Upgrading by replacing your drives one at a time will likely get you where you want to go. When I upgraded my 6Tb drives in my 920+ to 12Tb drives it took about a week.
Yeah, I wanted to and tbh that was my first approach, but I'm already at 16TB drives in there, even if I shell out a ton of money for 24TB drives I'd only add 33% more storage, so I think I have to look at either a bigger box or some sort of expansion.
Will that sounds like the perfect "Gee I have to spend this money on something bigger and better" reason!
That's... A lot of storage. I'd say your options are, in no particular order:
Failing that you could just have a bit of a purge? If not straight deleting stuff, move things onto an external drive.
You could also try deduping. There's a script that'll add any drive to the internal "supported" list and also enable dedupe on mechanical drives. The savings were minimal on mine but you might have more luck. https://github.com/007revad/Synology_enable_Deduplication
This is the answer. Just buy bigger drives, and replace them one at a time and let them resize.
Anyone saying to buy expansion units is wrong. It works like ZFS or btrfs, and very seamlessly. I've upgraded my drives 4 times with zero issues.
You can use an expansion unit DX517 to add more dives or upgrade existing to larger ones if you use some form of Raid/SHR.
The swap-drive-and-rebuild-array route can take it's sweet time.
When I was following Synology communities closer, the common wisdom was that the expansion units weren't great in either performance, stability or cost, and you were better off buying a new, bigger unit and then selling your old one used to recoup the cost difference.
I'm also in the same position, I have a DS918+ that is full. It's also 6 years old and probably on the tail end of getting software updates so I'm weighing my choices...
What everybody else said plus
https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/migration
Synology will migrate all of your data from one device to another if you just want to get a completely new device.
Well, it's in my back pocket if it comes to that...
There are expansions for Synology: https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/accessories?tab=nas&category=expansion_units
Probably most important is the 5-drive DX517 that will definitely work with your 1821+ https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DX517#specs
Thanks, I saw some of those, the prices seem... extreme for what is essentially a JBOD enclosure. It's definitely there as a backup, but I'm hoping for something that won't be that much.... but maybe I'm dreaming
Just in case it matters for you, the max single volume size for your NAS is 108TB
~~I think you'd just have to buy another Synology with more bays.~~
I guess not
Literally on the product page, first result when I googled the model number:
DS1821+ comes equipped with 8 bays and can scale up to 18 bays with 2 DX517 expansion units as your data needs grow.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1821+
Honest question: did you do any investigation on your own, or post here first?
Hey, thanks for the mean answer.
Yes. I had seen that, I saw the price too. I saw on Reddit that people had had luck using QNAP expansions, or just anything that supports JBOD. I thought I'd ask here because people are usually nice and may have creative ideas. Note other people here giving answers that don't have the attitude.
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!