general nas design assistance please

[raidforsaving]

Hi, I'm interested in some feedback on a potential NAS design. I'm looking to migrate to a new nas setup. I'm thinking about getting the new TS-651, as it should do a much better job at file encryption performance it seems.

I also see there is a model TS-653 Pro, which is very similar to the TS-651. But there is confusing/conflicting documentation on what is supported for them (and if it will change over time).
A model comparison shows that the TS-651 is a Home/SOHO, while the TS-653 Pro is a SMB.
BUT the user manual page for 4.1 shows that BOTH are given the SMB version. Why the discrepency? Which is correct?

Requirements:

1. RAID 1+ for all data. Having redundancy is key.
2. Support for RAID 5 and RAID 6
3. Two "volumes" - 1 smaller volume (~300GB) for encrypted sensitive data, and 1 larger (~6TB+) for everything else.
   • The documentation indicates that Volumes are strictly entire disks or raid sets - correct? So I would need 2 raid sets. At RAID 1 for both, that means 4 drives. At RAID 5 for both, that means 6 drives - correct?
4. The ability to grow volumes by adding more (or larger) drives.
5. Access of the encrypted volume from a linux host as a mount.
6. Ideally - support for SSD's. Because I need only 300GB of encrypted storage, putting that on a pair of SSD's with RAID 1 would be perfect. It seems that QNAP doesn't support RAID TRIM.

Long term, being able to upgrade to very large volumes would be appreciated. In 3-5 years I could see 8TB drives being available.

Are these points possible on both models? And a reasonable design?

Thanks in advance!

[schumaku]

Different form what is shown on on the docs for the SMB models, both TS-x51 and TS-x53 does come with a simplified storage manager, where each RAID (or for the sake of it JBOD, single disk volume) is automatically defined as a single storage volume, and multiple RAID can't be connected to a single volume.

[storageman]

Different form what is shown on on the docs for the SMB models, both TS-x51 and TS-x53 does come with a simplified storage manager, where each RAID (or for the sake of it JBOD, single disk volume) is automatically defined as a single storage volume, and multiple RAID can't be connected to a single volume.

I'm assuming this design change had something to with the fact they support USB expansion.

[schumaku]

I'm assuming this design change had something to with the fact they support USB expansion.

More product segregation I guess. But yes, these do support the UX expansion stuff - each external UX module does create a single volume.