Network Attached Storage recommendations

[Scuba_Steve]

I haven't looked into N.A.S. pretty much since it 1st became a [consumer] thing so I'm sure they've made decent advances since then & there's probably people round here with decent knowledge/experience with them.
So what would people recommend? I have no real requirements but ability to add drives wouldn't be a bad thing

[MarkH]

So what would people recommend? I have no real requirements but ability to add drives wouldn't be a bad thing

What would people recommend? The smart ones would make recommendations with considerations to the requirements.
If you have no real requirements then I'd recommend you save your money until you have a need to spend it.

For those with some requirements:
I bought a couple of Dlink 2-bay NAS boxes for $150 each. They aren't blazingly fast but give me much convenience and are fast enough. I've plugged my USB printer into one and can print to it easily, saving having to plug the printer into one of my laptop's USB ports.
I have 3 x 4TB and 1 x 2 TB hard drives in my NAS boxes - that is enough to hold my TV programs.
I do like the convenience of having all that data available without having to find the right drive and plug it into one of my USB3 enclosures.

I'd love to get 4 x 6TB HDDs and a 4-bay NAS box so I could set it up in a RAID 5 array, but that would be quite a lot of money to spend and I have 2 motorcycles to support.

[bogan]

Personally, I'd go with a single board compy as a lounge media server/player over a simple NAS. SATA ports plus a few mechanical drives, open frame if you've got a tv cabinet to put it in. Would take a bit more config, though there are probably prebuilts out there to be had, or cloned.

[Scuba_Steve]

What would people recommend? The smart ones would make recommendations with considerations to the requirements.
If you have no real requirements then I'd recommend you save your money until you have a need to spend it.

By "no real requirements" I meant special ones. Space is the main thing.
Currently I have a 4TB HDD connected to a wireless router via USB but this is filling up (think we're at 3.67TB of the 4TB limit) so looking at replacements.
The setup I have now requires the replacement of the drive in order to expand so thought I'd see what other people are running/recommend and as mentioned being able to add rather than replace would be an advantage as this replacement is going to take the NAS out of commission for awhile as I copy data across.

[TheDemonLord]

Synology NAS

Do it.


I run multiple ones for my Company - they are lovely to work on.

[pete376403]

RAID5 is no longer considered desirable, especially when you start using large (2tb or more drives). Its good while everything is working but turns bad when a failing drive is replaced and it's rebuilding - a single bit error is enough to make it fail. RAID6 is better but if the data really matters use RAID 10 (of course that means a whole lot more disks)

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/26-hom...6-bit-rot.html

[Gremlin]

Horses for courses, is all your data as precious, do you need it redundant, how much do you need.

2011 I bought a 6TB (2x 3TB) WD NAS (My Book Live Duo) and configged a raid 1. Then I began running out of space in 2012 and bought a second (same config). Couple of weeks ago the first one came up with the red light of doom (well, that's what some refer to anyway) but essentially it looks like it's dead (suspect the drives might be fine tho). Haven't got around to seeing if the data can be salvaged (sure hope it can) but I need space to store the data on anyway.

Any of the consumer grade NAS are relatively expensive (easy to see the cost if you exclude the drive cost), and stepping up to anything more enterprise grade has laughable prices (as in, haha, they can't be serious).

So enter the original plan which I dismissed in 2011 as I wanted something easy to manage. FreeNAS. Current stable version is 9.3 and it's software you load onto a USB key, and all the drives are used as storage. Hardware is whatever you build, but they do have recommendations of what you should be running. Feel free to choose something more basic, but you may encounter random issues. However, this is not consumer type stuff (iXSystems does have TrueNAS appliances you can purchase) and you have to be technical... even then delving into Linux isn't something I do, so the learning curve has been... steep.

Old desktop has been re-purposed, with a new one built... still trying to wrap my head around the configs before I load data on it, but it has 5x 4TB disks (Raid Z1 usable capacity is just over 14TB), read/write cache disks, and then probably another drive or two later for a bit of extra storage for FreeNAS itself.

[Akzle]

this:

So enter the original plan which I dismissed in 2011 as I wanted something easy to manage. FreeNAS. Current stable version is 9.3 and it's software you load onto a USB key, and all the drives are used as storage. Hardware is whatever you build, but they do have recommend...

Old desktop has been re-purposed, .

also, if you can get your head around winblows' horrendous workings, nix is a cakewalk.
Linux will get all your files back (photorec, testdisc, scalpel). Rewrite the fstab first and the drives may go bootable.

Mate runs a gigabit netgear hooderdacky. Missed some config and blanked 7T when installing the drives. Serves it vpn through win2k3 i think.

Best standalone hardware imo is lacie, but it comes with the pricetag.
Seagate drives are good. I've baked too many WDs to have any faith in them. hitachi rank best but come with the price.
Ymmv, because i hear people blag seagates heavily.

As for raid, very litlle advantage for end user, i have no idea about 5 or 6 or 10. You want striping with redundancy, which was about 3 iirc.

