NAS, Raspberry or Synology.

[luiHS]

Is there any advantage in building a NAS with a Raspberry instead of buying a commercial NAS?

I am going to use it to share movies between a PC and a mobile phone.

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.

If I used a Raspberry, I had thought about using a Raspberry 4 that I have or buying the new Raspberry 5. And the question I have is whether to buy an adapter board to be able to connect SATA hard drives or connect the hard drive with a SATA to USB adapter. I will also need a box to place both the raspberry and the hard drive.

[Nominal Animal]

You do know there are well-supported Linux SBCs for exactly this purpose available already?

As an example, I have an Odroid-HC1 (old, current is Odroid HC4 with two vertical SATA bays).

For a backup or media storage type NAS, I would consider Odroid M1 with at least OS on the PCIe M.2 SSD (PCIe 3.0, 2 lanes).  It has one SATA connector, but you can use USB3-to-SATA for additional ones.  It also consumes only about 1.3 watts when idle.  Putting the OS on the PCIe means that you can use huge spinny SATA drives for backups, automatically spun down until actually accessed (although I'd also run smartd on them, scanning them periodically about once a month, to detect data and disk deterioration hopefully in time).
Of course, if you use a large PCIe SSD for the OS, you'll have ample room for storing often-accessed data as a separate NAS volume.

Standard JMicron JMS578 etc. USB 3 to SATA bridges (that cost < USD $10) work quite well in Linux, so you can use basically any Linux SBC with gigabit ethernet or better, and one or more USB 3 host ports, to build your NAS.  (For example, look at Odroid C4 or Odroid N2+.  N2+ in particular has about twice the CPU power a Raspberry Pi 4 has, in case you need that.  For a NAS, you do not.  Note their low idle power consumption, on the order of two to three watts.  Standby is typically less than one watt, and on a NAS, you can safely use the powersave governor.)

For a NAS box that is in heavy use, I'd consider an Intel/AMD -based box with support for three or more PCIe SSDs, and only use SATA for spinny-disk-type long-term backup storage (with the same smartd config as for a Linux SBC NAS).  However, the power consumption tends to grow by an order of magnitude.

As I build my own solutions, I am not up to date on specialized NAS distributions and such.  I also do not use RPis myself, for various technical (problematic USB hardware) and nontechnical (foundation) reasons.

[DiTBho]

Is there any advantage in building a NAS with a Raspberry instead of buying a commercial NAS?

Short answer: no, Synology has support, and a team working on it.
RPI and customs solutions need *YOU* to fix and develop stuff.

[DiTBho]

Intel/AMD

I say this with regret, because I personally HATE Intel as a company and x86 as an architecture, however I have to say that Zimaboards are not bad.

At least they have a lot of support, including propietary stuff that only works on x86.

[DiTBho]

Another very important aspect that is never considered: the case, the sleds (this for HDDs), the airflow, the power supply part, the heat shield, all things that with an RPI are your responsibility (and are often underestimated), whereas with products like Synology they have been well designed and tested.

It may seem like a contract that suggests using a Synology when I designed my own multi node NAS with GNU/Linux PowerPC-40x modules, but I must say that I got into troubles precisely because of the aspects I mentioned, in particular the power unit occasionally caused glitches which I perceived as software bugs while they were problems with the power section.

[aeberbach]

I don't think the commercial NAS boxes give you much but an ugly menu system and molded plastic. They're probably the same code under the hood as your homebrew solution. Some say "well designed" but are they better than any other thing in the market made for supplying power and housing drives?

[DiTBho]

are they better than any other thing in the market made for supplying power and housing drives?

I won't say anything about the various other solutions because I've never tried them myself, but Synology? I will tell you *Yes, definitively than botched home made solutions*, and I say it after trying them and installing them for my bos, friends and customers.

Of course it's my opinion, but I think that from the hardware to the software everything has been intelligently thought out.

[Postal2]

I don't know what is on the market now, I recommend to use solution "out-of-box".

[luiHS]

Thank you all for the answers, I think I will try both options, I will buy a Synology, it only costs 114 Euros in total, and since I already have a Rasbperry 4 and a 1TB SSD, I will buy a SATA to USB cable which are very cheap and I will try it with the Raspberry.

[Veteran68]

I ran custom-built Linux-based NASes for many years. My last used 16 drives in external eSATA enclosures (x4 and x8). At first it was a fun project, I learned a lot about managing storage arrays and saved money in the process. But after awhile I tired of the fairly constant administration and upkeep required, and once I lost an entire RAID array due to my own stupid error during maintenance. So years ago I decided to buy a QNAP appliance, and am currently on my second model. I love them! I considered Synology but was convinced to go with QNAP instead and am very happy with them. DIY is cool when you're starting out, looking for an interesting project, and trying to save money. Once your time becomes more important and you just want things to work, buying a commercial NAS will be a wise investment.

[SiliconWizard]

How much space did you need for justifying 16 drives? (I mean, as you're talking about a "fun project", I'm assuming this was a personal NAS and not something for a business?) Just curious.

[Veteran68]

How much space did you need for justifying 16 drives? (I mean, as you're talking about a "fun project", I'm assuming this was a personal NAS and not something for a business?) Just curious.

Yes it was my personal NAS. Initially it was populated with 500GB drives in a RAID 6 array, so 7TB (unformatted) total with the 2 parity drives. Which is nothing in terms of today's storage levels. I started out with 1 4-bay enclosure, and buying 1 or 2 drives at a time. Eventually added a second 4-bay, and then an 8-bay as I bought more and more drives. Eventually I upgraded them all to 1TB drives, doubling my capacity, before retiring it after buying my first 8-bay QNAP appliance with 3TB drives.

Among other things like backups of multiple systems and network file shares, many years ago I started ripping all my music, home videos, and DVDs/BRs to my media server. I have somewhere between 20-30TB of media on my current 6-bay QNAP NAS, which contains 6x14TB drives in RAID 5.

[ejeffrey]

Is there any advantage in building a NAS with a Raspberry instead of buying a commercial NAS?

I'm not a big fan of the raspberry pi for a NAS.  It's a bit underpowered, but mostly it's really limited on storage IO.  For a simple NAS, the SD card is OK for an OS drive, but your storage drives are pretty much limited to USB.  I'd much rather something that had NVMe and/or SATA, even for a single drive system.

I find them unreliable, from experience I prefer to make differential backups on another disk.

Of course you are supposed to have backups either way.  The main purpose of RAID is to reduce downtime from failed hard drives.  And it's true, that while you add redundancy, you also add more things that can go wrong, both in terms of more hardware that can fail and more options to mess up the configuration (including things like swapping the wrong drive after a failure!).  That said, the commercial raid offerings generally handle the configuration side pretty well, and most people seem to have only good things to say about Synology in particular.

[SiliconWizard]

How much space did you need for justifying 16 drives? (I mean, as you're talking about a "fun project", I'm assuming this was a personal NAS and not something for a business?) Just curious.

Yes it was my personal NAS. Initially it was populated with 500GB drives in a RAID 6 array, so 7TB (unformatted) total with the 2 parity drives.

Oh ok, makes sense. I built mine in around 2009 (or 2010, not sure exactly) and used 2TB HDDs (which is 4 times what you had used), so yes - that would amount to about the same. 2TB HDDs were already quite affordable back then as I remember.

