[tor]

I just bought a new NAS for home (bunch of hard drives in a box on your network).

Every 5 years or so I go out and buy about 2 or 3 grands worth of storage to keep me going. Last time it was a dedicated RAID controller for a home pc with 6 or 8 drives in it. That gave me about 1TB of storage. At the time I was quite impressed with the quality of hardware available.

It died a while back and I have been making do using motherboards with builtin RAID 1 which did effectively the same thing but for way cheaper.

Current project I am working on requires lots more storage so I have bought a few new bits and bobs but finally bit the bullet and bought a QNAP859Pro (http://www.qnap.com/...re.asp?p_id=146).

So I have 11TB in that one box coming online at the moment (about a 16 hr startup process) and have been reading through the feature set.

Bugger me these things are cool.

Oh and I am now the proud owner of some 20TB in 3 boxes of storage. I win!!!

[savagegoose]

thats an awesome porn collection there tor.

[tor]

savagegoose, on 26 March 2010 - 06:07 PM, said:

thats an awesome porn collection there tor.

Trying to back up the entire alt.binaries.erotica hehehe

It is actually going to be an awesome music collection. So far I have about 8TB of music. About halfway through. Might need another of these puppies.

[Mr Medved]

The price is beyond my budget but it does look very sexy. NAS plus VMware can be quite a lovely thing.

[tor]

Mr Medved, on 26 March 2010 - 09:51 PM, said:

The price is beyond my budget but it does look very sexy. NAS plus VMware can be quite a lovely thing.

Yep it even has iSCSI support... I just rebuilt my network and am now considering virtualising most of it. Should probably get the paying work out of the way first though.

[RumpledElf]

Hah, our little server doesn't even have a RAID setup. We used to have two servers but the one in Adelaide eventually died (one of a particular model where the heat sink clip just goes *ping* after a few years) so now we have ADSL we're down to just the one. It has a surprisingly small amount of hdd space left - less than 50G. When it was in Adelaide it actually ran out of space from us forgetting it was backing up a database twice a day and we weren't deleting the older backups (usually never need a backup more than a few days old - and yes, the service we run has a stupid race condition that comes up often enough we really do need the backups). Dunno how much space it actually has in total, probably 500G or so. Getting on time for an upgrade I think. There's no way in hell that machine has enough grunt let alone RAM to run the existing service *and* a bunch of new ones for testing. The ones you can hire on the net cost a wee bit too much for us right now and never have the RAM we need, although the specs are improving. Not sure I want a massively grunty computer/s in our hotbox kitchen right now either.

And you made me look at my computer, which I could have sworn was barely used ... turns out its almost full and someone has stuck a VERY big shared folder called "Media Backup" on it. Hmmm, wonder who that was

[Sean]

hmm, I've been looking at inexpensive RAID NAS-type storage solutions for a 'project' where I only require about 1-3Tb, but it's for an NGO - editing video footage - so it has to have fast access and be robust and redundant -- but cheap, and possibly portable. eSATA would be good. I saw some dual bay hotswappable RAID 1 boxes on the net for about $100 with eSATA which might do the trick, but gotta be ordered from US -- plus the ever present problem of warranty and how long will a device last etc.

Need to get it soon to offload the current video store which is growing...

[tor]

Sean, on 27 March 2010 - 11:28 PM, said:

hmm, I've been looking at inexpensive RAID NAS-type storage solutions for a 'project' where I only require about 1-3Tb, but it's for an NGO - editing video footage - so it has to have fast access and be robust and redundant -- but cheap, and possibly portable. eSATA would be good. I saw some dual bay hotswappable RAID 1 boxes on the net for about $100 with eSATA which might do the trick, but gotta be ordered from US -- plus the ever present problem of warranty and how long will a device last etc.

Need to get it soon to offload the current video store which is growing...

This one has dual external eSata connections (3Gbps each).

It also has built in dual gig ethernet trunking (from memory 5 flavours of use).

Does RAID 6 so reliability is fairly minor, built in SMTP server for notifications.

Portability is debatable, I could carry it around but probably won't but it is a desktop version

Realistically if you are looking at less than 4TB (I assume you meant byte and not bit) I'd just do a pc with 2 drives in RAID1.

Even better do 4x1TB in RAID 10.

There is the same NAS I have in rack mount but I have not got the guys in to build my server room yet so rack is pointless, and I need a diesel generator first which means fixing the outside shed as it has a touch of slant. I currently have 24 poweredge servers sitting in a pile in my downstairs office waiting for all this to come together. Not allowed them inside even in the downstairs house due to noise consideration when I fire them all up.

Plans. They don't come together smoothly.

Probably going to buy another of these boys as my offsite backup somewhere. Going colo is a tiny bit above my current requirements but I believe Equinix is throwing some decent deals around.

[Mr Medved]

Tor - how has it performed?

I'm guessing that it is six months later so it should be half the price now...

[tor]

Mr Medved, on 15 October 2010 - 10:06 AM, said:

Tor - how has it performed?

I'm guessing that it is six months later so it should be half the price now...

The Qnap 859 now looks to be a shade under 2K and 2TB disks are now 125 each so all up it would be 3K now, I got it for about 3.5K with 8x2TB but that was a bit of a "good customer" deal.

I have really liked it.

I have had one small issue when I had a power cut the Active Directory integration settings were dropped, little annoying at the time but given how much other stuff went wrong at that time it was pretty low on my list of things to rant about.

Performance wise it outperforms all the other consumer grade NAS devices I have. The add ins are brilliant and I think anyone working in a linux world would have even better results. It has a built in mail server, nzb server (the girlfriend loves that) and a bunch of other stuff.

