[McG]

good on you for keeping your WHS going for so long!

Like GoinAllTheWay, I have a Synology and I have started doing exactly the same thing with the Red Drives as my older desktop drives fail. I have it on redundant mode inside the Synology and when I replaced a dead HDD, it was basically a matter of buying a bigger HDD than the one that I replaced.

I figured that over the life of the device, a local redundant drive was better than paying for the upload over Shaw and the network storage.

Not sure if GoinAllTheWay has seen the same thing with his drives, but when I run the S.M.A.R.T. tests, the Red drives always seem to be running at a lower temperature than the other drives. This has the added benefit of reducing the overall temperature in the small NAS box for the other drives as well.

I find my Synology getting just a bit slower now, but overall I would totally buy another Synology drive if it came to that. I have also considered buying a cheap 2 bay Synology and using that as a backup for the main NAS, but I always back away from it.