I have upgraded the HDDs once in the meantime (just once) and otherwise my NAS is still running fine, yes it's at least 13 yo now and has been running almost 24/7. So is it possible to do this with a homebuilt NAS and quality, but just consumer HDDs (not enterprise-class or anything like that), without having to constantly maintain it, absolutely. (Apart from this HDD upgrade, I have just updated the OS - CentOS - on a regular basis until it went out of support, I haven't bothered to update to a more recent version of CentOS and things are plenty fine this way with now zero maintenance.)

[Berni]

I am running Unraid on a 6th gen i5 as my NAS for a number of years now.

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.

RAID does not have to be so risky either. If you don't need the extra performance, then you can use the Unraid way of having a separate filesystem on each drive and then extra parity drives on top as safety. This way data is NOT striped across all drives. If something really bad happens and the RAID array collapses, then you can still just pull drives out and plug them into any Linux machine and see the files on it. You only loose data on the drives that actually died, not the whole array. You can also add more drives to the array any time (but does require parity to be recalculated) and they can all be different sizes. I would not recommend using hardware RAID controllers.

But if you really plan to use it as a NAS to make your files magically appear on the network then yes a Synology box is the way to go. You plug it in and it just works.

But using these premade NAS operating systems like Unraid, FreeNAS, TrueNAS...etc it makes it pretty easy too, you just install it and then manage over a WebUI. Once set up they don't need to be touched in years (apart from perhaps software updates every few years for security reasons)

[DiTBho]

QNAP
[..]
Synology

Synology vs QNAP: { pros, cons } ?

[DiTBho]

16 drives in external eSATA enclosures (x4 and x8)

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

[DiTBho]

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.

I personally developed a solution to keep it "personal home" profiled and "off" as much as possible and "on" only when needed.

A "personal home NAS" does not have the profile of a "corporate NAS" that must guarantee data always available with minimum downtime, and for this very reason different backup and RAID policies make sense!

For a home NAS I don't think anyone cares if from the time you need the data, maybe outside your home, via the internet, it takes you half a minute longer because the NAS has to bootstrap, and serve the request!

I don't think you need to access the data that often, otherwise there's no point in having a NAS, and you'll have to carry an SSD (or in my case an i-Rev) with you.

-

I recommend becoming familiar with your NAS before entrusting it with really important data, for at least a period of 4 months.

[Berni]

It is easier to run a NAS 24/7.

Even with the recent hikes in electricity prices it currently costs about 1$ to consume 1W for 1 year. You can get a x86 PC to consume less than 20W idle fairly easily, so that would be 20 bucks per year to run. Not worth investing a lot of my time into saving that much money.

With some careful component selection and spinning down of drives you can get the average consumption a fair bit lower than that even.

[DiTBho]

RAID does not have to be so risky either. If you don't need the extra performance, then you can use the Unraid way of having a separate filesystem on each drive and then extra parity drives on top as safety. This way data is NOT striped across all drives. If something really bad happens and the RAID array collapses, then you can still just pull drives out and plug them into any Linux machine and see the files on it. You only loose data on the drives that actually died, not the whole array. You can also add more drives to the array any time (but does require parity to be recalculated) and they can all be different sizes. I would not recommend using hardware RAID controllers.

UnRaid is a great solution, in my opinion!
It's similar to the solution I developed myself for my multi node NAS.

I also prefer softRAID, all managed by the kernel as this way you don't get hurt with your own hands.

[DiTBho]

It is easier to run a NAS 24/7.

Even with the recent hikes in electricity prices it currently costs about 1$ to consume 1W for 1 year. You can get a x86 PC to consume less than 20W idle fairly easily, so that would be 20 bucks per year to run. Not worth investing a lot of my time into saving that much money.

With some careful component selection and spinning down of drives you can get the average consumption a fair bit lower than that even.

but what's the point of leaving a NAS exposed to the network, therefore exposed to a lot of attacks just because you're lazy?

And, in addition to this, my NAS's nodes consume ~nothing(1) when turned off.


(1) nothing = only the ctrl board is always online, basically it's a small router

[Berni]

The point is that id spend too much time setting this sort of stuff up than what saving the 20$ of electricity is worth. This is the main reason why i bought a Unraid license. I could make a free linux distro do everything that Unraid can do, but it would cost me too much time to do it, it was easier to just pay Unraid for a thing that works out of the box.

Also no it is not all exposed the internet directly. The only thing exposed is a single UDP port that listens for a VPN connection, the way this VPN protocol works means there is no response until it gets the secret key. So the port will not show up on any scans.

[bitwelder]

On the 'Buy or DIY' choice, I'd say that if you think you'd be happy with a NAS that does exacly what shown in the brochure, i.e. mainly a shared storage, the 'Buy' solution is OK (and specifically with Syology you should get a good system). The NAS management experience is also quite easy.
If instead you think you might use your NAS also for other purposes, as running some custom tasks and scripts, and you are not afraid to configure and manage manually (and likely also via command line), then I'd suggest to take the DIY route.

Regarding what to use to build a NAS, you may start with a Raspi 4 if you have it but if you need to buy the controller instead of getting the new Raspi 5 I'd rather choose some other brand like Odroid, which seem better suited for NAS purposes (some models are available also with a simple case that holds the board and a disk). Reason is that at least up to Raspi 4 the performance of the USB controller isn't that great.

[SiliconWizard]

Regarding leaving the NAS on 24/7, what I've done is enable wake-on-lan and I put the NAS in standby when I'm not going to use it for a certain amount of time (although I haven't put it in standby for quite a while now, so it's only occasional).
But this approach makes it draw insignificant power while in standby (it's already not hungry when active, less than 30W), while waking it up, ready to serve files, only takes a couple seconds.

[Nominal Animal]

Please note that I've only listed Odroids as an example, and not by any means the best or only possible suggestion.  I like them, and HardKernel shows their power and benchmarks on the product page, and even responds to questions on their forum.  I also like several other Linux SBCs, but have only used Odroid HC1 for a NAS-like purposes myself.

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.

Full shutdown and startup thermal cycling is a bit hard on devices.  I recommend *against* powering them off for the night only.  Off for the weekend is on the borderline for me.  If I go away for more than a couple of days and do not enable external access, then turning them off makes sense.

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.
I've always used SMART on my spinny drives (and prefer to use smartd to read the disk contents at least once per month, hopefully to catch any data degradation early).  I've found that while there is no reliable early failure indicator, raw reallocated sector count incrementing tends to be sufficient –– for myself –– to replace the drive.  It does not necessarily indicate the drive is going to fail, but it usually does occur before the drive fails; my strategy is to replace the drives before they fail.  I do not have enough experience on SSDs (enough units in long-term use) to have an opinion on those.

I personally developed a solution to keep it "personal home" profiled and "off" as much as possible and "on" only when needed.

Me too, as I use switchable sockets for all my electronics, and turn them off when I'm away for longer than a day or weekend, and do not need external access back home.  I do not currently use a NAS box, as my main workhorse is a laptop: I simply use external drives of various sorts for backups.

That said, with e.g. Odroid HC4, you can suspend the system (systemctl suspend, with LAN wakeup if you use the enable_wol=1 kernel boot option; see HardKernel kernel config and patches for details), in which state the power consumption is only about a quarter watt.  I'm not sure if auto-suspend is enabled by default, but it shouldn't be too hard to set up.

[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.