But yeah. Id bung a headless server under your staircase,(linux, obviously) lots of drivebays, lots of mobo ports. Could prob pick up a dual cpu on tm cheap. Not sure about running sata controller cards as bus is too slow unless theyve changed technology in the last 10 years :

[TheDemonLord]

As for raid, very litlle advantage for end user, i have no idea about 5 or 6 or 10. You want striping with redundancy, which was about 3 iirc.

RAID 6 is your best option, gives the best option in terms of not having silly amounts of disks, very good redundancy and performance.

Whilst you can make a NAS from an old PC (which technically isn't a NAS, its just turning the PC into a glorified File Server) it does come with increased running costs (in terms of Power usage)

[Akzle]

RAID 6 is your best option, gives the best option in terms of not having silly amounts of disks, very good redundancy and performance.

manual/scheduled offline tape backups are your best option, actually.
IMO the only benefit of raid for eu is faster access (not really notable for most people/applications, especially if it's a music/movie dump...doesn't have high bandwidth requirements) and the OS "seeing" one partition rather than multiple. -

jbod. raid1 with backups. job done.

Whilst you can make a NAS from an old PC (which technically isn't a NAS, its just turning the PC into a glorified File Server) it does come with increased running costs (in terms of Power usage)

you realise NAS is an glorified file server, yeah? the overheads on a box pc are fucken negligible, while i cant point you to a watt-per-gig cost, i'm picking most NAS now-a-days run comparable cores and PSUs...

...and/or you could use it to heat your growroom

[Gremlin]

Seagate drives are good. I've baked too many WDs to have any faith in them. hitachi rank best but come with the price.
Ymmv, because i hear people blag seagates heavily.

Hah, I wouldn't be making such blanket statements. One Seagate Enterprise range we used (the good old .11) ran at a 50% failure rate (inside warranty). Funnily enough their website still said it was 0.0something %.

The majority of failed drives for us (tracking near on 700 drives now) have been Seagate, but then we used more Seagate in the past. Now we use more WD. WD does have a habit of running out of spare sectors ie, sectors failing too quickly.

you realise NAS is an glorified file server, yeah? the overheads on a box pc are fucken negligible, while i cant point you to a watt-per-gig cost, i'm picking most NAS now-a-days run comparable cores and PSUs...

Depending on NAS obviously, the main thing around TrueNAS for example is using very specific hardware the whole time. Gives a consistent response, stability etc. New desktop is using an GA-H97M chipset... Gigabyte lists Intel NIC, driver on website is Intel (desktop doesn't have an optical drive) but after some head scratching why I couldn't enable the NIC, the driver disk came with several NIC manufacturers on it and actual NIC was Realtek... Thanks Gigabyte

Then, with old desktop (also Gigabyte, EX58) it wouldn't boot from the USB stick. Whenever I inserted it (pre post, post post etc) it froze. After a lot of swearing and testing, it turned out that when FreeNAS set itself up on the stick, it was creating a flag the motherboard didn't accept. Changed the flag to BOOT (using Linux, you'd like that Akzle) and it was all happy...

[TheDemonLord]

Hah, I wouldn't be making such blanket statements. One Seagate Enterprise range we used (the good old .11) ran at a 50% failure rate (inside warranty). Funnily enough their website still said it was 0.0something %.

The majority of failed drives for us (tracking near on 700 drives now) have been Seagate, but then we used more Seagate in the past. Now we use more WD. WD does have a habit of running out of spare sectors ie, sectors failing too quickly.

I'm the opposite - all my Seagates have been great, but have had WD drop its MBR for no reason and other WD do weird shit,

[Gremlin]

I'm the opposite - all my Seagates have been great, but have had WD drop its MBR for no reason and other WD do weird shit,

Brings us to the #1 rule... backup backup backup.

Doesn't matter what your preferred flavour is, they all have equal chance of failure.

Except OCZ. Those fuckers should make coasters.

[TheDemonLord]

Brings us to the #1 rule... backup backup backup.

Doesn't matter what your preferred flavour is, they all have equal chance of failure.

Except OCZ. Those fuckers should make coasters.

Lol - I know them feels - actually used getdataback for NTFS to 'fix' those WD drives, before they were sold and replaced with Seagates....

[MarkH]

RAID 6 is your best option, gives the best option in terms of not having silly amounts of disks, very good redundancy and performance.

I Can't see it to be honest.
4-Bay NAS box running RAID 6 would give the data storage of 2 drives - half the storage you paid for.
That's the same as RAID 10 while being slower in most cases both for read & write.
Maybe if you have RAID 6 over 8 drives it can make a lot of sense, but for what the OP is talking about it seems to me that RAID 6 would be pretty shit TBH.

With RAID 5 you could at least get 3 drives worth of storage out of 4 drives.
For better redundancy you might as well just bite the bullet and go RAID 1 for 2 drives or RAID 10 for 4 drives.

Another option is to forget RAID and just go with a scheduled backup of data, of course this also requires twice the data storage as the space you want to use. It is hard to get around this if you want to protect your data, you just can't have redundant data without purchasing extra drives to store it.