NAS Recommendation

[ExtraSlow]

I'm no expert but that seems like a fine idea for basic use.
A question for the experts, if you do have a drive failure, the NAS gives you some kind of alert, right?

[Asian_defender]

Both QNAP and Synology will do alerts for failed hard drives. I would steer the OP more towards a 4 bay, you'll probably want to expand in the future. That seems to be the biggest regret in my work group, myself included

[FixedGear]

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Both QNAP and Synology will do alerts for failed hard drives. I would steer the OP more towards a 4 bay, you'll probably want to expand in the future. That seems to be the biggest regret in my work group, myself included

why would I need a 4 bay, I had a 2 bay for years (2TB) and it worked fine. Can't I just like double the drive size to 4tb, have extra room, and stay with 2 bays? I guess I don't understand why 4 bays is better than 2

[revelations]

I've deployed, literally hundreds of drives and the WD ones that fail are the reds, purples, greens, blues etc. Gold (about 12 deployed) has never failed on me in 4 years.

No, in a RAID1 scenario a loss of one drive is not the end - although some will fail shortly after another.

[Asian_defender]

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why would I need a 4 bay, I had a 2 bay for years (2TB) and it worked fine. Can't I just like double the drive size to 4tb, have extra room, and stay with 2 bays? I guess I don't understand why 4 bays is better than 2

Migration process is a pain in the ass, it's much easier to just plug in another HDD then it is to migrate all that data to a fresh drive.
If you do a RAID 1 you would remove 1 hard drive, put in the new one, let the RAID rebuild then repeat. I'd rather just plug in a new drive into an unused bay and walk away

**edit, spelling error lol

[FixedGear]

thanks guys

[FixedGear]

So if I wanted to get a larger unit with expansion capability, what would be the step up from the DS218+? Is the DS718+ the next step up? That one is expandable to 7 bays with the DX517 expansion unit. Otherwise there is the DS918+, which has 4 bays off the bat.

[Asian_defender]

It depends on your budget, I'd do the 918+ personally but it is also double the price of a DS218+. If you can double your budget for the NAS I'd do the 918+ and select the RAID that suits you best.
Also look at the other things a NAS can do for you like Pihole, VPN server, SONAR etc.

[FixedGear]

Budget isn't an issue, but I don't think I'll use Pihole, VPN server, SONAR, and also we live in a condo so space is at a premium. I'm not sure I want to buy a bigger box unless needed, so I might just go with the DS218+ and possibly get some bigger disks (6GB?). I mean, the old disks were 2 TB, and while they were getting close to full, I think tripling the capacity would work for the next handful of years at least.

[Asian_defender]

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Budget isn't an issue, but I don't think I'll use Pihole, VPN server, SONAR, and also we live in a condo so space is at a premium. I'm not sure I want to buy a bigger box unless needed, so I might just go with the DS218+ and possibly get some bigger disks (6GB?). I mean, the old disks were 2 TB, and while they were getting close to full, I think tripling the capacity would work for the next handful of years at least.

I remember reading the backblaze reports and for some reason the 3TB increments (3TB and 6TB) had the most failures at 3-5%. Go with a 4TB variants, Try finding the backblaze reports for 2015/2016

[Xtrema]

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why would I need a 4 bay, I had a 2 bay for years (2TB) and it worked fine. Can't I just like double the drive size to 4tb, have extra room, and stay with 2 bays? I guess I don't understand why 4 bays is better than 2

4 Bay let you do RAID5 or in Synology term, RAID-SHR.

RAID 1 will yield only 50% usable (2 4TB only gives you 4TB)

RAID SHR/5 will give you min 66% usable (4 4TB will give you 12TB, or 75% usable)

So you are getting better bang for $. And when we start going into 10/12TB drives, you may want to start doing double parity with your RAID set because rebuild time during a failure is getting longer. The longer the rebuild time, the higher chance you will lose everything. So more bays and bigger RAID set will buys you more security.

Also, WD Red tends to run less hot and less noisy than Gold if noise is a concern in small space.

As NAS are getting a bit more expensive, if you think a RAID 1 4TB is enough for your need, then it's fine although you never provided what your use cases are. There is no point future proofing unless you deal with large 4K videos all the time. You will just buy another NAS and more drives in 5-7 years anyway. You don't want a drive to be running forever.

[Mitsu3000gt]

The 10 TB WD Reds seem to go on sale for $289-299 all the time now if anyone is shopping.

[FixedGear]

Thanks everyone. I ended up going with the 2 bay option with 8TB gold disks. I just got tired of debating the options so just did it haha. I'm sure it will work great for what I'm looking for.

[revelations]

RAID 1 it, but also get an Amazon Glacier account to upload direct from NAS, for pennies a day.

[Mitsu3000gt]

I have a 2-bay Synology but to be honest I rarely use it anymore. Blackblaze is absurdly cheap ($3.99 USD/mo for unlimited data) and makes it so that there is really no need to have expensive on-site backup solutions if that is the reason you're getting a NAS. If your household needs constant access to local cloud data or something like that, then they make more sense.

[94CoRd]

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RAID 1 it, but also get an Amazon Glacier account to upload direct from NAS, for pennies a day.

I've been looking in to this (along with something to replace my aging QNAP - 219PII). It's so hard to make sense of Amazon's pricing with glacier. From what I understand, All data in to glacier is free, it's $0.0045/GB/Month to store, and if i want my data back, I pay x amount, depending how fast I want my data, and then x amount per 1000 requests. Is each request a file? In the pricing calculator (https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html), it says UPLOAD requests. Is that the same as data in?

Back to the NAS H/W though - not sure I'm entirely happy with QTS. I know my hardware is a bit old (6 ish years) - but it's come to the point where I can't have any apps installed, and more recently have had to turn off the logging service, otherwise, my CPU is pinned, so much so, I can't even SSH in to the device, let alone access the admin page. It only has a single core 1.2GHz processor, and 512MB RAM, so it doesn't take much to use up all resources. Anything in the two bay world that would be worth moving up to?

[revelations]

^ try the Syn 218+ (again), seems to be a good choice - or even check if you can upgraded the RAM on the existing unit?

The Glacier pricing model is based on that you get charged up the ass for DOWNLOADING BACK your data (presumably, disaster recovery).

[FixedGear]

Hey guys, I just got my DS218+ set up! I've not got to transfer about 2TB of files to it... can anyone recommend the best way to do that? I imagine I don't want to just CTRL-C and CTRL-P from my laptop. Is there some software that will check the transferred files to make sure they transferred properly and without errors? Thanks!

EDIT: Also we really only plan to use this as a media server. I'd like to turn it off when we're not using it - is it OK to turn it on/off frequently, or will that damage the disks? (I've read some opinions that you should leave it running all the time)

[The_Penguin]

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Hey guys, I just got my DS218+ set up! I've not got to transfer about 2TB of files to it... can anyone recommend the best way to do that? I imagine I don't want to just CTRL-C and CTRL-P from my laptop. Is there some software that will check the transferred files to make sure they transferred properly and without errors? Thanks!

robocopy.

[suntan]

Why turn off? It uses almost no electricity.