I bought a Synology 1522+ last week from B&H Photo with 4x 16TB drives. Arrived last Friday and I spent the weekend setting it up. It went fairly smoothly, but figuring out what type of RAID to set up took some time, as I am a rookie with all off this. I eventually went with a SRH (Raid 5) configuration. It should provide hard drive space for a long time for all of my digital life and data. And there is a lot of it.

I had a Drobo before and it worked well… mostly. But it did have some connection issues. I learned last week that Drobo went bankrupt and shut down. Not good for a storage provider. You want to partner with companies with solid products and longevity. “Bankruptcy” is one of the last words you want to hear about your legacy media and data storage solution. Today, I was able to connect the old Drobo to an old MacBook Pro (newer Macs won’t work and there is no more Drobo support). I am in the process of transferring 20,000+ photos, 10,000+ documents, and hundreds of ebooks to the new Synology. It is taking some time, but going well. So far I have been impressed with the Synology. Quiet, smooth, efficient, and capable.

Next I will be looking an online backup (or two) so I will never again find myself having all of my family’s digital data on one potentially bankrupted company’s products (and all companies have that bankruptcy potential). Nevermore! Nevermore!