[DiTBho]

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

if it really were as you say, none of my RAPTORs, and none of the disks used in the 2000s laptops, would be operational today.

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.

I think it was true in the early 90's and false after specific lubricants were designed.

There's a company near here in charge of destroying HDDs. Until a few years ago they simply removed the electronics and threw away the mechanics. Now they destroy everything in a hydraulic press. A real shame, but I managed to save a thousand BLDC motors from 2.5" (laptop) and 3.5" (desktop) hard drives.

The funny thing, we are discussing lubrcants for HDDs, but I have never seen a single bearing seized or deformed due to the degradation of the lubricants, and since those HDDs were company stuff, they certainly used them intensively.

Both managers and guys on business trips need something that turns their company laptop on and off even 10 times a day, because if it breaks, they got another one.

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.

if we talk about RAPTOR, MAV, or SAS (probably also WD Red PRO and EXO class), they are things that are built to wear out completely mechanically in the order of 50 years.

This is probably the worry: likely modern sATA are built with less care, to be cheap, but we are still talking about at least 20 years.

Back to old days: Hibernation on Linux/Apple PowerBook-G3-G4 never worked before 2010, so during those days we all put the laptop in our bag, turned it on during class, and then turned it off again. To then turn it on again in the afternoon for the laboratories. To then turn it off again, and turn it back on on the train. And then turn it off again. And turn it back on at home.

How many cycles did pATA disks see? At least 5 cycles a day, for at least 5 years of college, and people like me kept the laptop for more years after college.

How come everything works perfectly even though those things have over 15 years of cycles?

[Berni]

It is not like each drive has X number of power cycles before it dies.

My point is that any kind of use (be it frequent startups of continuous operation) puts some amount of stress on it as compared to a drive sitting on a shelf for 20 years in a reasonable controlled environment. So not like using them in a certain way will magically make all drives last forever. But if keeping them off for most of the life is the use case then a HDD is the wrong storage technology anyway, use a tape drive for that. The point of HDDs is a 'in between tech' between SSDs and tape, long term magnetic data storage that can be accessed quickly and often, so spinning constantly or being spun up every so often, this is what they are meant to do.

When it comes to laptops drives usually die from rough handling anyway. I had to replace a lot of HDDs in peoples laptops.

I never had any of my own HDDs just flat out fail (Tho i did replace 1 or 2 way way back as a precaution because they made weird noises). Does that mean HDDs are 100% reliable and out of the billions of drives in the world none of them fail? Of course not, given a large enough sample size they will fail. However they are very reliable these days, so not like you need to constantly worry about your drive dieing tomorrow. But they do fail sometimes, so buying a super high quality drive and treating it gently so it lasts as long as possible is not a replacement for backups.

Just use your drives however you find it convenient and don't worry about how that might affect the lifespan. It does not really matter that much, in both cases the drives have a small but non 0 chance of giving up the ghost.

[DiTBho]

We are discussing "on/off cycles" as a way to fast wear out the mechanical parts, as I have already told that the "gentile soft start" can reduce the electronic wear out.

Modern (> 2001) HDDs use "fluid dynamic bearings" and this is a relatively rare reason for them to wear so badly that they cannot function properly.

Keeping an HDD off for most of the life is another story, as leaving a bearing still, whether it is sealed or open, exposes the lubricant to what is called "cementing".

This also applies to bicycle hubs, in fact right now I'm dismantling two brand new C-Record hubs that have been stored in a warehouse for over 30 years: they need to be dismantled, degreased, cleaned, and put in fresh lubricant.

For HDDs it's called "stiction", a portmanteau of friction and sticking, which occurs when the armatures that drive flying read/write heads actually get stuck in place and refuse to operate, usually after a very long period of disuse (>10 years at least), which seems counterintuitive but that's it.

[Postal2]

Hard drive I'm using.
NAS in the another room, via gigabit switches. Always cold, fan is set to "auto", but never winding. Full silent. Your NAS must be silent too to be good home NAS.

[Veteran68]

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?
...
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.

Yes, unless they're being stuffed in a bag, my laptops are always on. My work laptop, docked at my desk, is never shut down unless it goes in the bag more than a few minutes. It only reboots for Windows updates or other maintenance that requires it. My two MacBook Pros at home, one of which is on my workbench, are always on unless being transported. The only PC I have that gets shutdown regularly is my main Windows desktop, which has five (5) monitors. If I'm not running a long/overnight process, it does get shutdown nightly.

A NAS is a server. Servers -- at least those that are in use and serving a purpose -- are intended to run constantly, not to be shutdown every day. In addition to my NAS, I have two full size servers in my rack at home that run 24/7/365. One runs a Core i7 and the other is dual Xeons. I also have 3 SBC servers that likewise never shutdown outside of maintenance activities.

[DiTBho]

Yes, unless they're being stuffed in a bag, my laptops are always on

we're talking about laptops that go in a bag, because it makes no sense at all to transport a powered hard disk, potentially with spinning platters.

[DiTBho]

A NAS is a server. Servers -- at least those that are in use and serving a purpose -- are intended to run constantly, not to be shutdown every day.

It's a server, and it is not written anywhere that, since it is a server, it must remain turned on all day every day.

This is simply how you use it.

If you have scientific evidence and/or argument that keeping an HDD in perpetual rotation will wear it out less, than you can give a useful contribute to this discussion, otherwise I will end it here with what I thing about this:

bullshit!

[Nominal Animal]

Servers -- at least those that are in use and serving a purpose -- are intended to run constantly, not to be shutdown every day.

Servers and appliances exist to provide a service their users need.  Whether they are on or not, depends on the users' needs.
NAS box for thin clients?  Yep, probably needs to run 24/7.
End of the week backup archive server?  Makes sense to turn that power-hog only when needed; plus reduces the chance someone "accidentally" messes with the backups in the mean time.

Like I mentioned before, spinny-disk startup causes wear on the power supply electronics.  (I do not mean specifically PC power supplies, but the entire supply from the wall socket down to the BLDC motor.)  Thermal cycling is a significant part of it, because as I recall, Google found out they could run their HDDs constantly at 40°C/100°F ambient without any degradation in lifetime –– we're speaking statistically here, of course.

If you have 6 or more spinny drives in the same enclosure, it's time to worry about power-on sequencing, too, since the BLDC spin-up current draw is significant.  (I'm still wondering why the darn things have to spin up immediately when power is applied.  It'd be so much easier if they could be powered on, and then a separate "now spin up" message would spin them up.  BIOS/EFI/Firmware already needs to support the drive controller anyway, it'd really be just one more message in the flow.)

Current machines support various power saving levels.  The two we need to consider are idle and suspend.
Idle is when the machine is not doing any significant work, but is ready to immediately respond to requests.
Suspend, or more specifically suspend to RAM, is a state where the processors and most of the rest of the machine is unpowered, but RAM is kept refreshed.
Linux kernel-based suspend is stable on Intel/AMD and ARM hardware.  (There may be some specific cases where hardware bugs or undocumented features prohibit suspend, but they're really, really rare.)

On many ARM hardware, suspend consumes only a fraction of a watt of power.  I already mentioned Odroids as examples.  Nowadays there are even Intel/AMD server-class motherboards that support sub-watt suspend-to-RAM.  As it is a motherboard feature –– namely, the power supplies must be under software control and power saving level change sequencing bullet-proof ––, each motherboard manufacturer decides for themselves how important a low-power suspend feature is.  As it is not something many mass customers demand, the exact power level achievable using typical server-class hardware varies.  On desktop-class machines, and especially mini-ITX and micro-ATX Intel/AMD motherboards, the suspend support gets much more focus, so low-power suspend tends to be more common.

