Basic Questions About NAS

[sokoloff]

Mine with 6 5400 RPM disks was 45-50W at the wall, and a little over half that with the disks spun down. They’re pretty power efficient.

[David Hess]

Mine with 6 5400 RPM disks was 45-50W at the wall, and a little over half that with the disks spun down. They’re pretty power efficient.

I would prefer lower power 3.5 inch drives but at higher capacities they are all 7200 RPM.  I guess the 8TB WD Red Pro is the highest capacity low RPM drive?  At idle it draws more power than the 12TB and 14TB 7200 RPM drives so I do not know what to think.

[sokoloff]

The WD120EFAX is a 12TB 5400 RPM drive.

[Kjelt]

Totally fair.

Equally fair is probably “don’t do that” rather than “buy (sometimes much) more expensive drives so you can do that with impunity”.

WD Gold Datacenter 8TB: $276: WD8002FRYZ

WD Red Plus 8 TB: $150: WD80EFZZ

WD Blue 8TB: $110: WD8002FRYZ

If you buy datacenter drives, then buy the current and previous generation(read capacity)
Not the one from six years back, those are too expensive now.
Because many datacenters buy these in huge quantities rhe price is not that much higher than the standard drives, better even less than the standard drives 
But suit your self, I can only give the advice to buy these because their MTBF, speed and guarantee are way better.

Only disasvantage is the sound, you should not put these in a NAS in the livingroom.

[EPAIII]

Some good points here.

Yes, technology is probably more reliable than I am. Sad, but true.

Engineering, in my experience, IS ALWAYS COMPROMISE. And, again in my experience, the money is often the first thing to be compromised.

Edit: I looked it up so no need to ask. If anyone saw that question, just ignore it.

I think I said it already, but in spite of having built computers before I am going to BUY a SYSTEM. New or used, I am going to buy. That part is decided.

In spite of what Shonky seems to think, I am not completely for or against anything yet. Last night, actually early in the AM hours, I spent some time looking at some cloud backup systems. One thing that surprised me was that Microsoft is offering some attractive free-bees with their cloud offers. One apparently includes the full fledged versions of Word and Excel. I am still using Office 2K and really need to upgrade. The price of that cloud package is less than buying the present version of Office outright. And I really don't need any of the other programs in Office. So that may be attractive. I still don't like the idea of cloud as storage, but as a backup, it may be OK. And you can bet your sweet bippie that I will encrypt it. Not that I have anything to hide, but just to keep them from harvesting info about me. Far too much of that going on.

You have given me a lot to think about. I will certainly return here at least once before I buy anything. Thanks!

One thing I am starting to see in this discussion is you can't really trust any technology for the long run.

In my experience, technology is more reliable than humans, especially if you put a little bit of design care upfront.


My biggest recommendation is: make sure all the backups are completely hands-off automated. My family has lost some theoretically backed-up data twice in 35 years. Once was my error during transferring from my college account to my own PC (ftp'd a zip file in text mode and detected it far too late) and the other was my Dad's hard-drive crash where the backup strategy was "every week or so, put in a DVD-R and double-click on this batch file on your desktop." When the drive failure happened years later, the most recent backup was over 30 weeks old.

Perhaps what I really want is several different ways of backing up in case one or two of them become obsolete.

Any of the commercial off-the-shelf NAS vendors I wouldn't worry about this. All of the ones I've seen (and definitely Synology) are using standard Linux (or BSD, which is similar) storage capabilities. You aren't going to unexpectedly have a storage means go obsolete and fail in a window where you can't easily get access at your data.

But don't know if I can afford too much of that.

That's often the problem in engineering. If you have a concrete budget and storage volume size in mind, sharing it might help people guide you to solutions that might fit. If you could spend $X now, $Y/month, and periodically add $Z in purchases, we could also suggest a "buy this now to start, in m months, add this to get a better level of data durability/availability".

