Preface

For general user demand analysis on NAS, please refer to my other article (Tips and tricks series on how to choose the best NAS for you), I won't go into details here. The main target of this article is people who need a lot of storage space on NAS, including but not limited to: PT players with a hobby of collecting (like me?), photographers and videographers, video editors and producers, game developers, etc.

In fact, for many years (at least 7 years), I have been exploring large-capacity storage solutions for families (the hard disk capacity was too small at that time, and I started buying in bulk from 6T, which is not as good as the current 22T starting point). Friends who see this may be confused, what is there to explore? Isn't it just buying a multi-bay NAS and then buying hard disks? In theory, it is true, but in reality, it is not that simple. It is necessary to strike a balance between scalability and cost-effectiveness. To explain it clearly, we need to talk about the conventional NAS solution first, so that we can compare it and explain why I chose QNAP instead of Synology.

Note: The brands mentioned in the article are only Synology and QNAP, because I have only used these two brands, and the prices are all found in the brand's own stores on JD.com. It is just for the convenience of comparison and to increase practicality. I don't mean to advertise. You can use the ideas below to find similar solutions of your favorite brand according to your actual needs.

NAS Solution Discussion

NAS Purchase Plan 1 (Regular Edition)

For example, if you want to buy a NAS to store your home data (photos, videos, work files, etc.), you can buy the cheapest dual-bay NAS from Synology (such as DS223) and two 4T hard drives, which will be enough for most people to use for a long time:

The total price (including 2 4T hard drives): 2299+599*2=3497, which is acceptable to most people.

You can also buy a 4-bay NAS directly, but the price of a 4-bay NAS is more expensive than a 2-bay one, such as the Synology 4-bay NAS (DS423):

The total price (including 4 4T hard drives): 3199+599*4=5595. Most people can afford it if they grit their teeth.

In fact, excluding the hard drive cost, from another perspective, only looking at the price per drive slot of "NAS price/number of drives", the 2-drive Synology is "2299/2=1149.5", and the 4-drive Synology is "3199/4=799.75". It can also be seen that the 4-drive Synology's price per drive slot is more cost-effective.

NAS Purchase Plan 2 (Rich Version)

However, if you suddenly become addicted to a hobby that consumes space quickly, such as downloading movies, you will find that even a 16TB (4 TB, not in RAID) hard drive will be full in a short time. What should you do? Even if you buy a bigger hard drive, you have to copy the content on the existing NAS before replacing it. But where can you copy it to?

Should I buy another NAS? And then another NAS and 4 hard drives? But what if it is full later? Therefore, this solution of only considering buying a new NAS + hard drives to expand storage space is not scalable.

Some friends may ask, can I invest a little more at once, buy a multi-bay NAS, and then spend a lot of money to buy the most expensive hard drive at the moment? Of course you can! The following is a direct 8-bay NAS:

8 22T enterprise-class hard disks:

Total price: 8899+3099*8=33691, with a huge space of 176T.

Logically speaking, for rich people, this solution is very efficient and can be used for a long time, but it is not friendly to ordinary people. It is obviously not suitable for ordinary families and does not have the cost-effectiveness that ordinary people require, so I skipped it directly. But I actually envy this solution, but unfortunately I don’t have money~.

(Extra Chapter 1) Tips for Buying Mechanical Hard Drives

In addition to NAS, the price of the hard drive also determines the cost of the entire solution. As the capacity of a single disk continues to increase, the capacity of mechanical hard drives is increasing year by year. However, in theory, at any point in time, there will be a hard drive with the most cost-effective and easily accepted capacity. For example, now:

Obviously, buying a 4T hard drive is the most cost-effective, as its capacity is double that of a 2T hard drive, and its price is only 160 more than a 2T hard drive; and a 6T hard drive is only 2T more than a 4T hard drive, but its price is 400 more expensive.

So theoretically, even if it is a multi-drive NAS (4 or 8 drive slots), if there is no special need, it is not a good choice to buy hard drives to fill all the drive slots at once. You can buy one first and use it, and then buy more when the capacity is not enough. At that time, you may be able to buy a larger 2T or more capacity hard drive for the same price. After all, the price of a single TB of mechanical hard drives will only get cheaper (except for the need for multiple drives for RAID).