At sub-watt suspend power levels, is there even a difference between "off" and "suspended"?
(Other than a suspended machine being accessible with a couple of second latency, and a machine turned off being inaccessible, unless it has external wakeup support, I mean.)

(Note: When the RAM-based image is put into storage, and the machine fully powered down, we're talking about suspend-to-disk or hibernation.  This is well supported on tablet and laptop boards, and Linux can support it, but it obviously requires proper storage: you don't want to hibernate to a SD-card, for example.  Also, combined suspend+hibernate exists, in which case the initial suspended image is stored on disk, but power-off is delayed in case the machine is needed within some time window.  Waking up from hibernation is "slow", because it involves a full hardware boot-up; only, instead of loading an OS, the hibernated image is loaded.  A major part of the wake-up delay is hardware (BIOS/EFI/Firmware) boot-up, with the loading of the full system image from storage also important.  The activation of the hibernated image is fast, basically the same as from suspension.  Thus, hibernation wake-up time is dictated by hardware and firmware, not the OS.)

Because only the RAM (and some low-power subsystems) are powered during suspend (suspend-to-RAM; in hibernation, the entire machine is powered off), some sort of a notification is needed for when the system needs to come back up to idle/active power levels.  In PC-class Intel/AMD hardware, power supplies and motherboards keep one of the +5V lines powered even during suspend, so that USB HID events (detected by the motherboard, involving no CPU activity!) will wake up the machine.  Similarly, many network interface (cards and built-in ports) use that line to power their receive sides, so that when a suitable Wake-On-LAN packet is received, the NIC tells the machine to wake up.  (Again, WOL involves hardware only.)
WOL support for ARM hardware varies, but it present on for example the Odroids I already mentioned.  (And I mentioned them only because I have one, and know of them; I am NOT implying they're the best, or even the only ones to do that.  They're examples and suggestions to look at, nothing more.)

In particular, basically all ARM-based NAS boards, and all ARM-based router/switch boards with suspend capability (low-power modes where RAM is kept refreshed but CPU and some other subsystems are not), have had WOL support.  Some even expose a wakeup pin (although I suspect it is more common to have it as an undocumented pad or test point; but that's just unfounded suspicion, not knowledge).  Whether USB is powered during suspend or not varies, mostly whether the board is able to power off the USB ports under software control at all.  (When it is supported, it's also supported by the Linux kernel; take a look at /sys/bus/usb/devices/usbN/power/ pseudofiles.  This file-like interface (under /sys and /proc) is how the Linux kernel exports things.  They are "pseudo" in the sense that they do not actually exist at all, not even in RAM: the kernel only generates the structures when there is some process actually examining things.)

So, what does all that above waffle mean when one considers a NAS box with spinny-rust HDD drives?

• You want your OS and related files on Flash (M.2 SSD).
  Because software will do a lot of file accesses whenever not suspended, having an SSD for the OS minimizes the impact on the HDDs.
  There are lots of tunables for such accesses in Linux and BSD –– even the act of when and how often file access timestamps are modified when the files are read is configurable.  You don't want to have to mess with those on top of everything else to get the NAS box to perform best to your needs, and putting the OS and logs etc. on a separate SSD drive gives you that option.
• If you have a copy of the OS SSD you keep as a backup, updated say once a week, you can recover from Doh! moments by swapping the two.
  It also means the HDDs and the NAS system itself are decoupled, letting you transfer HDDs in-and-out and between NAS boxes, for example when upgrading hardware, with minimal effort.  If the OS is on the same HDDs as your data, when anything goes wrong, pain will ensue.
• You want suspend (suspend-to-RAM) and Wake-on-LAN support, with a sub-1W suspend power use.
  This way, you do not need to power down the box unless you do not want anyone to be able to access it: at 1W, the power draw is just 8.8 kWh/year.
  My suggestion is to only power it down when you are away for several days, and do not want it accessible at all.
• Suspend works perfectly with HDD spin-up/down/parking.
  HDDs will automatically spin up when read from or written to, and most can be configured to automatically spin down when not accessed for a specified time.
  If your OS and related files are on an SSD, HDDs will only get spun up when information on them is actually accessed.
• On plain HDDs and software RAID setups, you'll want to run the smartd daemon (Linux, BSD) to periodically read each entire drive when otherwise idle, so that the drive hardware itself can detect deteriorating data and relocate failing blocks.
  Because the rest of the system doesn't care about the data itself, only whether the drive reports success (with the data), such scanning is integrated into most RAID controllers, and you don't need to run such a daemon; you just run some kind of host RAID controller management daemon instead.
  Now, to limit the wear on the HDDs when they're expected to be spun down for the majority of the time, you do need to configure smartd smartly: you want it to scan one drive at a time (to limit "idle" power use), as continuously as possible (when the machine is otherwise idle), with each drive fully scanned in a given period: I prefer about a month, but it varies depending on drives and people.  What you don't want, is having to spin-up a disk just for smartd scanning.
  If you run on mains electricity, you may prefer to set smartd to run only at night.  If you run on solar, you may prefer to set smartd to run only during the day, when there is plenty of energy available.
• The above is not controlled by any script or GUI, but by implicitly, timing operations sensibly.
  HDDs do not know or care whether a given access is because an user wants to open a file, or because smartd decides it's time to scan the drive.
  HDDs spin up when needed, and spin down when their internal controller decides they should, or (for ATA/SATA) when OS or userspace sends a spin-down-now command to the drive.  On Linux and BSD, you can typically use hdparm to send such commands, or configure drive idle spin-up/spin-down parameters.  Most HDDs also have internal temperature sensors, which you can read with hddtemp.  So, to make things happen like I described above, you need to consider the entire system and configure each subsystem in a suitable fashion.  (I do not know if e.g. TrueNAS core, a Linux distribution dedicated for NAS boxes, makes such configuration any easier.)
• In Linux and Android, the kernel has one or more power state governor, CPU frequency scaling and power state management subsystem, that can be configured from the userspace.  Not all hardware supports all possible governors, and not all ready-made kernels have more than one governor compiled, so to be able to select the one you want and best matches your use case, you may have to experiment and even recompile your own kernel (for testing; I do recommend using distro kernels for appliances if possible, because those get proper maintenance).
• Sensible "idle" power draw is nice, but when suspend and HDD spin-up/down are configured well, it only mixes with the active power draw in some duty ratio (depending on the behaviour of the above-mentioned governor), and is much less important than low suspended power draw.
  Essentially, the NAS box will only be idle when active bursts occur within (idle time limit before suspend).  Do not forget that you can configure a different spin-down time limit for the HDDs than the suspend limit: it is perfectly okay to have the NAS box that wakes up from suspend within a couple of seconds, to suspend rather aggressively (say, after 10 minutes of idle), but at the same time have the HDDs spin down only after 30+ minutes of no accesses.
  I like that, because it aggressively reduces power use and running temperatures, but is very gentle on stressing the HDDs by avoiding unnecessary spin-ups/downs, and –– as far as I understand –– should also maximise the system lifetime, stressing it minimally, overall.

Okay, but we were talking about servers, weren't we?

