Advice on NAS drive

DrRusty

DrRusty

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Richard
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I looking for a NAS drive (home use) ideally two bay Raid.

Not had much joy with NAS drives so far a LACIE drive packed up and a pogoplug overheated.

Money no object I would have a DROBO but things as they are I looking for a cheaper solution.
 
Synology.
Normally more expensive than other makes but strangely not for the two drive models.
 
been discussed quite a lot recently, search "synology" and a few threads should pop up.

as for RAID, dont rely on it as your only copy of your data. thats not what its designed for.
 
+1 for QNAP, they have a wide range of sizes. Or you could also look at an HP N40L Micro Server & stick Windows Home Server on it & use it for backups & a media server.

HP have regular cashback promotions, I paid £230 for an HP microserver at Christmas & got £100 cashback.
 
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3rd vote for qnap

i would add, however, that as fancy and clever as qnap boxes are, I only use a fraction of its capabilities.

I've subsequently looked on amazon for stonking reviews of cheaper alternatives and with my time again I may have found something cheaper that can mirror a Terrabyte and be done with it
 
All

Cheers - adding up a case and drives is near £150 so the synology looks good value.

I'm interested in the HP sever and ebuyer are showing £100 cashback. However I would need software and more storage over the 250GB supplied. I am also not sure I have the knowledge to set it up ?
 
I dithered over the HP microserver for a while and decided not to in the end. It has no sleep facility and I wanted something that would wake when needed.

My brother in law is in IT and I mentioned it to him that I was considering the HP. Next time I saw him he had bought one! have to say it is a nice little unit. Quiet and seems to perform pretty well. he has it booting from a usb stick on the mainboard and running 3 virtual machines while he plays with different server configurations etc. and it seems to cope with it OK.

I'd have thought using one as a NAS would be pretty straightforward to set up. There are plenty of how to guides out there.
 
neil_g said:
as for RAID, dont rely on it as your only copy of your data. thats not what its designed for.
Click to expand...

Wondering why this is? Was thinking of getting a 2bay synology and mirroring with raid.
 
Rapscallion said:
Wondering why this is? Was thinking of getting a 2bay synology and mirroring with raid.
Click to expand...

You're still vulnerable to - deletion, corruption, fire, theft, flooding, hardware failures (the type that write rubbish all over your drives) etc.

Mirroring is essentially still one copy of your data but with a disk redundancy. You should still run a backup alongside a raid array.
 
neil_g said:
You're still vulnerable to - deletion, corruption, fire, theft, flooding, hardware failures (the type that write rubbish all over your drives) etc.

Mirroring is essentially still one copy of your data but with a disk redundancy. You should still run a backup alongside a raid array.
Click to expand...

My intention was also to swop one if the raid disks off site to minimise the risk.

Perhaps you could advise a solution? I have a macbook that has ran out of hd space. I would like a NAS drive at home, an external drive that mirrors the nas drive so i can take my documents with me, and also an off site copy.

What would the most efficient way to achieve this?

TIA
 
Hi Neil,
thanks for the link. Heres my updated idea.

Macbook containing OS + apps.
Airport extreme 1tb contains my files.

Both above backed up to a NAS drive via time machine.

Manually mirror the Airport 1t drive to a usb drive and rotate off site.

Thoughts?

edit
there will come a time when the airport 1tb will no longer be sufficient, so this will be replaced with another nas drive.
 
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Rapscallion said:
Wondering why this is? Was thinking of getting a 2bay synology and mirroring with raid.
Click to expand...

Forgive me if I'm about to teach you to suck eggs;

RAID means a redundant array of inexpensive drives.

The keyword here is redundant. In essence, you supply one or more spare disks to the backup 'system' and generally, the more you supply the safer your data is.

RAID is a bit misleading as a term because you have Raid 0, RAID, 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10 etc.

RAID 0 is a striped set, meaning two or more drives acting as one disk. This is fast but has no redundancy if one disk goes, ALL your data is gone .

RAID 1 is a mirror. So in simple terms if you have one drive, you have a spare which gets cloned in a mirroring system. This is secure in terms of being fault tolerant to one disk failure, because you have a duplicate disk which you can use to rebuild your mirrored set.

RAID 1+0 (or 0+1) is where you have a striped set which is mirrored. This is fast and is tolerant to the loss of one or more disks ONLY within the same set. Lose one disk in both sets together and you're stuck. My Qnap box doesn't do this but this would have been my choice had it been so.

RAID 5 is quite clever where you have four disks acting as a three disk set. Any one of the disks can go and the set can rebuild itself once you chuck a new disk in. This is what I was using but its SLOW.

RAID 6 has five disks. Four of them act as a three disk set which is like RAID 5 with a literally a redundant spare that does nothing until one disk fails and then it springs to life and joins the set. This is a slow as RAID 5 but gives you tolerance of two faulty disks.

You can them start mirroring a RAID 5 or RAID 6 if you wish to.

So which should you choose?

Its all about the $$$, the speed and the level of risk you are happy with.

I have a four disk Qnap box and would prefer to stripe two and then mirror them, two disk used, two redundant but as my Qnap box (or at least its firmware) only allow one of the other, I choose to mirror.

Mirroring is (I think) the only solution where you can carry on working during your failure (though you may prefer to rush off and buy a replacement disk and build up your set first before something very bad happens).

Very large companies have bomb and fireproof safes where they keep their disks and all have something off site too.

I've seen MDs take a disk drive home with them each night (only protection against the destruction of the premises) but you can also consider something like 'drop box' or any of the multitude of online backup solutions.
 
