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I...don't know if I've got the money to go into a full, proper RAID setup for now (though I've always wanted to set up RAID5 or similar). In any case, what are some 4TB HDDs you'd recommend?
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Nov 25, 2015 01:44
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PerrineClostermann posted:I...don't know if I've got the money to go into a full, proper RAID setup for now (though I've always wanted to set up RAID5 or similar). In any case, what are some 4TB HDDs you'd recommend? If you're trying to set up a legit NAS of somesort, WD Reds are probably the way to go. If you're just gonna stuff them into your PC and run with them that way, WD Greens are fine.
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Nov 25, 2015 01:48
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PerrineClostermann posted:I...don't know if I've got the money to go into a full, proper RAID setup for now (though I've always wanted to set up RAID5 or similar). In any case, what are some 4TB HDDs you'd recommend? You can do RAID5 via Windows, you just need 3 drives. 3x4tb would be around $500-$600. If your data matters, you should invest in something to handle it better. Once you have it consolidated better, you should also look at something to back it up to another location.
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Nov 25, 2015 01:49
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Any good deals on things? I'm thinking maybe... http://www.amazon.com/WD40EZRX-Western-Digital-Internal-IntelliPower/dp/B00EHBEUZO/ But the 3TB is much cheaper, and whatever's in this old WD 3TB external has already crapped on me once (probably a green)
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Nov 25, 2015 03:04
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The 4TB NAS Seagate drives are on sale on Newegg and Amazon for $119.99 and the 3TB for $99.99. Picking up 4 of the 4TB myself for thes TS140 I got a month ago, been waiting for a sale on drives.
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Nov 25, 2015 17:27
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I'm kinda nervous about buying Seagate. Are their NAS drives any good?
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Nov 26, 2015 21:13
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PerrineClostermann posted:I'm kinda nervous about buying Seagate. Are their NAS drives any good? I'm cycling out drives in my media server right now and I've got a couple 2TB seagate drives in there which have been around for at least 5 years (these are the ones being removed). That said, there was a study published last year indicating we should avoid Seagate. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2089464/three-year-27-000-drive-study-reveals-the-most-reliable-hard-drive-makers.html Ashex fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Nov 26, 2015 |
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Nov 26, 2015 23:44
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Ashex posted:I'm cycling out drives in my media server right now and I've got a couple 2TB seagate drives in there which have been around for at least 5 years (these are the ones being removed). Backblaze doesn't use NAS drives though
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Nov 26, 2015 23:57
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PerrineClostermann posted:Backblaze doesn't use NAS drives though Also keep in mind that study covered the Thailand flooding period, and a few Seagate models were absolute trash due to it. That being said... I'm a little leery about Seagate still, even though I've nothing to back it up. Tough decisions ahead in the next few days.
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Nov 27, 2015 00:08
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WD Reds are on sale on Amazon now...$109 for the 3TB and $149 for the 4TB. Newegg too; the 3TB is $109 and the 4TB is $139. What about NAS devices? I thought the Synology 415+ or 415play would be good for what I wanted (more than two bays, minimal loving around with parts, quiet and small, and able to send media to a HTPC or a Roku or something), but I'm not crazy about that price and it doesn't look like they're on sale anywhere. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Nov 27, 2015 |
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Nov 27, 2015 01:15
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That 3TB Red is a lot better per TB than the 4TB...hmm...
