NAS, Raspberry or Synology.

[DiTBho]

I built mine in around 2009 (or 2010, not sure exactly) and used 2TB HDDs

which brand and model of HDDs?

[DiTBho]

Full shutdown and startup thermal cycling is a bit hard on devices.  I recommend *against* powering them off for the night only.

a bit hard to implement? or/and to manage as procedure?

yup, both have difficulties, and I had to build special hw, and implement special procedures, but once done it's very elegant and simple, and it simplifies the kernel side ("suspend" on PowerPC 40x is ... buggy) a lot and is more secure. Here I have to tell you that I have a "poisoned tooth": I often work with Unix machines from the 90s, and in their case keeping a power supply on standby means potentially exposing your lab to a fire risk, power supplies (especially > 200Watt ones) sucked in the 90s. Today, however, they are infinitely better, but I still have old-days paranoia.

Then there is the question of weather and bad situations that the UPS cannot handle for more than 25 minutes for me: all cases in which it is very useful and safe to shutdown or to keep it power down.

[DiTBho]

With spinny disks, the difference is even greater, as it is the spin-up that causes the most wear (aside from emergency head parking, which may or may not cause wear, depending on both the manufacturer and model), and also consumes a lot of current too, comparatively speaking.

if you talk about "the faster they wear out", I think of the "softstart" algorithms implemented in the HDD-fw (~ESC side for the BLDC motor) precisely serve to create a uniformly accelerated way that is much gentler and slower, with two advantages and one disadvantage:

• at the spinning-up the HDD sees lower current peaks, which no more puts less stress on the power electronics and connectors, all things that in any case heat up so wear out
• there is less mechanical wear due to more gentle acceleration
• unfortunately with this approach (sometimes there is a Jumper to select "soft-start"), the disk takes longer to get up ready

[Nominal Animal]

Full shutdown and startup thermal cycling is a bit hard on devices.  I recommend *against* powering them off for the night only.

a bit hard to implement? or/and to manage as procedure?

Neither: as in "stressful to the hardware".  Continuously running well below the recommended limits "ages" the hardware very slowly, whereas full power and thermal cycling tends to "age" the hardware faster.

(For a similar reason, I tend to use 15+ minute delay for spinny-rust spin-down: having a HDD spin continuously does not cause nearly as much wear as spin-up and spin-down does, although I think the largest wear due to spin-ups is on the power supply circuitry.  If there is an option, I do like to use the slower/gentler/softer spin-up, even if it takes 10 seconds as opposed to the 2-3 seconds for typical SATA drives I use.)

Google used to have interesting papers on HDD longevity.  If I recall correctly, they noted that even running their HDDs continuously at 40°C ambient didn't wear them out prematurely.

[David_AVD]

As a commercial NAS I have seen a single bay Synology. I don't like RAID systems, I find them unreliable, from experience I prefer to make differential backups on another disk.

I've been using a Synology NAS at home for a few years and quite like it. The web interface and available apps make it quite useful.

Don't forget that RAID is not a substitute for backups - preferably on a different device and in a different location if possible.

I've had a drive fail in a 2 disk NAS RAID array. The NAS informed me, I swapped out the bad drive for a new one which it rebuilt. Then I swapped out the other drive as it was the same age and again it handled the rebuild for me, all with a nice GUI.

[thermistor-guy]

I am of the opinion that a "personal home" NAS should never be turned on 24 hours a day, it simply doesn't make sense.
...

One of my Synology SHR use cases is running a torrent seed box, 24/7. The setup is relatively cheap: 2-drive Synology SHR for storage,  rpi running Transmission, VPN, and Debian.

To put in larger drives, just swap them in one by one, and let the SHR rebuild each time.

[Veteran68]

The advantage of doing this is having a more flexible and customizable solution. Not only is it a NAS but it can also run VMs and docker containers (letting you run various services like Plex video streaming, PiHole, personal 'dropbox', personal VPN, torrent, media ingest station, security camera recorder, home automation, periodic backups etc...). So when you want to run something 24/7 in the background you just start up an instance on there and it runs, rather than scrounging around for a machine to run it on.

