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 just over $900: $299 for the NAS, $269 each for the 12 TB HDDs, and then $22 for the Crucial 4 GB RAM module. This time around, the total was a bit under $1200: $519 for the NAS, $299 for each of the two 16 TB HDDs, and then $17 for the RAM module. Of course, I will need to get two more HDDs at some point for backups. And as described below, the DS224+ has an additional super power that I may avail myself of in the future too.

?️ DS423+ vs. DS224+

The DS224+ I already have and the DS423+ that’s on the way are both part of Synology’s home/small office-focused DiskStation+ series products, and neither is the very latest model in their respective category. But the advantages of the latest models are minor and unnecessary for my needs, and the additional costs are great. But the basics are the same.

Where the DS224+ has two HDD drive bays, the DS423+ has four HDD drive bays. But it also has two M.2 NVMe SSD slots, in the bottom of the NAS, which can be used as part of a drive array or as cache to improve performance. My experience with the DS224+ tells me that performance is not an issue today. But it may become an issue in time, and so I would considering adding SSDs for cache at that point. This is the additional super power noted above.

I could have stuck with 12 TB HDDs: Right now, I’m only using 6.3 TB of storage, with 4.1 TB free in a Synology RAID (SHR) configuration (data protection with 1-drive fault tolerance). But the 16 GB drives were not significantly more expensive, so it’s likely I’ll stick with that size for the backup HDDs I get in the future.

Beyond the storage, the two NASes are nearly identical. Both are powered by an Intel Celeron J4125 processor and 2 GB of DDR4 RAM (upgraded to 6 GB on both), and both have two 1 GbE LAN ports and two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports. The two-bay DS224+ should be a tad quieter (19 dB) than the four-bay DS423+ (22 dB), though the bigger unit has two fans vs. one and a beefier 90 watt power supply (vs. 60 watts).

The look of the two NASes is a bit different, too. Where the DS224+ has a weird plastic cover that attaches to its front, the DS423+ has a more industrial look with individual covers on each HDD. But the basics are the same, and each has similar lights, front- and rear-based USB ports, power and access lights, and so on.

Based on my experience with the first NAS, the initial configuration should be straightforward. But I will have to figure out the best way to enable NAS-to-NAS synchronization between the two. This is a feature of Synology Drive called Cross-site file syncing or ShareSync, depending on which documentation you read. But my only real question is how to get it started. That is, should I copy the data to the second NAS first and then enable ShareSync (or whatever)? Or just enable it and let it do it’s thing? I’ll find out. But I suspect I have to do the latter.

? When will then be now?

I held off on ordering the second NAS not just because we were in Mexico but also to account for a nearly week-long trip we had to go on as soon as we got back: My daughter graduated from college this weekend, so we drove to North Carolina on Friday, just two days after getting back from Mexico, and we drive to Washington D.C. tomorrow morning and will be back in PA on Wednesday morning. Basically, I didn’t want anything big and expensive sitting on my front porch while we were away.

I looked at each of the items on Amazon every couple of days to see where things were at, delivery time-wise. And then I finally ordered the items yesterday. The RAM module will apparently arrive Tuesday, before we get back, but that’s fine, as it’s small and inexpensive. The NAS is set to arrive a week from Monday, which is later than I’d like, but the best I could do. And the HDDs should arrive sometime between next Saturday and the following Wednesday. Hopefully, each moves up in the schedule a bit, as I’d really like to get going on this as quickly as possible.

But we technically have plenty of time. We’ll be home for the next two and a half weeks, and though we have a trip to Berlin for IFA in about three weeks, we will come back to PA from there before heading to Mexico again in mid-September. If all goes well, I will bring the first (two-bay) NAS with me to Mexico at that time. Fingers crossed.

More soon.