NAS Units

[Skinner]

Well its that time again, I got the warning that my NAS has used 90% of its available storage space.

I accumulate around 4tb of data per year (mostly HD video and photo's), so I'm looking at a 4 Bay NAS, and loading up with 4x 4TB raid 5 giving me approx 12tb of stoage or 2-3 yrs of data. I haven't figure out the backup logistics yet, but with 1 drive redundancy I figure I have a little time. You never know it may become feasible to use cloud by the time I use the 8tb nas I will repurpose once I have the 4bay.

My top runner is the Synology DS412+ http://www.scan.co.uk/products/syno...mance-4-bay-all-in-1-nas-server-for-smb-users

mostly because its pretty simple, I don't want to spend my life in CLI, I have enough of that with websites, so want simple, and reletively maintenance free.

I don't want any proprietary format rubbish so no netgear, seagate failed on me a few years ago, so rules them out.

Anyone got other suggestions?

Around £500-800 for the NAS is budget, drive wise I'll prob put Hitachi drives, lotta issues with the WD Nas Drives, people reporting upto 100% DOA on them.

Open to any suggestions

 

[AssetDomains]

That looks a nice piece of kit. I ended up just putting together a very basic windows box (£250ish) earlier in the year when I was putting together a make shift nas for all my media.
Need to reinvestigate the storage pool option of windows 8 now 8.1 is out see if its improved any as I'm getting to the point were I need to replace some old 1TB drives

 

[skoutuk]

I've got a couple of DS212j boxes running WD Green drives and can't fault them really. The DSM software is a joy to use and I have them backing up to Amazon Glacier which works out pretty cheap after the initial sync.

Hitachi is owned by WD these days anyway... I've never had a problem with IBM/Hitachi or WD disks. Personally I wouldn't touch Samsung drives having had a couple fail on me before!

If you wanted more redundancy you could go for RAID10 or Synology Hybrid Raid, the later would allow you to expand using different size disks in the future...

I take it you've seen the DSM live demo here http://www.synology.com/en-global/products/dsm_livedemo

The only other manufacturer you should be considering is QNAP, I think they're more enterprise orientated but can't comment on them.

Hope that helps, Rich

 

[Skinner]

I have a pair of Synology 2 Bays which is why I'm looking at the 4 Bay, they really are a dream to use. Beyond initial setup which took about 12 hours on the 2 x 2tb (R 0), and about 18 hours on 2x 4tb (R 1), I expect 4 x 4tb will take a few days. Everything else has been sooooo simple with them.

The mobile phone apps are great too.

The only real issue I ever had is DLNA refuses point blank to work, and they don't play nicely with USB externals, the sleep functions seem to put the usb to sleep be unable to wake it, until eventuall the usb needed chkdsk'd due to errors.

I'd always been a WD user, but these WD Reds are having major issues, negative reviews all around. The amount of data I'm storing in 1 pot means I can't afford to have a flaky drive.

I'll have a look at qNAP and see what they are about.

 

[mdrussell]

Well its that time again, I got the warning that my NAS has used 90% of its available storage space.

I accumulate around 4tb of data per year (mostly HD video and photo's), so I'm looking at a 4 Bay NAS, and loading up with 4x 4TB raid 5 giving me approx 12tb of stoage or 2-3 yrs of data. I haven't figure out the backup logistics yet, but with 1 drive redundancy I figure I have a little time. You never know it may become feasible to use cloud by the time I use the 8tb nas I will repurpose once I have the 4bay.

My top runner is the Synology DS412+ http://www.scan.co.uk/products/syno...mance-4-bay-all-in-1-nas-server-for-smb-users

mostly because its pretty simple, I don't want to spend my life in CLI, I have enough of that with websites, so want simple, and reletively maintenance free.

I don't want any proprietary format rubbish so no netgear, seagate failed on me a few years ago, so rules them out.

Anyone got other suggestions?

Around £500-800 for the NAS is budget, drive wise I'll prob put Hitachi drives, lotta issues with the WD Nas Drives, people reporting upto 100% DOA on them.

Open to any suggestions

I have this at home and love it.

