Well, greetings people of the internet—Uncle Joe here. In this one I’m upgrading drives in my Synology DS1621+ because I’m flat out running out of space. The whole reason I keep coming back to Synology is SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID). I’m not made of money, so I like that I can mix drive sizes and do upgrades onesie-twosie as I can afford them, instead of buying four or five matching drives all at once like a lot of ZFS setups push you toward. I walk through the actual process: identify the drive, deactivate it, pull it (yes, get the key), drop in a 14TB Seagate Exos SATA drive, then repair the storage pool. I also show the SHR calculator—going from my mix of 14TB/12TB/6TB drives to all 12TB and 14TB, which bumps me up to about 60TB usable while keeping single-drive protection. I’ll also say it again: have real backups (plural). Drive rebuilds hammer disks, and that’s when marginal drives like to die. After a few days of rebuild time (about a day and a half per 14TB drive for me), I check health info, kick off SMART testing, and start a data scrub on a monthly schedule. I also talk pricing—those renewed Exos drives jumped fast—and why, apps and all, Synology is still a solid value for small business and homelab use.