Come to find out, nope, probably not. My good friend Jim Donahoe (blog|twitter)was very nice to tell me that he’s running 100TB of storage in his house across multiple Synology devices. I also know for a fact that another good friend, David Klee (blog|twitter), utilizes enough storage in his house to help heat his home during winter in Nebraska. I’m no where close! You might have guessed that I’ve added storage to my home network. 18TB of it to be more precise.
The real question is, what am I going to do with 18TB of storage at home? What would you do with it or even 100TB?
Disclaimer: I got a Synology DS920+ from Synology on loan in exchange for reviewing it, playing around with it and writing some blogs. Honestly I’ve wanted one for years but never got around to picking one up so I’m really excited to have this opportunity. It came with 2 380GB Synology NVMe SSD drives to be used for caching. I purchased my own hard drives so that if or when I have to return the unit I can keep the drives to ensure my data stays with me. Plus, it never hurts to have some spare hard drives laying around. Yes, I know, I’m paranoid.
Now, back to my question. Why am I doing this?
For a couple of different reasons actually.
- One thing that I really want is to do some hands on work with storage pools and volumes. While I know the fundamentals, having this DS920 physically on my network loaded with drives gives me the chance to carve out storage pools and volumes.
- This also gives me the change to work with the Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR).
- Backups, backups, backups. With now 18TB of raw usable storage for distribution, I can ensure all of my computers within my house are backed up. I won’t get the full 18TB when using RAID, but that’s still a good chunk of drive space.
- You can use certain Synology units as Virtual Machine managers. While I can use Azure to facilitate this, sometimes I don’t want to mess with remembering to deallocate VM’s when I’m done with them. This will also let me work with iSCSI targets and attempt some VMWare migrations along with some other VMWare related ideas.
- Synology package manager also comes with a slew of useful packages (like a VPN server, Docker, Backup managers, etc) that will offer up some flexibility in testing things as situations come up. I’m really interested in the VPN capabilities as well as the ability to backup the entire array to cloud storage.
I’m really looking forward to being able to learn some things about Synology as well as provide valuable backup options for my various laptops and workstations.
If you are curious, here are some general specifications for the unit:
- Model – DS920+
- CPU – 4 core 2.0Ghz (base) Intel Celeron J4125
- Memory – 4GB expandable to 8GB
- Drive Bays – 4
- M.2 Drive Slots – 2 (NVMe SSD)
- Ethernet – 2 x RJ-45 1GbE LAN Port (link aggregation / failover)
Stay tuned for future posts about getting everything setup as well as the drives that I have installed. I am planning on blogging about how I’m using this device and what you can do with it.
Do you have a Synology device in your home? What do you use it for? Leave a comment and let me know!
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