For me, the last time I bought one was when I bought 14T:

I held out for more than 3 years before buying it this month (I finally waited until the price of 22T hard drives came down. In fact, it was even cheaper a few months ago, but it has increased a bit recently, which is not good), so I bought 4 22T hard drives at once this week, which is equivalent to 8T more for 1 hard drive and 32T more for 4 hard drives. This is the result of 3 years of waiting:

As for why I want to buy 4 at once, it’s because I like to merge all the hard drives into one large volume for easier file management. It’s actually not cost-effective, and I don’t recommend this method.

Here's a joke: I once attended a channel meeting held by Hitachi Storage. When introducing Hitachi storage solutions, the engineer mentioned many pain points of storage for small and medium-sized enterprises, including: long data migration time, difficulty in online capacity expansion, and many other points. I was deeply touched. After the meeting, I chatted with the engineer and asked him if Hitachi had a solution suitable for families. As a result, he said that my scale has exceeded that of many small and medium-sized enterprises, and there are only commercial solutions, with quotes of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions. I was speechless. Since then, I have been looking for a solution suitable for the family environment that can support large-capacity storage expansion.

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Another thing: Let me talk about data migration. It is often said on the Internet that the most efficient way to migrate data is to directly send the hard drive by express delivery. This is indeed true. Most people don’t know the pain of transferring a large amount of data through the network. Since I only have a 1000M backbone network (after all, the house was renovated 13 years ago), if I transfer 11T of data (large files) through the network, it will take at least 27 hours. For example, the time it took to migrate 11T of data is as follows:

Not to mention that last year, in order to hold on for another year, we migrated more than 30T of data through the Internet. God knows how long it took, and I was so worried about power outages during the transfer.

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What are the ways to expand NAS storage space?

I mentioned earlier that expanding capacity by purchasing a new NAS is not scalable. So, without purchasing a new NAS, what are the ways to expand capacity?

Economical method: hard disk cabinet (box)

This is actually quite good in terms of cost performance. Take a 5-slot hard disk cabinet that supports RAID as an example:

The 5-slot RAID NAS is only 859 yuan, isn't it much cheaper than the 4-slot NAS? I also adopted this solution in the early stage. The biggest advantage of this solution is that it is cheap, but everyone should pay attention that the price of 5-slot RAID is generally the most suitable. If it is 8-slot, the price will go up:

Just because there are 3 more disk slots, the price has more than doubled, which is enough to buy a new NAS. It is not cost-effective at all.

The advantage of this solution is that it is cheap, but it also has many disadvantages:
1. The USB interface is generally USB3.1 Gen 1, but some NAS already provides USB3.1 Gen2 interface or even higher speed, so the speed bottleneck lies in the hard disk cabinet.
2. The hard disk cabinet generates quite a lot of heat. I have used several hard disk cabinets, especially those with 5 slots. They are all a little hot to the touch when reading and writing. I guess it is because the structure is too compact and the heat dissipation is not good. I don’t know how much impact it will have on the life of the hard disk.
3. Power supply is a problem. If the power supply of the hard disk cabinet is unstable, it is unknown how much impact it will have on the life of the hard disk.
4. This is the most critical issue. The external RAID device is connected to the NAS via the USB interface, and the SMART information cannot be seen on the NAS (the online statement is that it is related to the chip used in the hard disk cabinet and the sata-usb solution, but it is difficult to achieve in reality). This is the most important reason why I later replaced the storage with a NAS brand for expansion: I need to know in advance when there is a problem with the hard disk and transfer the data.

Of course, I am still using the hard drives and third-party hard drive cabinets that I replaced before to store less important data, because I am not so heartbroken 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 the safest way in my opinion, because as long as the NAS brand itself is of high quality, then there will be no problem with the quality of its expanded storage.

In terms of usage, compared with using a third-party hard drive cabinet, the only disadvantage is that it is more expensive, and the advantage is that none of the four disadvantages faced by using a hard drive cabinet mentioned above are faced (again, the NAS brand itself must be strong).

Below, I will take Synology and QNAP as examples to compare the total price and expansion capabilities of the official expansion storage devices and the minimum required NAS models of the two brands for your reference. In actual use, you can use this idea to find corresponding solutions on the NAS brand you use.

Synology

Extended storage model

First, let’s take a look at Synology’s official expansion devices DX517 and DX1222:

There are 5-disk slots and 12-disk slots, which is pretty good and better than QNAP's 4-disk slots and 8-disk slots.

