more hard drives). Below are the steps I used this time to initialize four 22T hard drives with the TR-004, recorded below for your reference:
After optimization, the next step is to create a shared folder and associate it with the newly added volume:
Afterword
In fact, whether it's QNAP, Synology, or any other brand, if you need to expand capacity, you can follow this line of thinking when purchasing (if the brand itself doesn't support this method, there's nothing you can do. Actually, if you think about it, this method might affect the sales of the NAS itself, so it takes real courage to fully open up the USB port expansion capability. Kudos to QNAP).
The reason I chose QNAP is simply that between the two professional NAS brands, QNAP and Synology, QNAP is much more cost-effective (actually, talking about cost-effectiveness just means being broke~). And if you factor in the advantage of expansion storage, QNAP is simply unbeatable. The key is that nowadays, QNAP's mid-range and high-end devices easily come with 4 USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports. Even if you connect drive enclosures, you can connect a lot of them. For example, with my current TS-453Bmini, besides being connected to a TR-004 and a TL-D800C, it is also connected to 3 RAID-supporting drive enclosures (via a USB 3.0 hub, the one emitting blue light in the bottom left corner):
So why I have always been a die-hard fan of QNAP is because the ”cost-performance ratio” is just too high~. Moreover, QNAP's after-sales service is also very good. There were a few times when I had issues upgrading the firmware, and they were all resolved directly by QNAP's after-sales engineers via remote support after I opened a case. This also made me very satisfied (it reminds me of over 10 years ago when I also worked in F5 400 hotline after-sales support).
Note 1: Many people say that QNAP's system is not user-friendly, but personally, I feel that although the interface is not as good-looking as Synology's (Synology's interface is very clean, while QNAP's interface always feels a bit low~), in terms of functionality, as long as you are willing to tinker, everything you need is there (for those who have used F5 and A10 load balancers, you can think of Synology as F5 and QNAP as A10). Furthermore, QNAP's hardware advantage at the same price point is simply too massive (strong CPU performance, very generous with various interfaces, such as the number of USB ports involved this time, and no speed limits or anything when connecting third-party USB hard drive enclosures, which is truly very generous), so I don't mind the interface being a bit ugly.
Note 2: As for stability, I have bought about 4 QNAP NAS devices in total. Except for the first TS-110 which had a broken fan (it still worked, just got hot in summer), the TS-251+ currently dedicated as a PT downloader, the TS-453Bmini, the TVS-951N, plus 2 TR-004s (making it 3 including the newly purchased one), and 1 TL-D800C, have all been used for many years. So far, none of them have had any hardware issues (though there were some software issues caused by firmware upgrades, which were all resolved by opening cases with after-sales support). Therefore, personally, I am very confident in QNAP's quality.
P.S. 3: I finally finished writing this article. Actually, I hadn't planned on writing it at first because the core content is quite simple, and I felt it wasn't enough to warrant writing an article. However, because I recently bought a new hard drive and have been migrating data these past few days, I thought I'd just record it to churn out an article. I didn't expect that to explain it clearly, I'd have to cite various sources, and it just kept getting longer and longer~~~. But now that it's written, I still hope it can help friends with similar needs, even though I feel the target audience for this article is very, very small...