overwhelmed a little

[Enquiries]

Love your youtube channel. great info. keep it up!! I just bought the Synology DS418
Not sure if I really need RAID.
Is it possible to use 2 bays as RAID and 2 as just drives?

I'm a podcast coach and have a handful of client's shows that I edit as well. So need 2 backups for my projects. Also do videos as part of 'work'. (total around 3TB) On the personal side of things I have photos , legal stuff, docs and other stuff totaling (around 1TB)

If have the Sinology unit but haven't bought the drives yet. I've got a 1TB SSD that I can use plus many NON-NAS drives but am willing to buy NAS. Wanting to backup a little work and personal backups and replace the 7 drives around my workspace). Defiantly need to be able to access data from the road. Don't need to "after a breach" be up and running for my hundreds of employees. No that serious.
So if I'm not using RAID - would I just use the SHR setting and then hyperbackup?
Hope this is clear. Open to suggestions. THANK YOU!

[ed]

Yes, it is possible to use two bays for RAID and two bays as individual drives. With the DS418, you can configure the RAID setup using Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR), which allows for flexibility in mixing different drive sizes while providing data redundancy. You can set up a RAID configuration (such as RAID 1) with two drives for your important projects and podcast backups, while using the other two bays as separate drives for your personal files and backups. This way, you can have the desired redundancy for critical data and the convenience of individual drives for other purposes. Additionally, using Synology's Hyper Backup software would be a suitable choice for backing up your data, enabling you to access it remotely when needed. If you decide to use non-NAS drives, please keep in mind that they may not be optimized for continuous operation in a NAS environment, so it's generally recommended to use NAS-specific drives for better reliability.