I'm in the same boat though, I'm almost out of storage. Apparently I can swap in bigger 4TB drives one by one and Synology's custom RAID will rebuild and account for the larger size. I just bought an external backup drive to do a backup before I try this though.

I'll report back end of Jan when back from the US if its successful. Overall, I fully recommend the unit.

 

[ukdomains]

Well its that time again, I got the warning that my NAS has used 90% of its available storage space.

I accumulate around 4tb of data per year (mostly HD video and photo's), so I'm looking at a 4 Bay NAS, and loading up with 4x 4TB raid 5 giving me approx 12tb of stoage or 2-3 yrs of data. I haven't figure out the backup logistics yet, but with 1 drive redundancy I figure I have a little time. You never know it may become feasible to use cloud by the time I use the 8tb nas I will repurpose once I have the 4bay.

My top runner is the Synology DS412+ http://www.scan.co.uk/products/syno...mance-4-bay-all-in-1-nas-server-for-smb-users

mostly because its pretty simple, I don't want to spend my life in CLI, I have enough of that with websites, so want simple, and reletively maintenance free.

I don't want any proprietary format rubbish so no netgear, seagate failed on me a few years ago, so rules them out.

Anyone got other suggestions?

Around £500-800 for the NAS is budget, drive wise I'll prob put Hitachi drives, lotta issues with the WD Nas Drives, people reporting upto 100% DOA on them.

Open to any suggestions

I have esxi environment setup and i brought the N40L(2years ago) and N54L(last may) they do a better job then these Synology or netgear.

http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-hp-proliant-g7-n54l-2-2ghz-microserver-ebuyer-704941-421

Buy some WD RED drives and boot your OS off a USB.

for £500 i think you should be able to get around 8TB or high setup with a raid controller

 

[Skinner]

The £500-800 is just for the NAS unit, the hard drives I'll prob get more hitachi deathstars (must be 20 yrs since they earned that name and I still use it) enterprise drives, will be 4 x 4tb, giving me 12tb of usable R5 Storage.

The HP proliant is just a micro server as opposed to a nas, I have 2 dell poweredge servers here. If I didn't think I'd end up elbow deep in *nix which I'm keen to avoid, I'd consider the HP box.

At £130 (after cashback) you really can't complain. If I was in the market to replace one of the Dell servers I'd consider that.

I have esxi environment setup and i brought the N40L(2years ago) and N54L(last may) they do a better job then these Synology or netgear.

http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-hp-proliant-g7-n54l-2-2ghz-microserver-ebuyer-704941-421

Buy some WD RED drives and boot your OS off a USB.

for £500 i think you should be able to get around 8TB or high setup with a raid controller

Edit:

Have you read the WD Red reviews ? Every site you pick is damning

http://www.amazon.com/WD-Red-NAS-Hard-Drive/product-reviews/B008JJLZ7G

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4tb-...b-cache-intellipower-rpm-8ms-ncq-oem-24x7-use

all the same story, the DOA or general failure rate is immense.

 

[woopwoop]

I have the WD My Book Live 4tb and wrote great reviews when I got it on here... things have gone downhill a little since I got it.

The thing makes a lot of noise, it is slow to access and move files around on, and the mobile apps/integration hardly works.

Not sure if this is all the product or partly the network but at the time everyone was telling me Synology.

Can a NAS, act anywhere close to a regular harddrive while being plugged into a router (even with a local device)?

Not wanting to hijack Skinner's thread, but what should be considerations when trying to setup from scratch (again) or if I wanted to move everything off the WD MBL?

What's beneficial about a separate NAS unit and purchasing drives to slide in (other than upgradeability)? Is there performance benefit?

Are there mobile apps that work with these devices to easily sync/upload mobile files or even sync with google drive?

Are there other features that could be used that I'm not even thinking of?

If I built a setup like Skinner's suggesting, what would I do with the WD... use that to back up some files or is it just too inefficient if I'm looking to improve the whole system?

Thanks (and sorry Skinner for being a bit selfish but I hope it adds to the discussion)

 

[ukdomains]

The £500-800 is just for the NAS unit, the hard drives I'll prob get more hitachi deathstars (must be 20 yrs since they earned that name and I still use it) enterprise drives, will be 4 x 4tb, giving me 12tb of usable R5 Storage.