The same argument applies to servers.  If you have a motherboard that supports <1W suspend-to-RAM (as measured at the wall socket), and wakes up from suspend within a second or two –– easily achieved in Linux using Intel/AMD/ARM hardware, when the OS is on an SSD; with OS on a HDD, some accesses will always occur during the wakeup process and thus wakeup delayed by the HDD spin-up time ––, then the same energy savings apply, and hibernation or fully powering down the server is no longer necessary.

If you have a server motherboard that does not have low-power suspend –– typically the case with legacy hardware! ––, then hibernation or powering off the darn thing when not needed is definitely a good option.

If you have such a server, one trick that few people realize is easily available, is to use a low-power ARM SBC with Ethernet connected to the same switch and LAN (and VLAN) as the server, just to receive wakeup-on-LAN and other commands to control server wakeup-from-hibernation.  Power-down is not a problem, as even legacy server motherboards have software power-down support, and it is required anyway for proper hibernation; but you might want to add a normally closed (openable) contactor to cut off power for remote recovery from lock-ups.  There is a soft power-on button on all server boards, which you can connect in parallel with an optocoupler (might need a transistor for signal inversion, as the pin is normally not connected, and connects to ground or voltage when the button is pushed) to an SBC output pin, so that the SBC can wake up the server from hibernation safely.  A current sensor on a suitable server power bus would tell the SBC when the server is fully shut down (it's difficult to determine reliably otherwise), plus you can often sprinkle some temperature sensors read by the SBC to determine issues; the combination of both plus some watchdog software would allow even lockup detection automatically.

So, as someone who has practical experience in HPC and servers, both software and hardware, I do fundamentally object to the idea that a server or appliance needs to be running 24/7.  To me, they need to be running when I need them; and when I don't need them, I want them to not waste power (with my utterly arbitrarily set limit at around 1 watt).  There are many ways of making that happen, including "hacks" like adding a low-power cheap ARM Linux SBC as your power controller for hardware that doesn't support power save or suspend, so use them when needed.  Do not just adopt silly rules of thumb like "a server is on 24/7" without carefully considering the implications.

[DiTBho]

Like I mentioned before, spinny-disk startup causes wear on the power supply electronics.  (I do not mean specifically PC power supplies, but the entire supply from the wall socket down to the BLDC motor.)  Thermal cycling is a significant part of it, because as I recall, Google found out they could run their HDDs constantly at 40°C/100°F ambient without any degradation in lifetime –– we're speaking statistically here, of course.

As far as I understood and observed, sure spinny-disk startup causes wear on the power supply electronics(A), but they do so slowly that if you look at the statistics they are NOT that 5% of the problem, that is, the probability that the very thin layer of lubricant (B) applied over the platters "may fail" as a bearing for the flying read/write heads is much higher as it ages much more quickly locally and can cause a head to crash at that point

p(may_fail(A)) = 0.05
p(may_fail(B)) = 0.70

B: it seems that the vibrations and the very high data rate are prolonged, perhaps with the heads always moving on the same LBAs for long data sessions, accelerating this process much faster.

[Nominal Animal]

The mechanical vibration/noise during spin-up probably causes more overall wear than the current draw.

(Funny side note: Decades ago, I once bought a Maxtor IDE drive that was so out of balance, it would not stay put when spun up on on top of a horizontal flat table.  Got it replaced immediately.)

As to the platters, I thought the read heads use an air cushion on top of the platters, no lubricants?
(A small area is reserved for parking, and never contains any data, so that read/write heads are always positioned over the platters, even when powered down.  In the parking position, the head assembly has additional supports that move the heads further away from the platters, to ensure they physically cannot crash to the platter surface when powered down.  The spinning of the platters creates the air cushion, and the heads only move from the parking area when the platters are spinning and the air cushion present.)

The head assembly does move, and any lubrication on that (head pivot?) could age badly (especially if unused) and become sticky.  If that happens, the controller within the drive will fail to locate the correct sector (stiction making small head moves hardest), and will error out.  Many drives do an emergency park of the head assembly in an effort to get the head assembly "unstuck" (and in many other internal error conditions), just like when power is lost; this creates the very distinctive 'click' sound.

[Microdoser]

I recently checked out spinning HD reliability (because they just seemed to fail more often in my experience) to find that a drive made in recent years is 50% more likely to fail, and fail within 3 years than one made before something like 2015 (can't remember the exact year), 3 years being the time that it's either going to fail by, or last a very long time (barring abuse).

Of course, SDDs are far more reliable these days than a mechanical drive.

[DiTBho]

The mechanical vibration/noise during spin-up probably causes more overall wear than the current draw.

Sure, the spin-up makes a lot of vibration and noice, but for short time. It is clear that this is a problem, but not a primary one, in fact p(may_fail) = 0.09, still an order of magnitude lower than media degradation, which happens after the spin-up, so a greater probability p(may_fail) = 0.70 exposed to much longer times.

The question here is: what degrades the platters so much to the point of cracking the flying read/write heads?

I have given two reasons, but there are certainly others, and in this case the vibrations produced by the spin-up contribute yes, but to a minimal extent 

[Postal2]

I'm still wondering why the darn things have to spin up immediately when power is applied

Because firmware for disk is written on the disk.

[DiTBho]

I'm still wondering why the darn things have to spin up immediately when power is applied

Because firmware for disk is written on the disk.

On the HDD flash/prom.

And on the Raptor and Fujtsu MAW SCSI HDDs, the firmware allows you to choose whether or not to enable soft-start. There is a special jumper to set. At cold start the firmware checks if the jumper is set, if it is the bldc motor accelerates with a much softer curve - aka gentile spin-up - taking much longer to reach the final rpm.

even if we are talking about an impulsive event lasting a few seconds
    soft-start =
            less vibrations (most significant)
            less friction (not significant, but it's there)
            less heat (not significant, but it's there)
            less current peaks (significant)
            less stress on the power parts on the PCB (significant)

For the 10000 rpm, on Raptors HDDs there is a second jumper to choose a slow-soft-start of 1.9 seconds from zero to full spinning speed, which requires also setting the SCSI HBA so that it in turn delays the "device ready" check, typically with active waiting within a timeout.

I think that for the most of s/ATA HDDs those jumpers simply don't exist, I've never understood why.

[DiTBho]

As to the platters, I thought the read heads use an air cushion on top of the platters, no lubricants?

Actually they use both, and both tricks.

When you get the highway, you enter a special lane that is used to accelerate. Similarly, the outermost area of the platters is used (or rather should be used) for the spin-up, and here you understand why the vibrations at the start are not really a problem if the head parking has been done correctly rather than having suddenly pulled the plug (usually due to a blackout with no UPS in use).

Smart firmwares (like on my Raptor, and Fujtsu MAW, both enterprise level SCSI) trie to move the arm to the outer area BEFORE spinning the platters under acceleration. There is a special command "heads park" for this.

Air cusions help, but the special lubrificant spread on the platters works as a "bumper" for when the platters are already rotating and rotating at maximum speed of uniform motion, and it's the last countermeasure to avoid crashing a flying read/write head for an external (even if little) shock.

It's in use since 2009, so applied to HDDs of 320..512GB up, and works quite well, but it wears out much quickly ... in theory you could also replace it with fresh lubricant (assuming you can find of that type on the market)

[DiTBho]

The head assembly does move, and any lubrication on that (head pivot?) could age badly (especially if unused) and become sticky.

