 All right, let's get into some of your questions. And really, the thing, the place that I think would be good to start is not which Synology, but what drive configuration is the right one for your Synology? Because I think answering that question is going to help us answer which, or help inform us as to which disk station we want to get. Because once you know how many drives you want, then you know how many bays to buy. Listener James kicks us off here and says, I just pre-ordered two 5-bay Synology disk station 1520 pluses and I ordered 12 8TB drives. One NAS will be used for video storage and archiving. The other NAS will be for network backups of a handful of Macs on the network and maybe surveillance station if I can figure out an automated way to get that footage from one of my cameras. When I went on to Synology's raid calculator page, I was overwhelmed by the different raid options. Could you help me focus on the couple that might make the most sense for my use cases? Are there other options I should take into account when getting all of this set up? Yeah. So the 1520 plus is one of the many Synology units that supports what's called SHR, Synology Hybrid Raid. You're going to want to make sure that you understand what this is and whether or not you want it. It provides some flexibility that you may like down the road. Specifically, Synology Hybrid Raid lets you use drives of different sizes at the same time and maximizing the capacity of your Synology volume based on those drives. So my feeling, the way I run things, I won't run a Synology that I can't use SHR on because it's really great to be able to slowly upgrade my drive sizes and start taking advantage of the new sizes before I have drives of all one size. Again, it's easy to start with drives of all one size, and it's probably the way many of us will start, but that's the other beauty of SHR. You don't have to. If you've got drives of different sizes, put them in, and it will maximize them, which is a great thing. Is everyone here using SHR? John, are you using SHR on yours? Yes. Great. Jeff, now, Jeff, you've got a 2-bay unit. I know I'm jumping ahead a little, but have you configured it as SHR? I did, and I did that even though I was getting two drives of the same size. Rabbit, hold for a second. Sure. I bought the same drives, but I didn't buy them at the same time on purpose because I didn't want them coming from the same batch. That's super smart. We've talked about this on the show. We've talked about it because I've done this. When I get drives from the same batch, they fail at the same time when they're in use for the same amount of time. It's amazing, but literally within weeks of each other, they will start failing. Yeah, that was smart, Jeff. Good advice. I have to confess, I don't know if I'm using SHR or not. I think I may be because of that brief discussion we had in the pre-show about I bought a drive and it was incompatible, I think because it was too small. If someone does buy the drives of different sizes and to start, then they want to put their smaller drives in first, correct? Well, if you're just starting out, you can put them all in at once and it will figure it out. But there is a limitation based on the way the Synology Hybrid RAID works that when you go to add a drive to an existing volume, it needs to be at least as big as the largest drive in the volume. It can be bigger, but it has to be at least as big as the drive in there. Jeff, you were smart. Even if you wind up going with a 2-bay unit, you were smart, I think, to set up SHR because one great part about Synology is if you, for example, decide to upgrade to the 1520 plus that James talks about here, you can take your two drives out of there, put them in the 1520 plus, and all of your settings, your volume, your data, everything is now running on the new Synology, except you have three extra drive bays because that's a 5-bay unit. So that's why I recommend, one of the reasons I recommend SHR for sure. And I really, well, case in point, I have a Synology 1621XS plus sitting downstairs. I tested it, and now it sits in the box. Why? It doesn't support SHR. It's got a killer processor in it. It's really built for, it's like that crossover unit between prosumer and enterprise, and some of the enterprise units are built to just do RAID and not SHR at all, and that's this one. But I'd love to have that CPU running, but I don't know that I want to inherit a non-SHR capable unit. And it's a software limitation, obviously, if the processor's there, it could do it. So, Dave, could you go back to that, what you said just before that, though? So, because he set up SHR, he can switch from a 2-bay, throw those drives into a 4 or 5-bay 8-bay unit, and it's not going to format those drives, it's going to take them and spread them across? Correct. Now, that would also work even if he used regular RAID. It just means that when you take those two drives and put them in the upgraded unit, or the larger unit, you then still have to use drives of the same size. You're limited by your initial decision if you didn't choose SHR. Yeah. Okay. And depending on what drives you're using, that may not be a big deal, but if you have the option, the flexibility that goes along with SHR, why not take advantage of it? Yeah. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. What size drives are we each using in our disk stations? I'll start because I can get there quickly, unless you happen to know, Jeff, which you probably do. You know, I think I put 8-kit drives in mine. I need to go look just to be sure, you know, because you pop them in and then you're just done. This is somewhere in the interface, right? I mean, I can look in the interface and see. Yeah. If you launch Storage Manager on your disk station, you can look in the HDD SSD section and you'll see that that's where you'll see your drives are. And so I can tell by looking at mine that I have one 18-terabyte drive that is my hot spare, so it's not in use. I have a 16 and then that is in use along with 314. So I've got 314s and a 16. It does mean, because I don't have a drive, another 16-terabyte drive, it does mean that there are two terabytes that are unable to be used because they can't be... The way the Synology works, you have the... It's set up that you have fault tolerance of one drive. So one of my drives can fail. I don't lose any data. It doesn't even go down. I just take the drive out. I replace it with one or it replaces it with the hot spare, which is a beautiful thing to just have that at the ready. And then it goes into the volume. But because of that fault tolerance, I'm not using the extra two terabytes on my 16 yet. But when my next 14-terabyte drive dies and it pulls the 18 in, well, I'll start using the benefits of the 16. And then I'll have two terabytes on the 18 that are waiting to be matched by whatever I put in there next. And that's sort of how I encourage myself to keep the size of my volume growing over time. And that has worked out fairly well for me. That's a nice incentive. Yeah, it's just a nice way to make it work. And I was right. It turns out that I did pop two eights into mine. Cool. Cool. Yeah, there you go. So here's the other beautiful thing. You can just type... Once you log into your interface, all you have to do is type the word storage and it goes, oh yeah, storage manager, click on that. It is so... It brings you to where you want to go. You don't have to hunt and peck forever in the GUI. It turns out I have three terabyte drives. I've got an open bay. Guess what I'm going to be buying soon. There you go.