Rapscallion said:
Hi Neil,
thanks for the link. Heres my updated idea.

Macbook containing OS + apps.
Airport extreme 1tb contains my files.

Both above backed up to a NAS drive via time machine.

Manually mirror the Airport 1t drive to a usb drive and rotate off site.

Thoughts?

edit
there will come a time when the airport 1tb will no longer be sufficient, so this will be replaced with another nas drive.
Click to expand...


Put your airport extreme to one side and don't touch it, borrow an empty 1tb disk then using your NAS box, put your setup back together, if you can great, if you can't . . doh !! That will soon tell you whether your backup is adequate.

Thats what happens if you actually need to recover from a failure.
 
johngccfc said:
RAID 5 is quite clever where you have four disks acting as a three disk set. Any one of the disks can go and the set can rebuild itself once you chuck a new disk in. This is what I was using but its SLOW.

RAID 6 has five disks. Four of them act as a three disk set which is like RAID 5 with a literally a redundant spare that does nothing until one disk fails and then it springs to life and joins the set. This is a slow as RAID 5 but gives you tolerance of two faulty disks.
Click to expand...
RAID5 and RAID6 are not slow. The implementation you were using might have been slow, but inherently they are not slow technologies. They're basically RAID0 with 1 or 2 parity drives so you have the advantages of using multiple drives in parallel (striped data) whilst having the failsafe of parity data to enable you to recover from drive failure. They can also be used whilst one drive has failed and normally whilst the array is resilvering (rebuilding after a disk has been replaced).

For my media storage I use ZFS and a RAIDZ configuration (essentially RAID5 but with some additional niceties). I run 4 disks + 1 spare off a pair of PCI-e x4 HBAs and get this as sustained performance:

Block writes 276MB/s
Block rewrite 151MB/s
Block read 384MB/s

Not quite SSD speeds, but that is a 6TB "disk" and I don't have the money for 6TB of SSDs....
 
Couple things, raid5 shouldnt be slow. I use it and we use it at work for most things. Personally I think it gives one of the better performance to redundancy levels.

Raid0 is the only raid level that should prevent you carrying on with working, albeit in a reduced performance mode.

Oh and not really relevant here but staff members technically shouldn't take backups off site, it'll put a negative mark on any audits :)
 
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Rapscallion said:
Hi Neil,
thanks for the link. Heres my updated idea.

Macbook containing OS + apps.
Airport extreme 1tb contains my files.

Both above backed up to a NAS drive via time machine.

Manually mirror the Airport 1t drive to a usb drive and rotate off site.

Thoughts?

edit
there will come a time when the airport 1tb will no longer be sufficient, so this will be replaced with another nas drive.
Click to expand...

If you're considering a nas you may as well ditch the airport drive and use it to backup the nas from the word go.
 
neil_g said:
If you're considering a nas you may as well ditch the airport drive and use it to backup the nas from the word go.
Click to expand...

Hi Neil, the only reason i was using the airport extreme drive was to lower the initial cost...
was thinking of using the airport drive initially for my original files, backing up via time machine to a 2 or 4 bay synology (possibly 411j). then when funds allow and space demands it, buying another nas drive to replace the airport.

Apologies for putting these questions, just dont want to spend quite a few hundred pounds and realise i've done it esra backwards...

Cheers
 
johngccfc said:
RAID 6 has five disks. Four of them act as a three disk set which is like RAID 5 with a literally a redundant spare that does nothing until one disk fails and then it springs to life and joins the set. This is a slow as RAID 5 but gives you tolerance of two faulty disks.
Click to expand...
That's not how raid 6 works. You have described raid 5+ 1 hot spare. With raid 6 the fifth drive is running all the time and contains an extra copy of the parity information.
When using a hot spare when a drive fails you are in a critical state where if any other drive fails you will get data loss. That's the problem with raid 5 as if you have data on he system which is read very rarely you might have another drive with unreable sectors which you don't know about but if a drive fails and it rebuilds onto a spare it will find that unreadable area and be unable to rebuild the array. You would have yo copy everything off and reinitilise and then copy everything back! A lot of that can be avoided using automated bad block scanning at regular intervals but raid 6 is still more reliable especially as he raid array starts containing more discs where the likely hood of multiple failures increases.
 
I thought this was complicated and reading the last few posts I can see that it is.

I had started heading back to the idea of a server and adding a tape drive for backup purposes (possibly a DVD initially) due to cost.

Even with £100 cashback before end of the month the HP n40l needs software and HDD it adds up! but the qnap option isn't that cheap either. Scouring ebay hoping for a "bargin".

Thanks for all the answers
 
There are problems with tape as well. Hope do you know the backups good? How many people test a tape or do they just rely on the fact that the backup app 'says' it is ok? How reliable is that tape once you store it? Is it in the right conditions?

Really, it boils down to what can you afford to spend? The more money, the more reliable a solution you can make.

If you are buying HDDs and you buy 2, RAID 1 is the cheapest and most reliable option. If you buy more than 2 HDDs, RAID 6 will be the most reliable but not quite as cheap as RAID 5 as it requires 1 extra drive to get the same usable capacity.

As others have ,entitled, this only looks at HDD failures - it doesn't take I to account everything from environment issues (fire, flooding etc.) to data corruption (virus, accidental deletion etc.).

As I said, how much can you afford to spend vs what are you willing to risk loosing? That is a question only you will know and there isn't really a right or wrong answer there.
 
Problem with tapes is often capacity vs physical size. That and they aren't really that cheap £/gb.

And as above always check your backup works by restoring a data set, never trust the logs.
 
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