The HP proliant is just a micro server as opposed to a nas, I have 2 dell poweredge servers here. If I didn't think I'd end up elbow deep in *nix which I'm keen to avoid, I'd consider the HP box.

At £130 (after cashback) you really can't complain. If I was in the market to replace one of the Dell servers I'd consider that.




Edit:

Have you read the WD Red reviews ? Every site you pick is damning

http://www.amazon.com/WD-Red-NAS-Hard-Drive/product-reviews/B008JJLZ7G

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4tb-...b-cache-intellipower-rpm-8ms-ncq-oem-24x7-use

all the same story, the DOA or general failure rate is immense.

Yes its a server but you can convert it into a nas box using freenas which is robust as any custom nas software. i have esxi installed on both then freenas vm for datastorage and other vm's for dev.The great thing about the mircoserver is its expandable you add ssd to it etc.

I have been using WD reds for while now no failures

 

[Skinner]

I'm not sure im ready to plunge into wd reds just yet. I may pic one of the units up since it appears to include a 250gb hard drive, so £130 toy, see how I go.

Do you know if its a hardware raid unit or software based ?

Woop woop, my raid 1 DS211+ has a biweekly task to back up incrementally to a usb drive, it also has a remote backup task to back up important photos to a remote server. You can set this to amazon or other cloud. I have it go to my own server tho.

If you go to the appstore or android play store there is file manager app, a photo gallery app, a video suveilance (cctv) app, I movie streaming app, a music streaming app, a remote.download app, a bit torrent manager app and a general server management app. Just search for synology and they come up.

All of these can be accessed via a browser too, along with wordpress and a bunch of other scripts. So you can have people stream music or view your photos from anywhere.

Speed wise, I can easily stream 3 hd movies, one to my phone, one to each of my tv's via plex.

The quoted numbers 100mbps read etc are fairly close, ill transfer a 1.4gb file when I get home and let you know the times.

There is an sd slot and when I plug an sd or usb into the front it auto syncs the card/stick data so the assigned folder.

you can synch your phone to the unit, its time capsule compatible as well, you can shell in should you wish but there is a gui front for it.

Think I covered everything im mobile at mo so hard to check.

 

[aZooZa]

Just a comment about NAS systems - never buy D-LINK - bad experiences for me. You have to use the fun_plug and BusyBox hacks, and as a consequence the drives are continuously being indexed. There's a way around that but the processor itself is not up to muster - Atom as I recall. Just my 2p - I've not read the entire thread.

 

[Skinner]

I did have this concern, along with the issue highlighted by the first review on the amazon WD Red link I posted (2 bad sectors on 2 diff drives potentially killing a rebuild).

The question I ask myself is, based on the fact I'm going to repurpose a DS212 which is currently set for 8tb of Raid 1 to become a back up device for the new 4//5 bay.

By the time I have exhausted the 8tb, which will be be approx 2 yrs will the helium filled 6tb deathstars (HGST) be available at reasonable cost or will even bigger 8tb+ be available ?

I also ask myself how much data would I lose in 3.5 days between increments ?

Originally I wanted a 5 bay, but it pushes deployment cost to over a fair bit over £2,000 for the unit and 5 drives and that's without even looking into a backup solution, which prob be a fantastic use of the HP Proliant posted by UKDomains but even using WD Reds would add another £800ish on top.

Lots of pro's and cons to weigh up.

My concern with employing RAID5 is the vulnerability of the array when it is critical/rebuilding, especially with 4Tb drives. If you want 12Tb of usable storage using 4Tb discs then I strongly suggest a 5 bay (e.g. 1513+) and to use RAID6. That way if a disc in the array dies and you're rebuilding you can still afford another disc failing without data loss. Naturally you'd also employ backup to USB connected external hard drives and also to Amazon Glacier. The 1513+ can take two DX513 5-drive expanders allowing for a total of 15 drives if required.

