#SYNOLOGY DRIVE CALCULATOR HOW TO#

It was time to look at the storage we’re using, and see what we can throw away. Since the initial installation only 9 months ago, we’ve used 81% of the available space which sends the Synology into high alert status. Scanned photos from our physical photo albums.Our ripped DVD collection allowing the Synology to be a PLEX server.My audio files from the podcasts – both the published MP3s and the raw audio input.Steve’s video files – both his completed videos but also all of the raw source data.Financial and medical data that we don’t want stored on any of our computers and definitely not in the cloud.We have several categories of data on our Synology:

#SYNOLOGY DRIVE CALCULATOR HOW TO#

The problem to be solved is figuring out how I used up nearly all of my storage in only 9 months, and how to gain some breathing room without selling a kidney.

The bottom line is that with my 20TB of purchased drives, I get just 14.54TB of usable space of my 20TB worth of raw disk. I have to admit right here that I went with SHR because Steven Goetz told me to. It demonstrates the storage with either RAID 5, or with their own Synology Hybrid RAID, or SHR. It’s actually pretty fun to play with, but it’s also rather depressing. Synology provides a RAID storage calculator so you can virtually build your array with the drives you can afford, and then see how much usable storage you’ll effectively get. In order to keep track of where the data is on the five drives and keep it striped across them to provide the fault tolerance we talked about, you need some space dedicated to run those calculations, and that space is called parity. In order to be able to have a disk go bad and still have all of your data, by definition my 20TB of purchased disks could never give me more than 16TB. The word “inexpensive” is in the name because you don’t have to buy one giant, expensive drive, you can buy lots of smaller drives and create one giant volume in the array. This is done with a technology called RAID 5 which stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. It’s not really a backup, but a disk can go bad in your array and all of your data is still safe. One of the main purposes of having a NAS is to have data protection. 20TB sounds like a massive amount of storage, but you don’t actually get nearly that much. I bought the DS1019+, which is a 5-bay unit, and populated it with five 4TB Western Digital drives. Synology RAID Calculator Demonstrates 4TB in 5 Slots Gets 16TB of Available SpaceĪbout 9 months ago I bought a Synology Disk Station which is a network attached storage device, also known as a NAS.

Synology drive calculator