You also get more hardware flexibility. You can stick in a 10Gbit network card, you can stick in a SAS HBA (letting you connect multiple 12 bay arrays of drives for example), you can use a SSD as a cache, you can talk to a UPS for safe shutdown, etc... None of this applies for little Linux SBCs like a Pi tho, they are under powered.

I do all of this on my QNAP NAS. It has a 4-core/8-thread AMD processor and 32GB of RAM, runs VMs and containers, has an add-in 10Gbps PCIe NIC (plus the built-in dual 2.5Gbe NICs which can be bonded for 5Gbps throughput), dual 1TB NVMe SSDs for caching, connected to a UPS to manage automatic shutdown after lengthy power failures.

Synology vs QNAP: { pros, cons } ?

Eh, that would quickly devolve into a subjective debate. Back when I did the research I was leaning toward Synology as it was the one I was most familiar with, but after reading about support, software, etc. I felt QNAP was the better choice for me. And I have not been disappointed. Both are capable and have their fanboys, so I won't go there, and don't have a Synology to do A/B testing against. All I can say is I can highly recommend QNAP from experience, having owned 2 of them since 2015 (a TS-851 and a TS-673A).

{ HDD, eSATA enclosure }: which brand and model?

I ran Hitachi/HGST and Toshiba desktop 7200rpm drives in my NASes with great success. Not even NAS rated drives. I ran them for years, first the aforementioned HGST 500GB drives, then upgraded to HGST 1TB drives, then Toshiba 3TB drives in my QNAP TS-851 in 2015. Only with my latest QNAP TS-673A did I spring for WD Gold Enterprise class drives.

As to the eSATA enclosures, I ran Sans Digital (two 4-bay and one 8-bay) enclosures using dual-port eSATA cards. I still have them collecting dust in my garage, LOL. OS was base Debian or Ubuntu Linux running mdraid, all custom configured (no NAS-based distributions like Unraid or Freenas).

I am of the opinion that a "personal home" NAS should never be turned on 24 hours a day, it simply doesn't make sense.

Respectfully, I would strongly disagree, and would argue the exact opposite -- it doesn't make sense NOT to leave it on, as you would any server (which is what it is). And as far as RAID goes, it isn't perfect by any means and as mentioned, is not a substitute for backups. But it works damn well and is highly reliable if you know what you're doing. I do prefer software RAID (mdraid) to hardware RAID.

My NAS never powers down (well, short of planned maintenance or extended power outages). It serves many purposes, including media server (both to the internal network and when I'm travelling), backups (both from internal and external), personal cloud storage, internal file shares for multiple systems, etc. Even if I didn't require external access, I don't want to have to boot up a NAS when I need access. The wife would not be happy if she had to wait for me to boot it up so she could watch or listen to something.

As far as external access, I also have a pretty sophisticated home network (including 10Gbps network between the NAS and core workstations) and experience configuring networks securely, so there are multiple layers of security between the internet and my NAS. At the risk of jynxing myself, neither the NAS nor my home network have ever been breached and I've been running internet-facing servers for 20+ years, going back to dial-up (yes, I ran servers on dedicated phone lines).

Powering up and down a NAS is a pretty bad idea. If you're going to do that, may as well just use a big USB-attached external drive.

[SiliconWizard]

I built mine in around 2009 (or 2010, not sure exactly) and used 2TB HDDs

which brand and model of HDDs?

WD Red.

[David_AVD]

My first NAS was a QNAP and it was ok in general, although somewhat slow in the web GUI department. I don't recall it being horrible to use as such, just slow.

The Synology unit that replaced it seemed streets ahead of the QNAP, but that was probably because it had a much faster processor. I also put the (optional) extra RAM in it from day one.

Get the best spec'd one you can afford. The cheaper units are cheap for a reason.

[Veteran68]

My first NAS was a QNAP and it was ok in general, although somewhat slow in the web GUI department. I don't recall it being horrible to use as such, just slow.

The Synology unit that replaced it seemed streets ahead of the QNAP, but that was probably because it had a much faster processor. I also put the (optional) extra RAM in it from day one.

