PC Tech Thread

Time to expand the storage in the NAS.

I'm running a Synology DS1817+ which has 8 HDD bays, in those are 8 x 4TB HDD that provide a RAID 6 21.7TB volume.

I'm at 72% used, and 70% is my trigger for "best think about expanding my storage volume" and 80% used is my "oh fuck, it's going to die" threshold.

The HDD I've chosen is the Toshiba N300 16TB HDWG31GUZSVA ( https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/toshiba-internal-hard-drives-n300/ ) as this is a very standard HDD (none of that SMR stuff) with an incredible long life expected (1M hours between failures = longer than my expected life).

8 x 16TB drives in RAID 6 should yield 96TB of usable space. I'm already using 15.6TB of space, so I'll be at 16.25% used after expansion.

The process is an annoying one:

1. Backup to an external 18TB HDD.
   
2. Perform a data scrub (this is not a delete, it verifies the RAID data and performs error correction and will guarantee that the parity files are all good).
   
3. Deactivate 1 drive in the RAID 6 set, power off, replace the 3.6TB drive with an 18TB drive, power on, silence alerts and let it rebuild the RAID.
   
4. Repeat #3 until all drives are replaced (another 7 times).
   
5. Expand volume from 21.8TB to 96TB.
   
   

I've managed to locate all 8 drives from different suppliers so will hopefully vary the production batch and their environmental conditions, and so have hit the credit card. The drives alone will cost £2k.

Last time I upgraded the storage to the current 21.6TB was in 2016... I'm hoping for a similar time period until the next one... meaning that these will amortise over 7 years, or roughly £23 per month to have 96TB of storage at home.

The first HDDs should arrive a week from now.