I seriously doubt that this shows a match between Rebels and Soldiers . The first claim floated around 2 days ago ? There is no way that they would be able to organize it that quick . <| sep |> Look at Sero ' s goofy ass lol <| sep |> Performance I can ' t tell you objective performance numbers , but I haven ' t noticed a slow down on my DS 416 j that is currently 91 % full . It serves as a file and media repository and also has a 300 GB iSCSI volume which holds my VMware datastore . Stability No experience with crashes here . Yes , DSM is stored on a portion of the data drives . I work in enterprise storage systems , and this is not uncommon . Storage OSes ideally load into cache and then don ' t see much IO after that . Of course if you load a bunch of what I ' ll call nonNAS features on your Syno , then that changes quickly . I also am of the mind that latest doesn ' t always mean greatest . I ignore most DSM updates . Having iSCSI helps force me into waiting on updating , too , because I have to either migrate or shut down my VMs to upgrade . Migration I started with a DS 216 j and outgrew it in a few months . Powered it down , popped the drives into the new array and off it went . Here ' s one of a number of benefits of DSM living on the data drives . Cloud SyncBackup I use two backup mechanisms , the primary of which is syncing to a remote Syno . I keep them connected via a dedicated VPN easy peasy . I also send a small amount of data to Glacier , and that app is super easy as well , but I hope to never have to pay to recover it . That ' s where Amazon makes their money . Remote Access I use OpenVPN running on my pfSense firewall . You could do the same with the Syno directly , but echoing myself from a prior comment I don ' t like running nonNAS packages on my NAS . MiscellaneousSharing the root of the volume There ' s more than one way to skin the cat . I ' m not sure how well Syno handles complex permission structures , but it makes home folders easy . You ' ll figure something workable for you . Adding RAM When I sell an enterprise array I almost always include max cache , because it ' s cheap and there ' s no reason to skimp . Get an array with the RAM and horsepower that you believe you ' ll need and size it right from the beginning . Syno doesn ' t need much memory , unless broken record time you install packages that aren ' t for the purpose of serving NAS . Drive failures It ' s not a question of if a drive will fail , it is when . Being in enterprise storage , I see drives fail on a daily basisbut that ' s among 10 ' s of 1000 ' s of drives among my customer accounts . Personally , I ' ve had data loss a home due to drive failures twice in my life , and it was disastrous both times . I ' ve had two drives fail in my DS 416 j , but have not had any data loss because of SHR 1 and because it alerted me before each drive fully failed . If money wasn ' t a constraining factor , I ' d use SHR 2 or RAID 10 , especially with larger drives . Each 2 TB drive replacement took ~ 12 hours to restripe 8 TB drives will probably be close to 2 days . But having a remote backup helps easy my paranoia . TLDR I think you ' re going to be fine with a Syno . Certainly no product is perfect , but for a data paranoid geek like myself Synology has worked well . My only constant recommendation is to use a NAS as a NAS . If you want things like Plex one of the greatest things since sliced bread hook up a server with a free copy of ESX .