Get the best spec'd one you can afford. The cheaper units are cheap for a reason.

I think this applies to either/both. QNAP had some really minimally powered Atom CPU units that I wouldn't touch. The QNAP OS is quite robust and requires some CPU behind it. My TS-851 had a dual-core Celeron and 8GB RAM and performed quite decent. My current TS-673A has a 4c/8t AMD Ryzen and 32GB of RAM, 10Gbps networking, plus the aforementioned dual NVMe cache drives, so it's pretty zippy. Obviously if money is no object, you can buy i7 and Xeon based QNAP units if you really need the horsepower, but for most home use that would be severe overkill (and I'm probably near the top end of most home use-cases as is).

[Postal2]

The setup is relatively cheap: 2-drive Synology SHR for storage,  rpi running Transmission, VPN, and Debian.

Can not understand.

[DiTBho]

I told in this topic how my multi node NAS is made.

Powering up and down a NAS is a pretty bad idea. If you're going to do that, may as well just use a big USB-attached external drive.

It's not that the NAS turns on and off 59284240..14143231 times a day, it's that I usually don't need to access the NAS 59284240..14143231 times a day, because if that were the case I would take a portable disk with me, in fact, I already carry i-Rev cartridges with me for the data that I always need to have on hand.

The policy in this case is: you carry the i-Rev-cartridge/usb-stick with you during the day, and in the evening you wake up the NAS to put it in synchronization, so whatever you have modified ends up in versioning, replicated on the disks, and planned for the next backup.

So, noting that in a day at most I need to access the NAS 4 times, with times spread over 24 hours, or less than 2 times, with times concentrated in 8-10 non-working hours, these are the startups that it does at most, remaining off for much more time, off at night, off on weekends, off during holidays, off during storms, off when it is of no use to anyone!

The NAS "knows" the way I work, so, if within 40 minutes I don't need to access another file, it means that for at least another 2 hours I don't need to access anything else.

I developed a very specific mechanism that regulates switching on and off: automatic shutdown if there is no "data request" (~NFS, ~sshfs) activity on the network within 40 minutes, which for the way I work means that I no longer need to access anything.

[DiTBho]

WD Red.

Hitachi/HGST
Toshiba
[..]

thanks for this, it's really interesting for me.

@Veteran68
your Sans Digital { 4-bay } eSATA enclosures looks similar to my Raidon 

[luiHS]

Some questions about hard drives for a NAS.

1.- Are there really important differences between an HD for NAS and a normal one, is it worth paying the extra money?
2.- What are those differences, perhaps the speed of rotation of the disc? I can't think of any others.
3.- Are there also special SSDs for NAS or is it only available with mechanical drives?
4.- Do NAS disks have a special format that is not compatible with Windows NTFS?
5.- Does a commercial NAS allow you to automate backup copies to an external USB disk connected to the NAS, could it be a disk with NTFS format?

My NAS will not be on 24 hours a day, only for a while at night to watch movies and maybe throughout the day also to watch movies, but probably I will turn it on and off when I am going to use it.


I am thinking of buying this 1 bay Synology and a 4TB drive
https://www.amazon.es/gp/product/B07YVF3Q5G/ref=ox_sc_saved_image_1?smid=A1AT7YVPFBWXBL&psc=1

The disk could be this 4TB special one for NAS
https://www.amazon.es/gp/product/B09NHV3CK9/ref=ox_sc_saved_image_2?smid=A1AT7YVPFBWXBL&psc=1

Or this other one that is much cheaper:
https://www.amazon.es/Seagate-ST4000DMZ04-Disco-Interno-Plateado/dp/B07D9C7SQH/ref=sr_1_4

[Microdoser]

[Postal2]

Some questions about hard drives for a NAS.

1.- Are there really important differences between an HD for NAS and a normal one, is it worth paying the extra money?
2.- What are those differences, perhaps the speed of rotation of the disc? I can't think of any others.
3.- Are there also special SSDs for NAS or is it only available with mechanical drives?
4.- Do NAS disks have a special format that is not compatible with Windows NTFS?
5.- Does a commercial NAS allow you to automate backup copies to an external USB disk connected to the NAS, could it be a disk with NTFS format?

