NAS Build

[Asian_defender]

There are a couple of options to let you know.
There is email or sms. I haven't used the SMS personally but the email notification can be set to many options.
https://help.synology.com/dsm/?secti...on_filter.html
I have mine to email me in case of a HDD failure. I don't believe there is a desktop application for this

There are many raid's depending on your tolerance.
Raid 5 requires at least 3 HDD's and allows for 1 fault
Raid 6 requires at least 4 HDD's and allows for 2 faults
I'm on the synology hybrid raid which is a modified raid 6.

[Recca168]

Built this last year for just under $1000
Western Digital EX4 NAS
4x Seagate 4TB NAS
Set up with RAID5 so 12TB of usable space

Memx seems to have the 4 TB NAS drives every couple of weeks for $160-$170 each. I use it as primary storage for pretty much everything (music/photos/video/data). It's been working pretty well so far. Anything that I'm really paranoid about (family pictures) are backed up on cloud storage so if my house burns down I'll only be annoyed with losing the NAS.

Just curious what are people thoughts/plans are with NAS upgrades. If I ever have to upgrade this thing I'd have to upgrade one drive at a time and rebuild the array for each drive. That'd probably take at least a week if it was full. Seems like it would be quicker and less hassle just to build a whole new NAS and copy everything over.

[The_Penguin]

Originally posted by msommers
It lets you know if a harddrive is gonna go? Is there something I can install on my desktop to do the same thing?

Off to google what RAID 5 is

Google why RAID 5 = bad.
There are a lot of articles from a lot of industry experts.
With the size of today's hard drives the chances of hitting a URE during a rebuild are pretty good, especially with consumer hard drives.
Once that happens, you're nuking the array and starting over and restoring from backup.
RAID 6 is definitely better, but I only do RAID 10, myself. Sure you lose some capacity, but you get good redundancy and better speed.

[schocker]

^But now I am well into my Raid 5 with my 4 hdd's!

[Mitsu3000gt]

I still use cloud storage (Smugmug is good enough for me). It doesn't matter how many HDD's or NAS' you have if your house burns down. For me it protects against HDD failure, and provides an awesome interface for backups, media streaming through apps, etc. Also I can pop in some bigger drives anytime I want down the road. You can use it as a local cloud too. I'd have gone 4-bay if it weren't so damn expensive at the time, the WD Red's are a bit cheaper now. 2-bay is plenty so far though, since I also have 4 HDD"s in my PC and 2 external backup drives in addition to my NAS. The units are also surprisingly small, so you hardly need any space at all. They are just slightly bigger (depth/height) in each dimension than the hard drives themselves.

I use Synology Hybrid raid but since it's just 2 drives, I think it's just regular RAID.

If you really want to go crazy, you can burn some blu-rays and put them in a safety deposit box at the bank, but cloud is still better IMHO.

[killramos]

Originally posted by revelations


Seriously, with a price of 1c per GB, you cant go wrong with AWS as for offsite NAS backups

I had no idea until last year how cheap it was. Its not intended for constant retrievals however.


http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

Sounds like a great way to burn through my monthly data allocation... No way i could upload multiple TB to a cloud ( even if i did it like once a year) and not have Shaw lay down the whoop ass.

Maybe an 8TB single drive stored in a safety deposit is a better option?

[Mitsu3000gt]

^^^ If you're going to go so far as to put stuff in a safety deposit box it's better to use things like BluRays which have a stated lifespan of 100-150 years and cost around $60/TB. Hard drives can fail, be wiped, etc (even though that would be super rare in a safety deposit box).

[revelations]

Originally posted by killramos


Sounds like a great way to burn through my monthly data allocation... No way i could upload multiple TB to a cloud ( even if i did it like once a year) and not have Shaw lay down the whoop ass.

Maybe an 8TB single drive stored in a safety deposit is a better option?

No it definitely does become an issue once you go over, say 500 GB (shaw caps are what, 450GB / month?). You can assign a long-term upload that will spread out the data but at some point you're better off sending external HDDs to the offsite storage initially and just add to it on an incremental basis remotely.

For eg. to upload the OPs 12TB would take about 500 days at 3Mbs.

[UndrgroundRider]

Originally posted by The_Penguin


Google why RAID 5 = bad.
There are a lot of articles from a lot of industry experts.
With the size of today's hard drives the chances of hitting a URE during a rebuild are pretty good, especially with consumer hard drives.
Once that happens, you're nuking the array and starting over and restoring from backup.
RAID 6 is definitely better, but I only do RAID 10, myself. Sure you lose some capacity, but you get good redundancy and better speed.

Whatever you do, don't listen to this guy.

[EK69]

im looking more and more at the synology stuff for a NAS instead of a PC with harddrives and some sort of raid software..
but i also want to have a HTPC setup.


lets say i decide to go with a huge PC case with harddrives in it.
What RAID software would you guys recommend to use?

i would only care abt having 1 harddrive fail protection i think (if 1 harddrive fails, i replace it, rebuild the raid array, and continue on like nothing happened)

[ryanallan]

Any updates mat? what did you end up getting?

[locust]

look into unraid if you have the time.

I'm running unraid with a 30 tb server with a bunch of vms and docker apps like plex, sickbeard etc. It'll all built in and it's really easy to setup the vm's to run your various systems on a single machine.

[The_Penguin]

Originally posted by UndrgroundRider



Whatever you do, don't listen to this guy.

Please feel free to elaborate.

[Alterac]

Originally posted by The_Penguin


Please feel free to elaborate.

There are many articles that do state what you have stated, but the problem is none of them show the math.

We are assuming URE's are a definite that are spread evenly amongst the drives.