[savagegoose]

i know its small fry to you, but just got an external usb drive 1TB for 95$
about 3x bigger than my current desktop has.
i take it around pals places with good b band and insane monthly downloads;im still using a usb stick modem grrr,. and loot movies.

[Mr Medved]

tor, on 15 October 2010 - 06:29 PM, said:

The Qnap 859 now looks to be a shade under 2K and 2TB disks are now 125 each so all up it would be 3K now, I got it for about 3.5K with 8x2TB but that was a bit of a "good customer" deal.

What type of HDDs did you get? The only compatible model I have seen in that price range is the Seagate ST32000542AS (consumer-grade); for enterprise-grade 2TB disks they are around $300 each.

[tor]

Mr Medved, on 15 December 2010 - 12:43 AM, said:

What type of HDDs did you get? The only compatible model I have seen in that price range is the Seagate ST32000542AS (consumer-grade); for enterprise-grade 2TB disks they are around $300 each.

Enterprise disks for F&P? Nope I go cheap and crappy on them.

[Mr Medved]

tor, on 15 December 2010 - 01:45 AM, said:

Enterprise disks for F&P? Nope I go cheap and crappy on them.

I like to 'set and forget' for at least five years, but the premium for enterprise disks is a bit steep. I guess it's easier just buying a dozen consumer disks and replace them when they fail.

[tor]

Mr Medved, on 15 December 2010 - 08:25 PM, said:

I like to 'set and forget' for at least five years, but the premium for enterprise disks is a bit steep. I guess it's easier just buying a dozen consumer disks and replace them when they fail.

Well consumer disks don't fail that much more often than enterprise ones in my experience. So yeah I just make sure I have notifications set up and test the notifications by pulling a disk out every once in a while.

Then once a week I wander in and look around for red lights.

Am using RAID 6 so can deal with 2 dead disks.

[Max Carnage]

Hmmm. I just nabbed the less impressive QNAP TS-410 plus 5 x 2TB drives for $499. Supposedly as new.

It seemed too good to be true, and recent investigation shows that people have had issues running WD 'Green' HDDs in RAID. Which is what I bought.
Others reckon it's fine. Some flashed the bios and fixed them.

I probably can't go too wrong. The 5 hdds must be worth nearly $100 each new and the NAS would be about the same, so if one or the other is wasted I'll ~square out!

My photo, music and video library is currently under 1TB but I've started to digitize my entire DVD collection and have been stealing TV series from hotfile like a bandit. Now I'm not sure whether to run it as RAID5 for 6TB and some data protection, or RAID10 for 4TB storage and really good data protection?

[Turkey]

Max Carnage, on 04 February 2011 - 06:59 AM, said:

Hmmm. I just nabbed the less impressive QNAP TS-410 plus 5 x 2TB drives for $499. Supposedly as new.

It seemed too good to be true, and recent investigation shows that people have had issues running WD 'Green' HDDs in RAID. Which is what I bought.
Others reckon it's fine. Some flashed the bios and fixed them.

I probably can't go too wrong. The 5 hdds must be worth nearly $100 each new and the NAS would be about the same, so if one or the other is wasted I'll ~square out!

My photo, music and video library is currently under 1TB but I've started to digitize my entire DVD collection and have been stealing TV series from hotfile like a bandit. Now I'm not sure whether to run it as RAID5 for 6TB and some data protection, or RAID10 for 4TB storage and really good data protection?

It's probably not much of an issue for home use but RAID 5's write speed sucks arse. RAID 5 should be fine for data protection, if more than one hard disk goes at the same time then chances are that you have a bigger problem on your hands than faulty HDD's - like a lightning strike (RAID 5 can survive 1 disk dying, RAID 10 can survive between 1 and # of disks / 2 dying depending on how you have configured it and whether both disks in a mirror die or disks from a different mirror).

[Max Carnage]

Argh. How much arse?

My current NAS is a flaky Western Digital MyBook thing that has a 9MB/s write speed. Surely it can't be on that plane of suckiness?

On the other hand, I don't need all that empty space... it would make sense to try RAID10. Thanks Turkey.

[tor]

Max Carnage, on 04 February 2011 - 12:02 PM, said:

Argh. How much arse?

My current NAS is a flaky Western Digital MyBook thing that has a 9MB/s write speed. Surely it can't be on that plane of suckiness?

On the other hand, I don't need all that empty space... it would make sense to try RAID10. Thanks Turkey.

Like Turkey says, redundancy isn't that different really. RAID 6 gives you better redundancy.

If you are at 1TB now then 4TB is a lot depending on whether you are doing raw dumps of DVD's (say 5GB per movie I think, maybe 200 movies per TB) or converting them to another format (DivX is about 800MB per movie). The extra TB might not be worth having.

Although conversely does the write speed of RAID5 cause a bottleneck when compared to the LAN?

Your download speeds and plan can be used to plan how much you need that extra TB as well

[Turkey]

Max Carnage, on 04 February 2011 - 12:02 PM, said:

Argh. How much arse?

My current NAS is a flaky Western Digital MyBook thing that has a 9MB/s write speed. Surely it can't be on that plane of suckiness?

On the other hand, I don't need all that empty space... it would make sense to try RAID10. Thanks Turkey.

It's not from a comprehensive test but I think this graph is fairly representative:



But like tor has alluded to, performance is only going to be as good as the weakest link. Either the network (must be at least gigabit) or your local hard drive that you are copying from are likely to be the bottleneck.

If you're copying from DVD (you mentioned digitising DVD's) to the NAS then the hard drives in the RAID array are going to be dying of boredom while you copy!