The engine bearings are of the "fluid dynamic" type, they are very advanced in technology vs those used in the 90s, and so is the chemical composition of the lubricants.

As I understand it, these special lubricants begin to degrade after 10 years of non-use, and since then the degradation increases in geometric progression.

* * * conclusion * * *

My position is:
- turning on/off HDDs doesn't wear out them too much
- you can feel comfortable turning them on/off even several times a day when needed (without exaggerating)
- you have to turn them on at least a couple times a year and keep them in rotation for at least a couple of hours

the things you really need to worry about are:
- avoiding vibrations and shocks, especially while they are rotating
- avoiding making them work in environments that are too humid
- avoid having them work in very dusty environments, to preserve the air-filter, which otherwise may fail
- avoiding stressing them too much with data rates that are constantly too high
- avoiding making them work at temperature too high (>40C) or too low (<10C)

[Postal2]

On the HDD flash/prom.

No. See Beagleboard's AM335X techref - and you will understand, how modern SOC booting.

[DiTBho]

On the HDD flash/prom.

No. See Beagleboard's AM335X techref - and you will understand, how modern SOC booting.

As far as I know, I have seen these possibilities

• #1: boot from external parallel flash/rom ( <2006 )
• #2: boot from an external serial (SPI) flash/rom
• #3: boot entirely from an internal flash/rom
• #4: boot from an internal flash/rom, then look for an external SPI flash
• #5: boot from an internal flash/rom, then look for tftp-boot
• #6: boot from an internal flash/rom, then look for RS232-boot

e.g.
The IBM/Amcc PPC40x SoCs are of the type #1
The Atheros5-9 SoCs are of the type #2
The Mediatek/Arm SoCs are of the type #4

For the integrated controller on a HDD, I would expect type #2, or type #3

My Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 s/ATA HDDs have programmable firmware on a flash, I've never looked at the PCB, so I don't know if there is an external SPI flash chip, but I know you can update the firmware over the the s/ATA channel (via Seagate's software) and have a serial console/lvTTL type on a couple of pins on the back connector.

So what's your point? I did not get it

[Postal2]

On the HDD flash/prom.

No. See Beagleboard's AM335X techref - and you will understand, how modern SOC booting.

So what's your point? I did not get it

I suggest you think about why the mechanical subset is replaced “hot” only (to retrieve data).

[DiTBho]

I suggest you think about why the mechanical subset is replaced “hot” only (to retrieve data).

Again it makes no sense. No one replaces anything these days, the entire hard disk is usually thrown away and replaced under warranty; rarely if the damage is limited to the PCB only and platters are in working order(1), only the PCB is replaced to retrieve the HDD data, which are stored on platters!

So, it makes perfectly sense as I wrote above: for the integrated controller on a HDD, I would expect type #2, or type #3, this way if there is a firmware bug (as happened with my Seagate Barracuda), it can be solved without the disks having to go back. The user can download the software and update the flash of his/her HDD.

-

From what you wrote you can't understand anything, and it almost seems like you want to say that the stage2-firmware is written on the platters, which - frankly - would be bullshit for both technical(1) and commercial(1) reasons.



(1) which, according to what I wrote above, has less probability to fail, while platters have the highest probability to break

[Postal2]

I suggest you think about why the mechanical subset is replaced “hot” only (to retrieve data).

and it almost seems like you want to say that the stage2-firmware is written on the platters

Some blocks of data needs to be read from the disk before it's start. It's not a secret and widely known.

only the PCB is replaced to retrieve the HDD data, which are stored on platters!

Of course, you can change controller easily - because critical data will be taken from disk when they not corrupted.

Also I know that pcb without disk will answer via uart only. This behavior points to "stage 2" on the disk.
But modern SOC really have place inside own flash. You can check PCB without disk via SATA and report here.

[DiTBho]

Some blocks of data needs to be read from the disk before it's start. It's not a secret and widely known.

Oh, widely known, but you vaguely mentioned a SoC. Can you give me a technical document about that?

Otherwise, let me say what I think: I think you're making a crazy mess, the only data that is read from the platters is the alignment data, and this is something you can do even with a very slow soft-start.

[Postal2]

Some blocks of data needs to be read from the disk before it's start. It's not a secret and widely known.

the only data that is read from the platters is the alignment data

May be. But in that case access via SATA to naked pcb will be possible. It is not true.

I guess when disk go to fabricate, some special machine connect him, load him (mechanical part only). And pcb is common for all disks, nothing special content in it. Because set firmware to pcb is not good for mass-production.

[David Hess]

I looked at using a Raspberry Pi for NAS duty a couple years ago.  There are stackable expansion boards to support 2.5 and 3.5 inch SATA drives:

https://geekworm.com/collections/nas-storage

I ended up repurposing my old x86 workstation running Windows 10 with Storage Spaces because of its versatility with adding and removing drives.  FreeNAS worked great but was not as flexible.

but what's the point of leaving a NAS exposed to the network, therefore exposed to a lot of attacks just because you're lazy?

The network?  Why have only one?

I keep my NAS on a separate network which has no route to the internet.

[DiTBho]

May be. But in that case access via SATA to naked pcb will be possible. It is not true.

On my Seagate Barracuda you can update the Flash via the s/ATA link, and you can use the serial RS232 channel to debug and manually relocate clusters. Many things can be done, which are done in the factory and which are not fully documented.

I guess when disk go to fabricate, some special machine connect

on that serial cable for sure! It's its purpose! it wasn't made for the user, who shouldn't even know it exists

set firmware to pcb is not good for mass-production.

The controller-chip on the HDD boots from the internal rom, so once soldered onto the PCB it is able to speak "s/ATA"; an industrial machine can connect to the s/ATA link and serial cable to program the SPI flash with the firmware.

The platters come from a different machine, with preloaded sync patterns. As first step, the firmware must map the clusters, this is done during the early QA phases, during which the HDD is tested and must pass at least 96 hours of operations.

It may be discarded if the platters do not have enough spare clusters; and it's still not enough to be able to say that an HDD has passed the infant mortality tests.

Surely, if it does not break after 96 hours, the fluid-dynamic bearings and relative lubricant, as well as read/write flying heads, have been assembled correctly, but for the rest, there are company { Seagate, Hitachi, IBM, WD, .. } internal techniques and QA testing policies that I don't know about 

[DiTBho]

I keep my NAS on a separate network which has no route to the internet.

This rarely happens, but I may need to wake up my NAS from the Internet to access some data that I don't have with me on my i-rev or USB stick.

Essentially, however, the network interface of my multi node NAS is a real router, and as such physically decouples the connection that goes from the ADL modem to the internet, from the connection that goes to the office machines.

So, when it is not needed, the internet connection is physically deactivated because the PHY part of the router has a disabled hw on its pin.

Paranoia, bu you can never have too much paranoia!

[Postal2]

on that serial cable for sure!

Funny. For mass-production surface test serial port is genius.

I keep my NAS on a separate network which has no route to the internet.

I have FTP routed to NAS.
You can see my FTP 24/7.

[Nominal Animal]

The network?  Why have only one?

I keep my NAS on a separate network which has no route to the internet.

