Synology DS223 or DS224+ or DS423 or DS423+, and SHR or RAID in our situation?

Hello ladies and gentlemen,

I am a beginner and clueless, can you help me? :)

We are looking to buy our first NAS for home office use in our own small business for two people. We want to use it on WIFI, cabling is difficult.

We don't want to use the NAS for watching movies, running apps etc.

We need a central data store that we can access from two laptops, and this data store backs up automatically to an external HDD and the cloud.

We work 80% of the time with documents, pdf, excel, images, music files, but we also edit 5-10 full HD, sometimes 4k videos per month.

The videos are copied to the laptop with an SD card, edited there and then uploaded to the NAS. I suppose editing directly on the NAS would be slow.

Currently we have about 2.8 TB of data, in the next 3-4 years we will have 6-7 TB.

It is important that the NAS and HDD are both quiet. So basically we wanted to go for DS223 or DS224+ with 8 TB WD RED PLUS HDD.

However, I read that 8-12 TB is significantly noisier than 6 TB, so we considered DS423 or DS423+.

However, due to budget, we would only fit 1 6 TB HDD at first, 1 6 TB after 6 months, 1 6 TB after 6 months, etc. That's the idea.

In this case, should I set SHR, SHR-2 or RAID?
Which combination will be quieter? DS223/DS224+ with 2 x 8 TB HDD or DS423/DS423+ with 4 x 6 HDD? WD RED PLUS. For me, the 2 bay NAS with 2 x 8 TB HDD would be enough, but if it's loud, I prefer the 4 bay with 4x6 TB.
Over WIFI (NAS in the same apartment as the laptop) what download and upload speeds can I expect? Right now I am downloading torrents at about 40 mb/sec. If I take it from pCloud or other cloud, 5-10-20 mb/sec. Will the NAS be faster?
Given the usage described above, do we need the + version or is it unnecessary? I think it is unnecessary, but what do you think?

Thanks a lot, sorry if it got long or complicated!

Regards!

4 comments

If u go with a 2bay you should go with 10tb or more. You wont be able to expand. SHR-2 is not worth it in a 4bay imo. Shr is the way to go, its optimized for the NAS and for expanding later. Maybe check some prizes to see what makes sense.
Wi-fi is entirely dependent on your network setup, it has nothing to do with your NAS. You hook up your NAS to your router and if it has wi-fi set up you would access it like anything else on your network.

I'd opt for the four bay, just make sure it's an Intel or AMD CPU (the "+" variants), none of the ARM CPU's (like the Realtek) .It's just too weak and you lose out on a lot of Synology apps because they have very limited options with the ARM CPU versions. Their "Active Backup for Business" app is excellent for backing up client PC's, but is not supported by the ARM CPU version, just as one example.

I'd start with much larger drives, better $/TB and last you longer without having to upgrade. Start with two of same capacity and format as SHR-1. You can then add other disks as needed, and give you one disk redundancy.

You can grab 18TB refurbished/recertified/used for $160-180. Visit serverpartdeals as they have a good reputation and 2 year warranty on used drives. Otherwise pay the premium for a new disk with 3 or 5 year warranty.

Hard drives make noise. In most cases in a small office environment it's no louder than other ambient noise. Otherwise set it up in a "server closet" just make sure it has plenty of ventilation, or opt for SSD's and pay that premium.

But lastly, don't forget about backups. Either an external drive that you connect periodically to backup your NAS, then store away from your primary NAS, or buy another NAS for backup purposes, or store it in the cloud.
- .It's just too weak and you lose out on a lot of Synology apps because t
  
  Thank you very much for your reply, but what exactly do you mean?".It's simply too weak, and it falls out of many Synology applications because...
  
  "As I wrote above I don't want to film, stream or dock. I want a plain office use where we store data, backup from there.
  
  That's it. One gets a bit of a feeling that the answerers didn't read the question.I just don't need all these features like plex and others.Do I need the plus version for this?
  
  I understand. If you want basic file storage and nothing else, sure, the ARM variant will work fine. But in that case, consider other options that are cheaper than Synology.
  
  But my point is if you're buying into Synology, you get tons of great apps from Synology that are very useful, but can't make use of many of them due to performance, limited RAM (just 2GB available for DS423) or just that they don't bother to compile for ARM.
  
  And if you ever do anything more than basic file storage, expect your general performance to be affected.
  
  It's like asking if a bicycle will get you to work and back. Sure it will do the job, but there's better options out there.