I was looking at some old files tonight and saw that I have stuff that goes back at least 20 years and I haven't lost it yet. I have some floppies around with even older stuff, most of which is probably impossible to access. Perhaps I am over-thinking this. The data seems to last longer than the means to access it.
<snip for brevity>
Do you have any definite system in mind? One that would give me the advantages of a NAS as well as a good back-up scheme. And which will not be unsupported five or ten years from now.

If you can swing it, I'd get a 8 bay Synology NAS (DS1821+) or 5 bay (DS1522+) and put 4 drives in it in SHR-2 (which can survive two drive failures). If that's a little too rich, get a used Synology on Ebay (DS916+ is a little over $300 used) and put 4 drives in it. With SHR-2, you lose the useful capacity of 2 of the drives in service of redundancy. You can migrate to new drives [one at a time] over time, which I just completed this spring in my unit and it was easy.

Create two shares on that: one for critical (3-2-1) data and one for less critical (3-2) data.

For the critical data, plan to have it on your computer, on your NAS, and backed up offsite. Backed up offsite could be Google drive, Dropbox, a friend's NAS, whatever. That's the data that you'd really be frustrated to lose.

For less critical data, you might plan to just have it in two places, one of them being the NAS.

All of that is predicated on someone who wants to pay a little more and do a little less tinkering/learning. There is a cheaper path available that looks something like "get an old $100 desktop, put 4 drives in it, install unRAID, Proxmox or TrueNAS Core or TrueNAS Scale, and build the same type of functionality from more raw components". I'm in IT, started down that path, and then plunked down for the nicely packaged finished product and rely on that for the core of my storage needs here. unRAID and TrueNAS offer similar levels of "nicely polished" on the software side while you cobble together the parts on the hardware side. You can save quite a bit of cash upfront this way, but will likely have higher power bills month after month.

tl;dr:
flush with cash? Buy two Synology units, one large and one your-choice. Put the large one at your place and other one someplace offsite. Configure some (all?) data to replicate off-site. Consider backing up some to Google drive, backblaze, Dropbox or other cloud.

less flush? Buy one Synology and use a cloud vendor for the off-site third copy.

less? Buy a used Synology and do as previous

less and you're willing to have a minor side-hobby? Look into TrueNAS or unRAID.

less and you actively want a side-hobby? Look into proxmox

Sounds like you have had some bad experiences with drives failing at just the wrong time. Better grade of hard drives is required. That is also a common suggestion in this NAS business. I think I am being convinced of that.

I wouldn't buy bottom of the barrel drives, but I'm not entirely convinced that "datacenter grade" is needed in spinning hard drives for home users on a budget. I'd much rather design around "things break all the time, make sure the data is resilient" than to pin my hopes on better hardware failing less often. (That's a good additional layer if you can afford it, but isn't the primary.) I'd trust a two-drive redundant array of commercial quality disks than a one-drive redundant array of datacenter-grade disks. The real takeaway for me is "one drive redundancy has the possibility to screw you if a fault goes undetected on drive X and then drive Y fails". That's why two drive redundancy isn't overkill, even though it seems like it at first. Data scrubbing is also important and something that I have set to run automatically every month (built-in feature of most systems).

[EPAIII]

OK. I guess I am too old school. I just assumed a bank would have boxes. I will catch up sooner or later.

I just gotta get out more.

As for banks disappearing, not in my neighborhood. I have been doing business with my present bank, which is the closest to me, for around 11 years. They underwent a name change, but are still there. Another bank, which is also within a few blocks of my home, is presently offering me $300 if I open a checking account with them. That is in progress. And there are at least two others within a mile. So, I don't think I will run out of banks anytime soon.

Reread what I said... it's not that banks are going away, it's that they don't want to continue providing safe deposit boxes because it's expensive, risky, and low margin. Very few new branches built have them at all, and many older ones are ceasing to offer them.

[EPAIII]

Yep, always compromises to be made.

See, that's why I am asking questions. And why I do appreciate the answers. This is a great discussion.

I wouldn't buy bottom of the barrel drives, but I'm not entirely convinced that "datacenter grade" is needed in spinning hard drives for home users on a budget.