I like to have a dedicated firewall box between my local networks and the internet.  This is the one I put all kinds of shenanigans on, to auto-block all IP traffic from port scanners and such.  Internally, I use separate wired networks for hard-wired media devices (for traffic priorization rather than security), another for internal control and sensitive or security stuff, and one for common devices split into a couple of VLANs.  I like my WiFi bridged to my guest network, with no IP access to the wireless routers themselves (but configuring OpenWRT thus without a local console is a bit tricky).

Complex?  No, not really.  I've found that splitting the functionality into separate devices gives me more options, and actually reduces the maintenance task due to each device has a simpler task, and thus simpler internal configuration.  (Except for me being me, and adding those shenanigans on top.)
Stuff like traffic shaping is much easier, when it is only about prioritizing traffic to/from the different LANs/VLANs, and not within one.

I do prefer having my wireless routers (for local network) having two separate physical connections: one for the normal network, bridged to the wireless 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz ones, and one control-only local one, so that the router itself exposes no TCP/IP or UDP/IP services on the normal network, only on the control-only wired interface.

In this scheme, there are two different networks and purposes I could add a NAS box to: for media, e-mails and files on the normal network, or for periodic backups et cetera on the control/sensitive/security network.  Similarly, I could add a local server (SBC) on either/both networks, home appliances, etc.

If you draw out the entire scheme, it isn't much more complicated than the typical "everything depends on this single expensive router/switch device" schemes.  You'll also notice that specific parts of the scheme can be separately powered in case of blackout: the RBM33G firewall/upstream connection draws only a few watts, and that is sufficient to give you wired upstream network connectivity even if the local mains is out.  Add another few watts of backup power to the wireless router, and now your tablets and other wireless devices work also.

I'm typically about 1 Mm away from the most important installation, too, so although I cannot afford expensive components, robustness is a must or it just won't work.  There, the main user is, uh, not very technical, having had her Fakebook account hijacked twice already; prime phishing target.

[Postal2]

The network?  Why have only one?

I keep my NAS on a separate network which has no route to the internet.

I like to have a dedicated firewall box between my local networks and the internet.

Only one internet connection? I have two: one direct and one adsl for backup. Also second connection used by vulnerable devices - completely other network. It's not too expensive.

Small detail - I have manually blocked all domains from which viruses can be downloaded (pastebin etc.). I saw some viruses cannot download their bodies, in real time.

[Nominal Animal]

Only one internet connection?

Right now I do have both wired ethernet (fiber to the premises, ethernet in the building) and LTE.  Mikrotik RBM33G does support two LTE modems simultaneously, so I'm actually already also prepared for dual LTE where no fiber or ADSL is available (it's very rural, north of Arctic Circle).
(Fiber installation costs are high due to the long distances involved, and the current existing networks have fine cables but horribly crappy underspecced routers.)

So no, not really "only" one.  Also, surely you can see how simple it would be for me to completely split guest to a separate network if needed, just not needed for now.

Small detail - I have manually blocked all domains from which viruses can be downloaded (pastebin etc.). I saw some viruses cannot download their bodies, in real time.

That'll help, but don't think for a moment you have blocked 'all domains from which viruses can be downloaded': only the most commonly used ones.

The effect is similar to that of my dynamic response to port scanning (which adds source IP addresses trying to connect to ports that are not open to a dynamically maintained drop list for 24 hours: all packets from IP addresses on that list are ignored before the userspace sees the traffic).  It is part of 'operational security', and reduces amount of garbage coming to the internal LAN, and may block automated bot attacks, but it alone is no security measure.
It is more analogous to a tall concrete wall or barrier, or putting barbed wire and glass shards on top of one.  A dedicated, targeted attack can avoid it easily; it's there just to stop the brainless zombies.

[Postal2]

only the most commonly used ones.

"Almanahe.B" was stopped by this technique.
And my router, very cheap:

[luiHS]

I'm going to try the solution with Raspberry, since I have an RPY4 that I don't use at all, I just have to buy an RJ45 cable and a USB-SATA cable, I also have the SSD disk, a 1TB one. If everything works well, I'll buy a 4TB drive and a case to mount it all. I also have ordered a Raspberry Pi 5 for other things but I could put it in the NAS as a replacement for the RPY4.

I have thought about buying one of these boxes that already includes everything except the power supply.
https://www.amazon.es/gp/product/B095WD7BTW/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A2PBQMPS4N8CJ2&psc=1
https://www.amazon.es/gp/product/B07VXF2HJG/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?smid=A2PBQMPS4N8CJ2&psc=1

What I saw is that cheap commercial NAS usually have a much less powerful processor and less RAM than a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5.

Any advice on free applications to organize and watch movies that I can install both on the Windows PC and on the Android mobile phone sharing the NAS between the two devices? Something that allows me to organize movies and TV series by theme, putting images of the cover and some information.

[Postal2]

Any advice on free applications to organize and watch movies

I suggest take a look to "Enigma2"-system for sat-tuners. Select via browser and watch in one click via "Videolan" (VLC). But for "films" you need 5GHz-lan on your "android mobile phone".

[Bicurico]

For Live TV, I fully recommend Enigma2 receivers.

You can download the playlist as an *.m3u8 file containing references to all channels in the desired channel list. This file can then be opened in VLC or any Android-based IPTV receiver.

This is how I distibute TV in my holiday house, due to the walls being to thick to pass new cables. I just do it over IP. The receivers are close to the respective antennas and further receivers or older iMac are used as players.

One cool feature of Enigma2 is that there is a plugin that allows to directly share a channel list from one receiver to another. Example: Receiver 1 is connected to a dish pointing to Astra 19.2E and receiver 2 is not connected to any antenna. The plugin imports the channel list from receiver 1 into receiver 2, allowing receiver 2 to watch any channel of receiver 1. For the user this is totally transparent. If receiver 1 has 4 tuners, you can have 4 independent remote users watching different channels.

For sharing movies, I would recommend putting the harddisk into a PC and run Serviio. It is basically free and allows any DLNA compatible device (most if not all modern TV's) to stream the content. It even does automatic transcoding when required and handles subtitles.

[Postal2]

I would recommend putting the harddisk into a PC and run Serviio.

Or right click on the file and select "send to device" (Windows 10). Submenu will show DLNA-receivers.

[Bicurico]

With Serviio, on the PC you have just a service running and on the TV you can browse the whole media library: by genre, actor, ..., or just the existing folder structure. This works for Audio, Video and Pictures. Very confortable.

Sending one file from Windows to a device is a different job (which has its use cases, of course): you control from the PC what you want to render on the TV.

[PlainName]

If you'd like Synology but aren't keen on their boxes, there is a clone: Xpenology

It came about because Synology used open source software so had to continue that license. I've run it up on a HP Microserver and it works very well indeed.

[luiHS]

Thanks for the information.
Well, what I was looking for is something like a media center that allows me to organize the movies and TV series that I will have stored on the NAS disk, so I can play them on both the PC and the mobile phone. Organizing the files by theme, with images of covers and some information about each movie.

I found PLEX, I don't know if this is what I'm looking for, I see that it can be installed both on the PC and on Android phones, and that it also allows you to watch streaming TV channels.

To watch streaming movies I currently use Amazon Prime and PLuto TV from my PC and Android phone. But now what I'm interested in is setting up a NAS in which I will store all the movies I have, approximately 1.5TB, to play them from both the PC and the mobile phone.

I already received the RJ45 cable and the USB-SATA cable to try to build a NAS with a Raspberry Pi 4 and a 1TB SSD. I will install the openmediavault software.