That URE number, is the chance of a bit being unrecoverable. There is no number saying WHEN a URE will occur.

To add chaos to this possible chance of a chance occurring:
A URE is a bit based measurement, and drives these days read / write in blocks of 512 or 4096 bytes.

This article specifies a bit more about why a URA and that assumption is pretty useless.

http://www.raidtips.com/raid5-ure.aspx

https://www.physicsforums.com/thread...-raid5.789603/

https://www.high-rely.com/blog/why-r...g-in-2009-not/

Even if you follow the poor assumptions, the math isn't that terrible. Here is a calculator based on that theory:
http://www.raid-failure.com/raid5-failure.aspx


URE, and such aside, I follow this:

To me, I would never use more than 4-5 drives in a single raid 5, moving to ZFS would be best for large capacity and quantity.

You could even use multiple RAID5 arrays, and then Logical volumes to make them appear as one giant storage space.

[Xtrema]

Originally posted by ryanallan
I built a FreeNAS box out of lego last year. Still running strong.
4 x 4TB in ZFS-2 for a total of 8TB with 2 disks of redundancy.
Consumes 40W under load.
I get about 50MB/s transfer speeds.

It all depends on how much admin work you want to do. If all you want is somewhere to store photos, buy something. If you're a techy and want a project, build a FreeNAS box!

Google also offers unlimited photo storage now (for photos under 16MP).

How much memory do you have on the server and what protocol are you using? NFS/CIFS/iSCSI?

Last time I play with ZFS and FreeNAS ended up so slow for me with 6GB of RAM. And they update the mem requirement to 8GB min and 16GB recommended and that's just too much for a cheap NAS box.

http://web.freenas.org/hardware-requirements/

Originally posted by Asian_defender

I'm on the synology hybrid raid which is a modified raid 6.

SHR can be configured for 1 or 2 drive failures. It's flexible.

Originally posted by The_Penguin


Google why RAID 5 = bad.
There are a lot of articles from a lot of industry experts.
With the size of today's hard drives the chances of hitting a URE during a rebuild are pretty good, especially with consumer hard drives.
Once that happens, you're nuking the array and starting over and restoring from backup.
RAID 6 is definitely better, but I only do RAID 10, myself. Sure you lose some capacity, but you get good redundancy and better speed.

Raid 5 isn't BAD. It's all about the performance you want and the the redundancy you can afford. Not everyone can afford dual parity in the low end NAS market. And if you have a 4 bay unit and want dual parity, RAID10 is better than 6 from performance perspective. But beyond 4 bay, RAID 6 is better utilization and performance can be improved by having SSD caching.

That said, due to ever increasing drive size and how slow they are to rebuild, you do want dual parity to buy you extra time if another drive fails during rebuild process.

Originally posted by Recca168
Just curious what are people thoughts/plans are with NAS upgrades. If I ever have to upgrade this thing I'd have to upgrade one drive at a time and rebuild the array for each drive. That'd probably take at least a week if it was full. Seems like it would be quicker and less hassle just to build a whole new NAS and copy everything over.

The nice thing about SHR and unRAID set up is you can remove and replace/upgrade one drive at a time without impacting RAID set and auto grow.

Don't know with WD unit has similar capability but I would assume no.

[The_Penguin]

Originally posted by Alterac



There are many articles that do state what you have stated, but the problem is none of them show the math.

We are assuming URE's are a definite that are spread evenly amongst the drives.

That URE number, is the chance of a bit being unrecoverable. There is no number saying WHEN a URE will occur.

To add chaos to this possible chance of a chance occurring:
A URE is a bit based measurement, and drives these days read / write in blocks of 512 or 4096 bytes.

This article specifies a bit more about why a URA and that assumption is pretty useless.

http://www.raidtips.com/raid5-ure.aspx

https://www.physicsforums.com/thread...-raid5.789603/

https://www.high-rely.com/blog/why-r...g-in-2009-not/

Even if you follow the poor assumptions, the math isn't that terrible. Here is a calculator based on that theory:
http://www.raid-failure.com/raid5-failure.aspx


URE, and such aside, I follow this:

To me, I would never use more than 4-5 drives in a single raid 5, moving to ZFS would be best for large capacity and quantity.

You could even use multiple RAID5 arrays, and then Logical volumes to make them appear as one giant storage space.

Thanks for following up with the info.
I don't necessarily disagree with those articles, but I wouldn't risk it.
To rebuild a RAID 5 array you need to read data off of all of the other drives. If even one has a URE, you're done. Given the fact that the array is old enough that one drive has already failed, it wouldn't be a big surprise for one of the remaining drives (particularly if they're the same age/model/version) to have an issue. And today's drives are huge compared to the early 2000s when RAID 5 was more popular.

So yes, the math is all theoretical, but it's not a risk I'd take. Besides, RAID 10 preforms so much better.

[UndrgroundRider]

Originally posted by The_Penguin


Please feel free to elaborate.

Ok. Your suggestion to use RAID 10 is outrageously stupid and flat-out wrong. RAID 10 is only guaranteed to withstand 1 drive failure. If you lose a second drive from the same mirror the array is toast. You're actually getting less redundancy than RAID 6, the same redundancy as RAID 5, and WAY less space. Plus you can never upgrade without remaking the whole array from scratch. Also, if you ever do need to rebuild the array, it's going to be rebuilding directly off of the only other drive in the array that you can't afford to lose.

RAID 10 is a special purpose level designed for ultra high IO performance. It's pretty much pointless anywhere except special cases in a data centre.

Also, RAID is not a backup solution. You probably don't need 4 drives of redundancy, just 1 and a proper backup system. It's not going to save you from corruption, viruses, local disaster, etc.