best set up for a Qnap

Chaz Photos

Chaz Photos

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Can anyone tell me what the best way to set up a Qnap I have set the hardware up 4 HD 2Tb each in raid 5 but its more about how best to set up the connection as in the software has so much in it I am guessing that I do not need most of it?
 
You need to be aware that RAID5 using non-enterprise drives is a little “risky”. Yes it protects you if a drive fails, however when rebuilding your the array statistics say there is around 40% chance of hitting an Unrecoverable Read Error Which will cause rebuilding to fail. With 4 disks RAID 1+0 is best (but you “lose” 50% of capacity), over 4 disks then RAID6 (two parity disks vs one in RAID5).

Of course in any case you should have backups... make sure you have at least three copies of any data, stored in at least two places (ie. one copy stored off site).
 
I think we would need more specific questions to be able to help :)

I would second Eloise's concern in implementing RAID5 though.
Chaz Photos said:
how do you use the fact it has dual LAN support
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That depends what you want to benefit from in using the trunking support for the two interfaces? The possible benefits are going to be things like increased bandwidth, load balancing and fault tolerance. Bare in mind you're not going to see any bandwidth increase between the QNAP NAS and a single client from trunking. For that you will need a NAS with a 10GbE NIC (or 2.5GbE or 5GbE I guess if that's a thing yet?) and respective support for the rest of your network/clients. In terms of bandwidth, trunking is only potentially going to help when it comes to simultaneous access from multiple clients.
 
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implement RAID 6 for sure regardless of your LAN question it is realy good advice.

RAID 5 is very good in servers and datacentres where you have a hot spare or a technician on hand to swap out the drive within a very short time.
in a home environment by the time you have noticed the fail and sourced a drive you could lose all your redundancy.
 
TLR-330 said:
You have not said which Qnap you got.
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QNAP TS-431 4 x 2Tb and I have my main PC hard wired to the router.
I also have a Seagate Personal Cloud Model: SRN21C which is 3Tb

main PC has a 1Tb 840 EVO SSD for win 10 and programs
120 GB SSD as scratch disk
2TB date disk
1TB date disk
If this helps I just like to be able to get to my older files on the NAS easy and quicker
 
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Mr Bump said:
RAID 5 is very good in servers and datacentres where you have a hot spare or a technician on hand to swap out the drive within a very short time.
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To be honest not even then... in reading the data to recreate the failed drive, for a 6TB usable array (i.e. 4x 2TB) there is around 40% chance of failure. For a 12-14TB array (4x 4TB or 8x 2TB) that chance of failure approaches 100% - we’re talking statistical chance of failure based on usual stated error rates for drives, it is possible to rebuild a RAID5 array if you’re “lucky”.

Hot spares don’t offer any greater protection.

Data centres may use “enterprise” disks which have a 10x greater (more reliable) failure rate which mitigates the risk somewhat.
Chaz Photos said:
Thanks but it was more about setting up how to use the drive as there are a lot of options from what I can see and how do you use the fact it has dual LAN support
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You probably don’t want to worry about the dual LAN. As for how you should set it up, etc. what are you going to be using the NAS for?
 
Chaz Photos said:
QNAP TS-431 2 x 2Tb and I have my main PC hard wired to the router.
Click to expand...

No idea and not sure if there is any point worrying about the dual lan, but one question is if your router's LAN is a Gigabit router or just 100 Megabit? Mine is 100 so I have connected a 1Gb switch to the router and all my PCs connects to the Qnap via the switch (all hardwired).
 
Chaz Photos said:
QNAP TS-431 2 x 2Tb
Click to expand...
You cannot use any other RAID than RAID 0 or 1 with 2 x drives.

If you want 4TB of fast storage but if a drive fails all the data is lost, RAID0.
If you want 2TB of standard speed storage, if a drive fails you still have everything, RAID1.
If you want RAID5/6 then add 1 or 2 more drives respectively.
I would suggest not using RAID5. (I used it extensively until drives got larger)

The unrecoverable thing is actually not as bad in reality but yes, larger disks are a bigger liability.

I would also have it backing up to the external drive once a week and maybe look at cloud storage.
 
Captain Fizz said:
You cannot use any other RAID than RAID 0 or 1 with 2 x drives.
Click to expand...
On the first post the OP seemed to say that he has 4 hard disks(???) so raid 5 would be possible. I do hope though he is not using RAID 0.
 
TLR-330 said:
On the first post the OP seemed to say that he has 4 hard disks(???) so raid 5 would be possible. I do hope though he is not using RAID 0.
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True facts - Didn't scroll back to top to verify... Urk.

Also to note, 1 x 1GBit connection will pretty much max out one HDD.
So unless going from SSD to SSD then 1GB will be plenty for transfer speed.

EDIT - Also to say again, do not treat RAID as "my files are safe".
Always backup. Ideally on a device in another location/cloud.
 
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TLR-330 said:
No idea and not sure if there is any point worrying about the dual lan, but one question is if your router's LAN is a Gigabit router or just 100 Megabit? Mine is 100 so I have connected a 1Gb switch to the router and all my PCs connects to the Qnap via the switch (all hardwired).
Click to expand...
Not sure I know what a 1Gb switch is I have BT Hub 5 which is 1,300Mbit/s,
Typo it is 4 x 2TB HD's
 
Chaz Photos said:
Not sure I know what a 1Gb switch is I have BT Hub 5 which is 1,300Mbit/s,
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I don't have a clue what it is either, but looking for it, it appears to have Gigabit connections for its 4 WAN ports. Probably only a marginal gain if you were to use a switch and I would not bother. So your PC has a cable that connects to the back of the "BT Hub 5" and so does the QNAP? [If yes, you will need a switch if you get more than 4 devices that have to be connected by cable to the "BT Hub 5"].
 
TLR-330 said:
I don't have a clue what it is either, but looking for it, it appears to have Gigabit connections for its 4 WAN ports. Probably only a marginal gain if you were to use a switch and I would not bother. So your PC has a cable that connects to the back of the "BT Hub 5" and so does the QNAP? [If yes, you will need a switch if you get more than 4 devices that have to be connected by cable to the "BT Hub 5"].
Click to expand...
I have my PC in one QNAP in two and my Seagate in one this leaves the the WAN
 
Bt hub 5 supposedly has 4x 1gbps lan ports.

If you're working from it I would certainly make sure all relevant devices are connected over ethernet rather than WiFi.

Circling back to the raid debate, there are a lot of best practices but in reality for a home user it doesn't matter that much what level you run. On the basis that it isn't your only copy of the data and you can recover from backups if the worst happens and the raid goes all cockeyed.

(for what it's worth I used to run raid0 as my main working set, mainly for the extra space, however it was backed up to a separate on site raid 5 array. None of which were enterprise disks, and I'm still running 7 year old spinpoints in a raid 5 set)
 
The advantage of the dual lan ports on the nas is if you have your BT hub and another switch, which you don't seem to have so I wouldn't worry about it.
For explanation only, if you had the BT hub with WiFi clients and separate switch with your wired clients attached then you would have one LAN from the nas go to the BT router and the other from the nas going to the switch. All devices would should use the quickest route to the nas then.
 
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