Supported NAS Models

Then check the applicable models (there are requirements for Synology NAS models):

Economical solution

If we want to calculate the price, we will take the cheapest NAS model that supports DX517 as an example, and choose the DS723+ in the picture above (this is the lowest-end and cheapest model that supports DX517 on sale, and it has two hard disk slots...):

Plus DX517:

4099+4049=8148 (excluding hard disk), in exchange for 2+5=7 disk slots expansion performance. After checking, DS723+ can only connect one DX517:

I don't want to research it anymore. It's too expensive, I can't afford it, and it's totally not cost-effective (compared with QNAP which I will talk about below).

QNAP

Extended storage model

Then comes today's protagonist, QNAP's extended storage. There are three common USB-type interfaces as follows (there are other types of interfaces, but most people don't have access to them, so I won't go into details):

Let’s first look at the prices of several expansion devices.
TR-002 price:

TR-004 price:

TL-D800C:

Note: TR-004 is only 540 more than TR-002, but it has 2 more disk slots, which is very cost-effective, so the following article will take TR-004 as an example.

Supported NAS Models

Take TR-004 as an example to see the requirements for NAS models:

The red box indicates the 2-slot models I saw on sale at QNAP's JD flagship store. The TS-216 is the cheapest, the TS-262C is a little more expensive, and the TS-264C is a little more expensive:

Economical plan (not recommended)

Since TS-216 is the cheapest, we will use this model as an example. Let’s first see how much expansion storage TS-216 supports:

Only one TR-004 can be connected, and the cost is: 1499+1860=2359, which can be exchanged for the expansion performance of up to 6 (2+4) disk slots. Although it has one less disk slot than Synology's 7 disk slots, the price is reduced by 8148-2359=5789, which is 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 its scalability is much worse than the other solution, and the price is not much different.

Cost-effective method (recommended for general use)

This time I chose the NAS model TS-262C, which is 500 more expensive than the TS-216, but it has much higher expandability:

TS-262C can support TL-D800C, and since TS-262C has two USB 3.2 Gen2 (that is, USB 3.1 Gen2, I hate this naming), there are two options:
1. Can connect 2 TR-004, cost 1999 + 1860 2=5719, which gives an expansion capacity of 10 (2+4+4) disk slots.
2. You can connect 1 TR-004 and 1 TL-D800C, spending 1999+1860+3600=7459, and get 14 (2+4+8) disk slots expansion capacity (compared to Synology's 8148, which has 7 disk slots expansion capacity and doubles the number of disks, it goes without saying which one is more cost-effective~). Based on the current 22T hard drive: 14 22=308T, which is more than enough for most people.

The highest expansion capability plan (recommended for non-general use)

In fact, we can see that the biggest problem of TS-262C is that it only supports 2 USB 3.2 Gen2. If the NAS can support 3 USB 3.2 Gen2 interfaces, it can connect 2 TR-004 + 1 TL-D800C, such as TS-564:

It has 5 USB ports (1 USB2.0, 2 USB 3.2 Gen 1, 2 USB3.2 Gen 2)


Therefore, TS-564 can theoretically connect 1 TR-002 + 2 TR-004 + 1 TL-D800C, and the price is 2500 + 1320 + 1860 2+3600=11140, which means 21 3.5-inch disk slots + 2 2.5-inch disk slots. The 2.5-inch disk slots can be used to insert SSD hard disks as system disk RAID 1, which is not included. What is the concept of 21 3.5-inch disk slots? If we calculate based on the current 22T hard disk, 21 22=462T, the hard disk is free! Moreover, this expansion does not need to be done in one step. You can buy a TS-564 at the beginning, which is only 2500, and then gradually buy TR-004 or TL-D800C and finally TR-002 according to your needs (TR-002 is bought last, because theoretically the previous ones are enough). At that time, you may be able to buy a 26T or even 28T hard disk at the same price.

In this comparison, if we only consider the hard disk space expansion capability and cost-effectiveness, how does Synology compare with QNAP?

Note: NAS itself can also choose higher disk slots (such as 8 disk slots or more) to improve expansion capabilities. Of course, the price will definitely be more expensive. This choice depends on your respective financial strength.