My NAS will not be on 24 hours a day, only for a while at night to watch movies and maybe throughout the day also to watch movies, but probably I will turn it on and off when I am going to use it.

About my experience. I put one old Seagate 1TB after CC-error with renew firmware, null bucks cost. DNS-325 is a gift from my friend, he wanted to throw in the trash. Null bucks cost.
I do not "enable-disable", NAS automatically parked when not in use.
At the whole hystory I had not problems with Seagate, NAS has USB, but I'm not using it. But really I time to time made some backups - I have usb-cradle for it. And backups successfully on stored externally HDDs.
But I can't give any advice about modern devices. As minimum, new devices must work better and must have more functions than my garbage.

[Bicurico]

A NAS hás to be on 24/7.

If you start switching it off when not needed, you will have to switch it on when suddenly needed and that comes with a waiting time.

Doesn't make sense to me.

My main computer is switched on 24/7 because I don't like to wait for it to boot and because I do access it remotely when away from home.

As such I ended up discarding dedicated NAS devices and just put the disks in my main computer. This saves energy as I only have one device switched on and is very functional, since Serviio and Samba fullfil all my needs, including user management.

And I agree that thermal cycling is bad for components - switching them on/off instead of running them 24/7.

Back to topic: I would not use a Raspberry for a NAS. It was not built for continuous heavy use and if it fails your Raid setup may become unreadable.

In my opinion, OP has two options: Synology (pay and get all ready to use and save time) or TrueNAS for his existing hardware.

[Nominal Animal]

Raspberry Pis (at least up to Pi 4), are not suitable for a NAS, because of the unreliable USB hardware implementation.

I listed much better SBC examples in reply #1.  For example, the two SATA on Odroid HC4 are connected via ASM1061 PCIe-SATA bridge, and you can add at least a couple more using USB3-to-SATA adapters.  I've happily used even the cheap JMicron JMS578 ones.  You can see various Odroid HC4 benchmarks on the product page, and ask about specific use cases or worries on the Odroid forum.

ARM SBC-based NASes tend to be limited by their storage connectivity; they do have enough CPU power to fill a GbE/2.5GbE with data –– noting that the number of packets per second supported by either end and the switch in the middle, tends to be the actual network bottleneck; and for storage, the 4k random block access rate (in most typical use cases) which is often a small fraction of the theoretical maximum bandwidth –– but connecting enough storage drives without introducing bottlenecks in the storage bandwidth and IOPS can be difficult; you need to choose the hardware very carefully.

For often read but rarely modified data like OS itself, you can often boost the storage speed by using software RAID 1 (mirroring) in Linux.  This does halve your storage space, but allows two different read operations to the same volume to occur in parallel, which helps especially with the 4k random block access rate.  It does not help with maximum file streaming rate, or linear operations like single large file reads (with no other I/O).  I do not know if you get a similar speedup when using mirroring on ZFS, however.  For speeding up linear operations, you can use software RAID 0 (aka striping), or similar options in ZFS.

[SiliconWizard]

Yep. But beyond that, in my view at least, a NAS is set up with some kind of RAID at least. The idea of setting up a RAID with several drives all connected via USB look like, uh, a nightmare vision to me. So, unless you build a "toy", this would just be out of the question, even with fantastic USB performance. Now this does restrict the use of typical small SBCs for a NAS to almost uh, none. Just my opinion of course. If all you want is to give access to files on your LAN, it will work. For a while. With limited performance.

[Nominal Animal]

Yep. But beyond that, in my view at least, a NAS is set up with some kind of RAID at least.

For Linux ARM SoC-based NAS boxes, we're pretty much limited to software RAID only.
(Many of the cheaper NAS boxes already use SBC-like custom Linux ARM boards: QNAP TS-130 uses a Realtek RTD1295 SoC, Synology DiskStation DS120j uses Marvell Armada 3700 88F3720 SoC, and so on.)

That said, even PCIe 3.0 x2 can do quite okay with up to six SATA drives using ASMedia ASM1166 (as used on AXAGON PCES-SA6 and Silverstone ECS06 and other PCIe SATA cards), and quite a few Linux SoCs already have that –– it's just that it's either internally used or not exposed with an useful connector on most SBCs.
 
