Just checking in with a status....
TL/DR The Synology 1815+ is up and running. And frankly I love it. Needs a faster CPU.
While the setup was a breeze, it took about a week for things to stabilize. The first step was installation of 5 WD Red 6TB drives, and a memory upgrade module. This was painless and took minutes. After the build was complete, I connected the unit to the network and started the "DSM" admin console via a browser, which walked me through the process of creating a disk group, volumes, and formatting drives. Easy.
The unit can use various flavors of RAID, but also provides Synology "Hybrid" RAID types that are similar to RAID 5 and 6 called SHR-1 and SHR-2 which provide a bit more flexibility. I initially opted for SHR-1 with the intent of switching to SHR-2 (for added redundancy) once additional drives were added. This was a mistake. While it's possible to convert from RAID-5 to RAID-6, it is not possible to convert from SHR-1 to SHR-2. I'll have to correct this later when I build another server and can copy the contents elsewhere while the rebuild occurs.
The next step was to consolidate content from a few different sources onto the Synology. This is where I discovered my network was only running at 100Mb/s and that the universe would die from heat death before all the files finished copying. This provided a nice excuse to by a new network switch
and start over at 1000Mb/s. I opted not to use link aggregation for improved performance and redundancy because it would require a switch more expensive than the $34 one that I bought and because... well... why bother. Once the copy started again, it could saturate the LAN and the Synology unit wasn't even breathing hard. It's quite a little beast. After several days the copy was complete but then I noticed that there was a considerable amount of disk activity... turns out it indexes all the media files and builds thumbnails, etc. Its limited CPU makes this process run a LONG time.
The media indexing process ran for about a week before settling down, this produced quite a bit of heat and noise. I could almost picture the little squirrels inside the box spinning all the disks around. The trick here is that it looked like there were no (or at least a limited number of) media files when using the included media management applications. It took me a while to realize that I just had to wait and let it finish. Lots of people complain about nearly every aspect of this indexing process on internet forums.
The next step for me was to remove 2 6TB drives from my desktop computer and add them to the Synology array. This was really painless, but the rebuild process took four days. It would have taken six days, but I figured out that turning off media indexing and (oddly) shutting off my desktop computer really sped things up.
Finally I setup some backups. All the computers in the house automatically backup to a volume dedicated to this purpose. I also connected a 4TB external drive to the Synology to backup things that would be painful to lose as well as the backups. So now I have external and cloud backups of everything (even the backups) in addition to the RAID-5 redundancy.
So now the unit has 7 drives, and room for a hot spare (i'll order this before summer). The media applications have finished indexing everything and I can enjoy all my movies, photos, and music anywhere I go... even my living room. On the road, it feels a lot like a OneDrive account: all documents and media are easily and quickly available and can be shared and downloaded to my various devices. Nice.
Final thoughts. I really love this little guy. My only wish is for a more powerful CPU to speed up rebuilds and media indexing. These processes take WAY too long and really impact usage. I'll keep this in mind when I build my next server to replace this.