On music libraries … or at least the storage for same …
Late last year, I changed my local storage solution and moved everything on to the, then-new, Synology DS1821+ units. This was prompted by the macOS “Big Sur” update totally breaking access to the simple DAS Drobo units I was using for my music library.
I used them because they were really the only good DAS option, and that had implications for cloud-backup of my library.
And its quite a large library …
50TB at present (all legal) … and, yes, now probably larger than I can listen to once-through in the remaining time I have on this rock …
Anyway, I got around the cloud backup issues, moved everything to a pair of DS1821+ units (one of which is just a time-delayed backup of the other), and off we went. No issues. Much more flexible. NAS vs. DAS, but not really a big issues anymore.
I moved.
A few days after setting everything back up in the new place I got a “Volume Crashed” error on one of the Synology units. A reboot and a “repair” later, and it was fine again, for a couple of months.
Next power-down that volume kept crashing. It’d repair, but crash again within the hour. Drives were fine (I moved them to the 2nd unit and they had no issues there, something you can’t do easily with other systems).
A quick call to Synology (whose service group is, ironically, about 15 minutes from where I used to live in Seattle), and it was apparent that the 4 right-most slots of my unit were dying. A few minutes later I had an advance RMA setup.
New unit arrived a few days later … DOA. No biggie, this happens with service units. Another quick call and I had a brand-new (not repair-stock) unit on its way. Another couple of days for that to arrive (Synology covered expedited shipping), and I was back in business.
Moving the volumes (and extra ram and twin SSD caches) to the new unit took about 5 minutes on the hardware side, and about 10 on the software (just updating the new DS1821+ to the latest version of DSM) … incredibly simple, no hassle, no loss of data …
This is probably the simplest recovery I’ve ever gone through (personally or from a global IT perspective). And easily the best hardware support I’ve experienced; absolutely on par with the PAID (and expensive) 2-hour support I’ve had for enterprise IT stuff.