In general, sure... but specifically for the scenario where you're intentionally removing a disk from an array and swapping it with another one for offsite storage, you'll be routinely putting the array into a degraded mode and recovering from that, which can put a lot of extra load on the disks.  Can you get away without it, sure... but I suspect you'll see more frequent failures, which are ultimately more frequent points of possible loss of data if something goes wrong and you lose multiple copies at once.

[EPAIII]

AAAahhh!

One last time. I AM NOT TOTALLY SET ON ANYTHING. I am listening to all the comments and am checking into things suggested. I do want a good system that needs minimum assistance from me and that will have minimum failures.

Actually the only thing from my original ideas that I am still trying to hold to is RAID 1 because ALL the data is on all of the discs. Sorry Shonky, but that is at least one step into the area of backups.

I have not worked in IS but have worked closely with computer professionals in creating overall systems before my retirement back in 2011. My attraction to RAID 1 is a long standing one, back to when RAIDs were first created to allow larger storage volumes with smaller discs. I have lost more battles over system design than what I have won. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. COMPROMISES! That is the heart of engineering.

"... that are clearly worth paying to make someone else's responsibility." You wouldn't be volunteering to pay my cloud bill, would you? 

Totally fair.

Equally fair is probably “don’t do that” rather than “buy (sometimes much) more expensive drives so you can do that with impunity”.

Absolutely. I guess I should have been more explicit that this is "if you must" advice, given that OP seems kind of set on DIYing their own hardware and rotation. Personally, I feel like reliable backups at the bottom of the stack and reliable monitoring/alerting at the top of the stack are the two parts of running software services that are clearly worth paying to make someone else's responsibility.

[EPAIII]

NO actual data quantity? Back in post #4 or so I said I am presently at about 400 GBs and expect that to increase faster than in the past due to my hope to start producing some internet videos. I can see being at the 1TB level in a year or three.

"Things like this and even Hot swap in a home situation are overkill and that is before you get to how much power you will finish up consuming." OK, thanks for saying it out loud. And don't worry, I don't have the funds for anything gold plated.


You said, "Both of these are running between 400-500W a day total." That steps into MY area. Equipment does not consume Watts in a day, total or otherwise. The Watt is a unit that measures the instantaneous rate of power consumption. Look at your electric bill and you will see that you are being billed for kWatt-hours (kWh). ONE kWh is 1000 Watts being consumed for a full 60 minutes. And on my electric bill I am paying about $0.13 US for each KWh.

You could turn on a device that consumes a million Watts for one micro-second and never notice the change in your electric bill because that would be only one Watt-second (or about 0.000278 kWhs) of actual power consumed. An LED night light, turned on for ten hours would consume far, far more power.

Your 500W device, running all day would consume 500W x 24h /1000 = 12 kWh of electric power. At my present rate that would cost $1.56 USD. Of course, if you are also running AC in the summer months, then the cost of removing that energy (ALL of it becomes heat) from the building would be added to that. How much would depend on the efficiency of your AC system.

I am not saying that power consumption is not important to me. It is. And anything running 24/7 will have an impact on the bill. Another factor into the compromises here. Boy, that cloud is starting to look better and better. Spare me the "I told you so"s, please.

PS: Money saving tip for all who operate even moderate sized server/storage facilities in the winter: have your HVAC people bypass the AC system in winter with an outside air intake to the server room. And add a fan and a thermostat. Why waste all that cold air outside the building when only one room needs cooling in the winter? And exit the hot air from the server/storage room into the rest of the building to save on the heating bill. Why waste that free heat?

My apologies for the digression.

Seriously some completely OTT advice above here for 'home use' and as far as I can see NO actual data quantity to be stored. Get an 8 bay NAS, Enterprise storage neither of those are 'basic advice' they are advice that Rolls Royce (with Gold plated trim) or you are slumming it 

Things like this and even Hot swap in a home situation are overkill and that is before you get to how much power you will finish up consuming.

Lets also consider the jet engine whine of Data Center drive speeds while we are at it in a home use case.

