Drobo alternative with option to mix different size drives and upgrade HDD capacity in live RAID

Drobo alternative with option to mix different size drives and upgrade HDD capacity in live RAID

I currently run 2 Drobo’s 5N’s;
Drobo A – Total Capacity of 10.72 TB made up from 5 drives at 3tb each. 1 drive for redundancy
Drobo B – Total Capacity of 28.90 TB made up from 5 drives at 8tb each again 1 drive for redundancy

Between the two of them I only have 1.5tb space free so I need to action an upgrade. It has taken me 4 years to reach this amount of space usage.

I am currently using these as pretty dumb network shares for Plex and general file store in my home (attic). Originally I did have nzbget and couch potato running on the Drobo’s but it just wasn’t worth the hassle and so now I have a dedicated htpc come server handle all that.

From reading online I see a lot of people have had problems with Drobo products, I haven’t had any issues myself and have quite enjoyed the experience and would be looking for something just as trouble free in future.

My thinking currently is to buy something with around 15 bay capacity along with 30tb of hard drives. Move the contents of Drobo A to the new NAS then disassemble Drobo A, sell the enclosure and move the drives to the new NAS. Then do the same with Drobo B.

I’d like to somewhat future proof myself a bit better than I did last time by just buying a new Drobo. So being able to take two of the 3tb drives and change them to a 10tb drives without having to rebuild volumes or anything like that in future would be good. Being able to shrink volumes would be nice too, like I can do with the Drobo’s currently.

If you need a good replacement NAS for Drobo then DS2419+ from Synology might be a good fit. You can also mix drives with different capacities. Also, you can upgrade them without a need to reformat the system.
But unfortunately, you can not resize a volume without formatting it.
Qnap does allow you to resize volumes but it lacks the option of mixing different size drives in the same volume. Model ts-1685 would be the biggest tower-style NAS they offer. But you can upgrade drives without resetting the entire system. But the drive mixing option might be quite a disadvantage.

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