One interesting SBC would be Odroid M1.  Apparently, JMicron JMB585-based port multipliers like Silverstone ECS07 work on it (link to Odroid forum thread on the subject, with benchmarks), providing five SATA 3 ports (JBOD, no hardware RAID controller). Odroid M1 itself uses very little power, idling at 1-2 watts, drawing only 60mW when suspended.  Its 5V bus is limited to 3A, so with many spinny drives, you need to ensure sufficient 5V power supply (with shared ground to the SBC, of course).
If the benchmarks described there are to be trusted, it should be able to fill a GbE or 2.5GbE from (software) RAID 5 or ZFS RAIDz configuration with suitable drives.  (GbE theoretical maximum bandwidth is a bit under 100 MB/s; as I mentioned previously, the random 4 kB read rate on the drives is likely the limiting factor.)  With mirroring, i.e. RAID 1 with two drives containing the same data on each, it should not be at all a problem given fast enough drives.

Another interesting similar board would be Radxa Rock 5 B, which also uses a Rockchip SoC (RK3588, Odroid M1 uses RK3568), and exposes a PCIe M.2 that should be similarly suitable for an ASM1166 or JMS585/JMB585 SATA host controller and port multiplier, for software RAID use.

[DiTBho]

or a zimaboard 

[DiTBho]

1.- Are there really important differences between an HD for NAS and a normal one, is it worth paying the extra money?

the writing/reading tecnology is one of the most important difference.

With CMR HDDs it's very important feature, but only if you play to use HDDs for RAID > 1.

Why'? because if you don't use CMR disks in a pool of let's say 3 disks, and one breaks, in theory you don't lose data, since you can rebuild them thanks to the parity spread across the other 2 disks, the problem is rebuilding the pool takes some time and with all non-CMR implementations it takes even longer due to the HDD technology, and what happens if another disk fails before the rebuild operation is completed?

well, in certain RAID cases, it happens that you lose everything 

[DiTBho]

And I agree that thermal cycling is bad for components - switching them on/off instead of running them 24/7.

Do you always keep your laptop "on" too?
Before the advent of SSDs, did you always keep your laptop turned "on" so as not to stress its hard drive?

- - -

I'm implicitly agreeing that perhaps for a NAS that isn't always on, laptop hard drives are better, 2.5", at 5400rpm, designed to use BLDC motors driven with soft gentle start.

examples are my two Hitachi p/ATA mounted on a PowerBook G3 and PowerBook-G4, both perfectly woring.

- - -

But I'll also tell you one thing, folks: my 10.000 rpm Raptor SCSI HDDs are mounted on a UNIX server, which I certainly don't keep on all the time since it consumes 500 fixed Watts. Taken in 2003, there is no "iddle mode", and HDDs will have about ~4000 starts in 20 years, but have no problems.

maybe with s/ATA technology the engineers have gone stoned and no longer know how to design "gentle start" in the HDD firmware 

[Berni]

Both startups and continuous use is hard on the devices, just in different ways.

Not only is startup more intensive on the components, but things like bearings can also need a few turns to get the lube into the right places after standing still for a while. Things shift as they heat up and cool down etc... But when constantly running things are warm all the time but much more mechanical wear is placed upon components. So either way if you use something regularly it will accumulate wear one way or the other.

I personally have my NAS running 24/7 but the disks spin down after a period of inactivity. Unraid is also smart enough to only spin up the disk that it needs data from, it won't spin up the whole array unless there is a reason to do it.

But i also don't think there is anything wrong with keeping your NAS disks spun up, does burn more power, but is ready anytime.

[Messtechniker]

I use the best of two worlds. A two bay Synology for daily backups based on Macrium Reflect images and 2 old PCs running OpenMediaVault. One does a weekly backup, the other does a monthly backup. In addition, weekly copies via usb and 3 disks for off-site storage. Avoiding cloud storage like the plague. Once a year I put a HDD away for "eternal" storage. In view of todays low storage media costs this is entirely feasable.