Just running a consumption test on my NAS and NVR consumption to put them on a 12V UPS/Battery partly for data reasons and also physical security ones the NVR runs its own Wifi independant of the main network and if I am part way into. Both of these are running between 400-500W a day total. Power consumption on an 8 Bay NAS heavier processor and enterprise drives long before you get near a home brew PC based solution is what exactly?

[beanflying]

There is a simple reason NOT to use kWh here as the load is far from a constant per hour so it would still be an average and the logger in this case just runs total consumption and I am scribbling data about the same time each day for a number.  All I wanted out of it was to make sure a 15Ah battery (my guesstimate for a size based on some very rubbery specs) and something around a 2A charger/monitor would keep up. Peak consumption on this pair was 35W and likely for a few seconds rather than millisecond

It was in the case of the discussion here just to consider a commercial low power CPU/board over building a PC based solution. Different story if you want to run containers and virtual machines but that is a very different system.

I did scroll back and looked for a data quantity but missed it. At 400Gb and unless you run multiple PC's then a weekly backup to a HDD and a live mirror device with snapshots enabled might also get your needs done for a year or two as well.

Worth taking a look at this and again it is the software that makes it much more than the hardware but it is a nice plug in and idiotproof partial solution to data protection. https://bee.synology.com/en-us

[David Hess]

The WD120EFAX is a 12TB 5400 RPM drive.

From Western Digital's datasheet:

Actual spindle motor rotational speed for this model is 7200 RPM; although ID Device may report
5400 to reflect previous Performance Class designation.

[Jeroen3]

For energy reasons I picked four 2.5" disks that consume a lot less power running and idle than equivalant 3.5" disks. They make less noise as well!
ST2000LM015: 0.5W versus WD20EFAX: 2.7W

This costs money...
0.5 * 8000 = 4 kWh ~ €1.6 / year
2.7 * 8000 = 21 kWh ~ €8.60 / year*

You're not going to notice the performance difference over gigabit if the nas has cache.

And you sometimes see people running old rack servers at home for fun, think of the energy bill! 

^{i pay ~0.40 per kwh}

[David Hess]

I looked at 2.5" disks but could not find any larger than 2TB without SMR.  There used to be some larger ones which used CMR, but they have apparently all been discontinued.

I have been able to saturate 1G Ethernet for many years even with my slower NAS solutions, except for Windows Storage Spaces until recently.  Since I am only using SMB for sharing and had the Gigabit hardware available for free, I am now using SMB3 multichannel with 3 x 1G Ethernet and regularly get 250MB/s transfer rates with even a small number of 3.5" drives, unless those drives are WD Greens or Samsung Spinpoint models which all seem to have interface problems limiting them to Windows.

My overall goal is to consolidate the bulk storage from several different systems into one to save power and complexity, so I will be left with my workstation, a NAS, and a lower power workstation which is the only one which runs continuously.

[beanflying]

Blame the YouTube algorithm for this. Looks like with work it might be up to being used for a Home NAS https://www.openmediavault.org/

I have seen it used on a PI with a single drive but maybe look at some other low power board with proper SATA ports (or even dual NVMe these days) rather than having to use USB3 to SATA rubbish.

Not a recommendation just a third alternative to FreeNAS and the other more complex options.

[50ShadesOfDirt]

+1 on Synology NAS ...

Purchased a DS1618+ some years back, maxed out the ram on it, shoved in whatever HDD's I had laying around, and had TB's of space available; later, replaced them all with 8TB hdd's. The Synology OS has many features and modules to aid whatever task you'll need. Too many for me to list ...

I'm running Synology's Active Backup for Business (free), and backups are automatic, versioned, and deduped. Whenever a target pc is on, and the nas is on, backups just happen, in the background.

There are a zillion physical models of Synology, and they should fit any scheme you have ... keep one on site, repl to another offsite. Access from anywhere in the world. Secure, rock-solid ... it's good stuff.

Hope this helps ...

[bitwelder]

One more vote for Synology.

Currently I do have a DIY NAS (using OpenMediaVault) as I needed more flexibility than what commercial NAS offers, but in the past I had a few Synology NAS and I'd still recommend for those who don't want to spend too much time administering.
(Unless they changed recently) They don't use proprietary formats, just take advantage of various Linux storage technologies, so in the worst case one should be able to pop the disks in a PC and access the data that way.