[JohanH]

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.

I have an old Qnap NAS. I only use it for backup. It's scheduled to boot up once a week, stays up for a day (enough to run backup scripts and me to remember to copy something there). I also kept the NAS and workstation running 24/7 in the past. With today's electricity prices I can't afford it. A NAS doesn't make sense to me today with the storage available in desktop computers. For me only as a backup device. The desktop goes to suspend when I don't use it.

That said, RAID 1 or 5 is essential in a backup device, too (unless you have other parallel backups). I've lost a few disks. If the first disks were bought at the same time, there's a risk that they go bad at the same time, too. I had three disks go bad within a year a couple of years ago.

[DiTBho]

I had three disks go bad within a year a couple of years ago.

which brand and models?

[JohanH]

I had three disks go bad within a year a couple of years ago.

which brand and models?

I've had many other disks break over the years. I don't see a pattern with certain brands/models. Of spinning disks I've lately been using mostly Seagate. It's good to have spare disks to pop in when one fails.

The disks in the NAS had many hours (can't remember, but thousands). It was before I started to shut down the NAS, so it was on all the time. They were two Seagate Barracuda Desktop ST3000DM001 and one Seagate IronWolf NAS ST3000VN007. I replaced them with newer similar Seagate models.

I don't think there is a big difference between NAS and desktop disks. NAS disks are usually quieter with 5900 rpm or lower.

[Veteran68]

I found PLEX, I don't know if this is what I'm looking for, I see that it can be installed both on the PC and on Android phones, and that it also allows you to watch streaming TV channels.

I run Plex on a rackmount server with a 10Gbps network link to my QNAP NAS. I've used it as my home (and internet) media server for over a decade now. I bought a lifetime Plex Pass way back then, I don't believe they offer them anymore. It has evolved to do a lot more than when it started, including free TV streaming (which I don't use). I've used my iPhone & iPad to stream moves & TV shows from my collection while I was away. My son-in-law runs his own Plex server and we share them with each other, so he can access my library and I can access his.

[luiHS]

I run Plex on a rackmount server with a 10Gbps network link to my QNAP NAS. I've used it as my home (and internet) media server for over a decade now. I bought a lifetime Plex Pass way back then, I don't believe they offer them anymore. It has evolved to do a lot more than when it started, including free TV streaming (which I don't use). I've used my iPhone & iPad to stream moves & TV shows from my collection while I was away. My son-in-law runs his own Plex server and we share them with each other, so he can access my library and I can access his.

Thanks, I'll try PLEX. What is still not clear to me is if PLEX also needs to have OpenMediaVault installed, or both applications do the same and it is enough to install one of them.

Does anyone know what maximum disk size there is in 2.5 inches? I have seen them in 2 TB, but I would like to install 4 TB. I have seen 3.5-inch 4TB ones but they already require external power, so if there were 2.5-inch ones I would prefer them. The problem is that the boxes that I have seen to mount NAS with Raspberry are for 2.5-inch drives or M.2 SSDs, none for 3.5-inch drives, I would have to have it external with a USB cable and power supply for the drive.

[Veteran68]

Thanks, I'll try PLEX. What is still not clear to me is if PLEX also needs to have OpenMediaVault installed, or both applications do the same and it is enough to install one of them.

Plex is standalone, it does not require any other software.

Does anyone know what maximum disk size there is in 2.5 inches? I have seen them in 2 TB, but I would like to install 4 TB. I have seen 3.5-inch 4TB ones but they already require external power, so if there were 2.5-inch ones I would prefer them. The problem is that the boxes that I have seen to mount NAS with Raspberry are for 2.5-inch drives or M.2 SSDs, none for 3.5-inch drives, I would have to have it external with a USB cable and power supply for the drive.

2.5" SSDs come in capacities up to 30TB, maybe more. You'll pay a fortune for 30TB, of course, around $3500 USD. But 4TB is common and affordable, they cost $150-$200 USD. 8TB is $350-$400 USD. I've had a 4TB 2.5" Samsung SSD in my desktop for several years now. I've ordered a M.2 NVMe Gen4 to replace it.

If you still want a mechanical HDD, you can get 2.5" models up to around 5TB at a cost of around $100 or so.

[Postal2]

The problem is that the boxes that I have seen to mount NAS with Raspberry are for 2.5-inch drives or M.2 SSDs, none for 3.5-inch drives

Because it is a toy. For your short game. With huge time spent with it.
SSD will not hold data 3 years without power, 2.5'' HDD has bad mechanic and heads.

[PlainName]

SSD will not hold data 3 years without power

Got a source for that?

[Postal2]

Got a source for that?

My own experience. Controller SMI, DDR3 buffer, nand Toshiba. Was direct copy old harddrive. And now was needed direct copy to another SSD. In the middle of dumping appeared system error with disk reported about ECC-error. I rewrote my dumping prog (win32 diskimager fork) to skip, but place to skip was too big (sector by sector).

[Veteran68]

I'd say that's pretty anecdotal, sample size of 1.

I have many SSDs. Some have been in storage for several years. I've yet to pull one out and not be able to get data out of it without error.

In fact if memory serves I've had exactly one 2.5" SSD fail since I bought my first 60GB OCZ SSD in February 2010, so nearly 14 years ago. It's been unpowered for at least half that time now. You make me want to go dig it out and see if it has any errors.

There are any number of factors that could cause a failure of any electronic device in storage. Generally stating that SSDs don't hold data without power is a bit of a reach.

[DiTBho]

Generally stating that SSDs don't hold data without power is a bit of a reach.

His SSD was probably built with cheap flash, I started a topic here on this forum as my USB sticks were behaving this way.

Then I built a 16Mbyte storage device that uses NVRAM based on static-ram + battery, and it's not like we're going very far, as well as the "NVRAM cartridge disk" on my SHARP pocket calculator: different storing tecnology, flash vs static ram + battery, but the point is that if you don't feed those damned cells, yes in the datasheet it says 10 year data-retention, but after 3 years you only read 0x00 or 0xff, or, worse still, corrupted stuff.

So ....... it is not a bad idea to feed, refresh and check every year, and make it a habit, e.g. for the Christmas holidays.

[Postal2]

You make me want to go dig it out and see if it has any errors.

I wondered when disk stops on ECC-errors. I thought disk will give erroneous data with monkey face. I think not all controllers performs this way.

His SSD was probably built with cheap flash,

My mistake, nand is Samsung. I don't know, cheap or not, see photo.

[DiTBho]

• let's face it: usb sticks are not reliable, here
• SSD vs HDD for data security, here
• Do you trust consumer grade SSD to store back up? here
• ...

(topics on EEVblog  )

[Postal2]

• ...

Thank you father.
I recommend use Seagate 7200.7 for backup.

[luiHS]

Does anyone know or has tested if transcoding is possible with a Rasbperry Pi 5 used as a NAS to play videos on client devices?
Any recommendations for a cheap commercial NAS (Synology, QNAP...) that does hardware transcoding?

[Postal2]

...to play videos on client devices?
... hardware transcoding?

I have a cheapest solution for you.
This cheapest motherboard with J1900 with passive cool (you can onscrew pi5-fan if you love it).
https://aliexpress.com/item/1005005888045324.html
Next device is a cheap hdmi-usb capture like this:
https://aliexpress.com/item/4001010505067.html
That construction will make all you need.