Online Accounts 2025: The Second NAS is an Upgrade (Premium)

After a lot of deliberation, I decided to go with a four-bay solution for the second NAS, which will also have two larger 16 TB HDDs to start. So I'll be bringing the first, smaller unit to Mexico City once I get the second NAS configured and both of them syncing with each other correctly.
? One NAS, two NAS
This may end up being my defining personal technology project of 2025, but I feel like I've spent most of the time waiting and occasionally reconfirming my choices. I was probably always going to go with Synology, and I knew a two-bay NAS would be fine. But I was initially unsure which processor architecture--Intel, AMD, or Realtek--made the most sense.

After a bit of deliberation, the Intel-based Synology DS224+ quickly became the front-runner. And so when we returned home from Mexico in May, I ordered a DS224+ with two 12 TB HDDs and a 4 GB RAM module to upgrade the total RAM to its theoretical max of 6 GB. That experience was overwhelmingly successful and now I'm using it for pretty much everything on all my PCs, phones, and other devices.

Of course, the plan was always to get a second NAS, leave one of them in Pennsylvania, put the other in Mexico, and configure them to keep in sync. Among the questions was whether one of these NASes--the one I'll leave in PA, as we have more space--should have more than two drive bays, the maximum supported by the DS224+. Otherwise I would need to figure out an external drive solution to use for backup.
? It always comes down to money
As mentioned up top, I went back and forth on that one many times. We were in Mexico for most of July, and while we were there, I ran through the various options and their respective costs several times. And I could have gone either way, frankly. But in the end, there were three related factors that led to the direction I finally took. All of them are related to money.

First, all the NASes are more expensive now than they were in May, at least on Amazon: The DS224+ is roughly $50 more than it was when I bought the first one in May. This may or may not be tariff related, I have no idea, and it doesn't really matter.

The difference in price between the two-bay DS224+ and the four-bay Synology NAS, the DS423+, that I ended up ordering, was about $200, which is not insignificant but less than the price of a typical two-disk external backup solution.

And while I wasn't thinking about upgrading the hard drives, for whatever reason, 16 TB Synology HDDs are just $30 more than the 12 TB drives I had gotten for the first NAS, so I went with those as well.

In short, the NAS we keep in Pennsylvania was always going to have additional drives for local backup. These could be external or internal, it doesn't matter, but internal is "easier" in the sense that it will just be a single box and power supply. Given that, the four-bay DS423+ seemed to make sense. So that's what I ordered.

If you think back to the first NAS purchase, the total cost there was...