If reliability is important, rather than using a multi-way RAID 1 (i.e. N-disks in parallel, with N>2), I'd rather suggest to use two 'simple' NAS, one used only to backup the other one. The backup-NAS can also be located in a separate place if the flood/fire disaster option should be covered.

[rdl]

I use an HPE Microserver Gen 7 and FreeNAS with WD Red 4TB drives (CMR). It's been working fine for years. If I was doing it again today I'd probably do about the same thing, just better.

[EPAIII]

I have learned a lot about NAS from this discussion. My most sincere thanks to all who have contributed.

[beanflying]

  Only a little while later and here I am playing with and Orange Pi5+, NVMe SATA card and a couple of 500Gb used drives building a plaything for fun

Likely to use Open Media Vault for my Newbish Linux skills and this may or may not stay in use, it was more just to see if the RK3588 would talk to the drives at this stage.

Answer is yes it does  I did check Kernel support on the Asmedia SATA controller before I picked this card specifcally and after cutting it into the bottom of my Laser cut case it just hooked up an boringly worked and the drivers for it were already in the distro I have installed.







Anyway modern ARM64 SBC Sata options are possible it seems and even a Linux dummy like me can likely make it work.

[vad]

OP, follow the 3-2-1 golden rule:

Keep at least 3 copies of your data, on at least 2 types of media, and at least 1 of the copies should be kept offsite.

[beanflying]

Totally sketchoid wiring to see if it will work and we have a winner 





Time for some software and make a proper enclosure for the project.

[Hogwild]

If you go the Synology route, I'd strongly recommend staying away from the 918

This has been happening to quite a few 918 owners:
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/synology-918-wont-start.1495183/

Also XPEnology is an interesting compromise. It allows you to run Syno software on standard commodity hardware
https://xpenology.org/

[David Hess]

My overall goal is to consolidate the bulk storage from several different systems into one to save power and complexity, so I will be left with my workstation, a NAS, and a lower power workstation which is the only one which runs continuously.

I decided to change my plans.  Instead of building a NAS box, I am just going to upgrade the storage on my workstation and transfer everything to that, so I will have two systems instead of three, saving on the heat and power load of a dedicated NAS.

So far I have picked up 8 x 14TB drives and connected 4 of them to the NAS hardware, transferred everything on my workstation to the temporary TrueNAS core based NAS, and connected the remaining 4 drives to my workstation.  Once I transfer everything back, then I can move the 4 NAS drives to my workstation for a total of 8 and use the RAID capacity expansion on my workstation, and then copy the contents of my remaining systems to my workstation.  I have not quite done that yet because I am going to make some minor hardware changes on my workstation and am waiting for the parts.

TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD) works perfectly on my old Phenom II workstation, but performance with 4 drives connected to the motherboard SATA controllers seemed to be limited to about 250 MB/sec.  I suspect a limitation with the motherboard south bridge SATA controller.  Had I built an 8 drive NAS, I would have been using a PCIe x 8 host bus adapter instead and a PCIe x 8 network interface card.

[Veteran68]

I ran my own home built Linux NAS using external eSATA enclosures (16 bays total) many years ago, then got tired of the admin and bought a QNAP TS-851 8-bay unit. I've been sold on the NAS appliance over DIY ever since. A couple years ago I upgraded to a QNAP TS-673A 6-bay Ryzen CPU, 32GB RAM, 2x 1TB M.2 SATA cache drives and 6x 14TB WD Datacenter drives, with a 10Gb add-on PCIe NIC. I'm very happy with QNAP devices.

[thermistor-guy]

One more vote for Synology.
...

Another vote, here. I've used various Synology NAS boxes for about 15 years. All of them are still running 24/7,
except for a DS106 (2006 model?) The DS106 still works, it's just unsupported.

They have been very reliable. Drives are 3.5 in. WD Caviar Black of various sizes.

In my view, for someone just getting started and on a budget, it's hard to go past Synology plus SHR.