 

[Edwin]

Looks like you can get the 5 bay Synology for ~£650 and 4TB drives can be had for ~£150 each so that's a total of £1,400 for a 5 bay solution with 12TB of usable space and 2x redundancy. You can shave £100+ more if you go for desktop drives rather than NAS drives (assuming they'll still work in a NAS, and it's just about durability)

For example:
"Seagate NAS 4TB SATA III 3.5" Hard Drive" is currently £149.78 at CCLOnline http://www.cclonline.com/product/11...4TB-SATA-3-5IN-6GB/S-5900RPM-64MB-IN/HDD1964/
"Seagate HDD.15 4TB SATA III 3.5" Hard Drive" is £123.96 from CCLOnline http://www.cclonline.com/product/11...sktop-HDD-15-4TB-3-5-inch-Hard-Drive/HDD1904/
"Western Digital Red 4TB SATA III 3.5" Hard Drive" is £143.32 from CCLOnline http://www.cclonline.com/category/7.../attributeslist/140020-140028-140035-1088003/

"Synology DS1513+ 5 Bay NAS SATA HDD/SSD" is £638.26 from CCLOnline http://www.cclonline.com/product/11...y-DS1513-5-Bay-Desktop-NAS-Enclosure/BAK4122/
Amazon are currently price matching it http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00CDG2XG8/?tag=acorn06-21

I really like buying from CCLOnline, because they send stuff via DPD which let you know on the morning of the delivery exactly what time they'll be coming by to drop the items off. Still means you have to plan to be "in" that day (just as with any other delivery firm) but it gives you that extra reassurance that if they for example say "4-5pm" you can safely go down to the shops before lunch...

 

[Skinner]

I'm sure I'd trust putting standard disks in, and I don't think any enterprise disks would be £150 ? (only ones with ent grade enhancements are WD Reds but the reviews are truly shocking).

 

[Edwin]

I'm sure I'd trust putting standard disks in, and I don't think any enterprise disks would be £150 ? (only ones with ent grade enhancements are WD Reds but the reviews are truly shocking).

I've edited my previous post with some examples and links. Pls see above! If you're going for double redundancy you can probably get away with less premium disks, since you'd need 2 to fail simultaneously to have problems.

Oh, and you'll need to add the cost of a spare drive (forgot that, sorry!) as it's pointless if you have to wait a week to start rebuilding after a fault.

 

[Skinner]

I don't do seagate, I had a Raid 1 BlackArmor NAS and both disks died when the thermals on the unit failed with no warnings or auto shut down. Triple failure (disks and nas all at once) while disks under warranty and all seagate do is offer to replace the disks, screw the data, wait they did offer to "look at the disks" for a fee.

The WD Red's are getting a beating in the reviews for catastrophic failures, many many dead on arrivals, lots of failures within months, click of death starting in days. I really really really wouldn't trust the Reds, is a shame as I love WD products

I use scan.co.uk for their DPD, the gps van tracking is great, 9am text message with delivery time, then can pop check the location on my phone and get back in time. Good to know ccl use the same,

 

[Edwin]

I use scan.co.uk for their DPD, the gps van tracking is great, 9am text message with delivery time, then can pop check the location on my phone and get back in time. Good to know ccl use the same,

Likewise, good to know Scan.co.uk use them too.

 

[Edwin]

You may find this analysis interesting, btw...
http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/11/12/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/

 

[Edwin]

Another alternative (not sure how effective it would be in practice, just playing with specs)

8 bay Synology NAS unit £772.67 from Scan.co.uk
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/synology-ds1813plus-scalable-nas-for-smb-growing-demands

"3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300 3.5" SATA III Hard Drive 6Gb/s, 7200rpm, 64MB Cache 8ms OEM NCQ" £79.56 each
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/3tb-...rd-drive-6gb-s-5700rpm-32mb-cache-8ms-oem-ncq

Total cost: £1,409.15

In theory that would give you 18 usable TB and 2x redundant drives within the unit. Plus 3TB drives aren't quite as cutting edge and dense as the 4TB ones, so they may be a bit less flaky.

Or you could go with Toshiba DT01ACA200 2TB SATA III 3.5" Hard Drive at £54.97 each (CCLonline) and end up with 12 usable TB in a device costing £1,212.43

I suggested Toshiba because you seem wary of both Seagate and WD.

 

[AssetDomains]

Thinking about how much your going to spend is Drobo an option to consider.
http://www.drobo.co.uk/

You can grow your data as you want use different (size/manufacturer)drives at the same time