I haven't seen it with the TS-x62 line, but I know I've seen it with older models is it's possible to dual-boot these guys and install the likes of Ubuntu/TrueNAS/UnRaid on there. It'd be super cool to see a video of you comparing the same hardware on the different OSes and your experience going through the process.... and I'm totally not suggesting this because I've been thinking of buying one and putting linux on it as a remote borg backup destination.
If I'm understanding your question correctly. He put 2 HDD's in here setup as RAID1 which is for mirroring. So if you have 2 - 8TB drives you only get 8TB of storage because anytime you write or delete off the drive it "mirrors" and does the same thing to both drives. So if only 1 driver were to fail, you would still have all of your data on the 2nd drive.
Could you put together a vid on how you set up your test bed? I've got a qnap ts-832x and on the surface it looks like a better system, but when I've downloaded higher res videos and it transcodes them via Plex, I get too much stuttering. So I've had to download the YT videos at 14.4 or 1080 or lower. So I'm getting like 1 Plex user which sounds insane compared to your 17. The Annapurna CPU must really suck. But I wanted the 8 drives and with that it's working super. I've got one RAID 5 of 32TB total storage. As far as backups, check Qsync Central for PC backups, and Hybrid Backup for backups between NAS, remotes and cloud.
QNAP is a bit of a mixed bag. The stuff they DO make, it's GREAT. But their paper specs leave a LOT to be desired given that you can still ONLY get up to like an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X on AMD side of things, and their lack of overall PCIe expansion is also severely underwhelming. But for the stuff that DOES work, it's fantastic for what it is.