My actual case

I now have 2 sets (due to historical reasons, this expansion plan was not available at the time, so I could only buy a new NAS to expand the capacity～～):

1. TS453Bmini + 1 TR-004 + 1 TL-D800C

TS453Bmini also has 4 USB3.2 Gen 1 ports, and can also accommodate 2 TR-004 + 1 TL-D800C + 1 TR-002, so I can also expand 1 TR-004 + 1 TR-002 = 6 3.5 disk slots.

2. TVS-951N + 2 TR-004

TVS-951N also has 4 USB3.2 Gen 1 ports, and can also be plugged in 2 TR-004+1 TL-D800C+1 TR-002, so I can also expand 1 TL-D800C+1 TR-002=10 3.5 hard disk slots, which is a lot of room for expansion. 2 sets can also expand a total of 16 3.5 hard disks, and wait for the hard disk price to drop in 2 years before upgrading again~.

Note: Previously I had a TVS-951N + 2 TR-004s + 1 TL-D800C. Later I saw that the TS453Bmini was idle, so I migrated the TL-D800C over. Now I have added a newly bought TR-004 with 4 22T hard drives.

(Bonus 2) QNAP TR-004 Initialization

It is very easy to add TR-004 to expand the capacity on QNAP (the steps for TL-D800C are the same, just with more hard drives). Here are the steps I took to initialize 4 22TB hard drives using TR-004. I will record them below for your reference:

After the optimization is complete, create a shared folder and associate it with the newly added volume:

Afterword

In fact, whether it is QNAP, Synology or any other brand, if you need to expand capacity, you can buy it according to this idea (if the brand itself does not support this method, there is no way. In fact, if you think about it carefully, this method may affect the sales of the NAS itself, so it takes courage to fully open up the USB port expansion capability. Thumbs up to QNAP).

The reason I chose QNAP is that between the two professional NAS brands, QNAP and Synology, QNAP is much more cost-effective (in fact, those who talk about cost-effectiveness are poor~), and if you take into account the advantage of expandable storage, QNAP is directly invincible. The key is that QNAP's mid-range and above devices now have 4 USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports. Even if they are connected to hard disk cabinets, they can connect a lot. For example, my current TS453Bmini, in addition to a TR-004 and a TL-D800C, also connects to 3 hard disk cabinets that support RAID (through the USB3.0 hub, the one with blue light in the lower left corner):

So why I have always been a fan of QNAP is because the "cost performance ratio" is too high. In addition, QNAP's after-sales service is also very good. There were a few times when I had problems with the firmware upgrade, and I opened a case, and then QNAP's after-sales engineers directly solved it remotely, which also made me very satisfied (reminded me of more than 10 years ago, I also did after-sales service for F5 400 phones).

Another 1: Many people say that QNAP system is not easy to use, but I personally think that although the interface is not as good-looking as Synology's (Synology's interface is very refreshing, QNAP's interface always feels a bit low-end ~), but in terms of functions, as long as you are willing to work hard, you can get everything you need (for those who have used F5 and A10 load balancing, you can think of Synology as F5 and QNAP as A10), and QNAP's hardware advantages at the same price are really too great (CPU performance is strong, and various interfaces are not stingy at all. For example, the number of USB interfaces involved this time, and there is no speed limit when connecting to a third-party USB hard drive cabinet, which is really very conscientious), so I don’t mind the ugly interface.

Another 2: As for stability, I have bought 4 NAS from QNAP, except the first TS-110 whose fan was broken (it can be used, but it gets very hot in the summer), now I have the TS-251+, TS-453Bmini, TVS-951N, which are dedicated download machines for PT, plus 2 TR-004 (3 including the new one), and 1 TL-D800C. All of them have been used for many years, and none of them have had any hardware problems so far (there have been some soft problems caused by upgrading the firmware, but they were all solved through opening cases with after-sales service), so personally, I am still very confident in the quality of QNAP.

Another 3: I finally wrote this article. Actually, I hadn’t thought about writing it because the core content is actually very simple and I don’t think it’s good enough to write an article. But I just bought a new hard drive and was migrating data these days, so I thought I’d just write it down and write an article. I didn’t expect that in order to make it clear, I would have to quote a lot of classics. The more I wrote, the more I wrote. But now that I’ve written it, I still hope it can help friends with the same needs, although I think the target readership of this article is too small. . .