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Nov 27, 2015 02:55
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I have been living on borrowed time for years and really need to come up with a backup system and centralized NAS. Currently, I have over 40 hard drives, both PATA and SATA, stuck in static bags in my closet. I would really appreciate it if you could help me out with some of my questions and give feedback on my thought process. Priorities: - Automatically backup two desktops and a laptop - Low power usage (Will be on 24x7) - Quietness (I live in a small apartment) - Reliability (Probably ECC and Intel/LSI disk controllers if I build my own) - Act as a NAS and present the files as a single pool - Can be expanded incrementally to a large number of disks (would be nice if I could use the disks I already have without wiping them). - Ease of administration; probably windows based since I don’t have time to learn something else. - Easy way to make at least partial off-site backups - I don’t want to need to update the hardware or make substantial modifications one year from now. Nice to have options: - Integrated video - I am not immediately planning to use virtual machines but it would be a nice option to have so vt-x and vt-d would be a plus. - Relatively low cost - IPMI/KVM management - Ability to spin down drives when not in use. Option 1: Repurpose a stock HP Mediasmart EX-490 ======================================= Repurpose a stock HP Mediasmart EX-490 with either Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials or Windows Server 2011 (Still have a license I never ended up using) with SnapRAID (1 OS Drive, 2 Parity Drives, and up to 5 data drives) and Stablebit DrivePool. And hooking up a TowerRAID TR4M+BNC over eSata running in IT mode. If I don’t go with this option I may give the hardware to my parents for a back up of their systems or use it as an offsite backup for my files. =Cost= Essentially free except for the DrivePool license =Pros= -I already have the hardware and the cost is cheap. =Cons= -The hardware is quite old (Celeron 2.2 Ghz). I am not sure how well the EX-490 will run Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials and it could be quite slow -I am not sure if there is a size limit on the hard drives that can be used with it. -I don’t really like the idea of an external DAS from a reliability perspective. -No ability to expand beyond 8 disks. -No IPMI ability -Might not be much support. -No ECC Option 2: Buy a Synology DS1815+ 8-Bay Diskless NAS ============================================ =Cost= ~$970 =Pros= -Works straight out of the box -Can be expanded with additional Synology expansion boxes for substantial cost. =Cons= -Need to buy new disks or somehow clear old disks -Might be more difficult to mix disk sizes and expand on an incremental basis. Option 3: Build My Own NAS ====================== If I build my own NAS I am leaning towards a Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials based system (I get free licenses for this through school) and using SnapRaid (Maybe FlexRAID) with Stablebit Drivepool. This should let me reuse disks that are already populated and expand the system easily. Most of the files will be fairly static media files. The exception to this would be files being backed up from the laptop. Other software that I would like to run include SABnzbd and utorrent. For the offsite backup I have been thinking about repurposing the old HP Mediasmart EX-490 with either Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials or Windows Server 2011 (Still have a license I never ended up using) and hooking up a TowerRAID TR4M+BNC over eSata running in IT mode. Still trying to figure out how to sync data to it in some manner other than having to haul it home. Maybe BTSync or some kind of Rsync that will work with Windows. I have some hardware I was going to build a computational node for running simulations that could wholly or partially be repurposed. i7-4790k (I would like to keep this for running simulations) ASUS Z97-AR ATX motherboard (Could be repurposed for the storage NAS but doesn’t have sufficient SATA connections) Samsung 840 EVO 512 GB Seasonic SS-660XP Platinum-660 Power Supply Fractal Design Define R5 (I could repurpose this to a storage NAS) Beyond the hardware I already have I am considering the Intel Xeon E3-1200 v5 and i3 processors with a Supermicro X11SAE motherboard. Any particular case options other than the Define R5? Any recommendations which option I should go with or suggestions for other options? I have never used a Windows Server OS of any vintage. How easy is it to administer? How well does Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials perform backups when the clients to be backed up are not joined to its domain? Can it do some sort of differential or incremental image? Can it do versioning? What processor, motherboard, and case would you recommend if I build my own NAS? Which system would you go with and why?
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Nov 27, 2015 03:29
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NAS question: is QNAP or Synology better at the moment? I am looking for a 4-6 drive unit and I've heard good things about both. I've used synology, and my partner has used QNAP, and both of us have been happy with our personal choices so I could go either way.
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Nov 27, 2015 08:47
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Kinetica posted:NAS question: is QNAP or Synology better at the moment? I am looking for a 4-6 drive unit and I've heard good things about both. I've used synology, and my partner has used QNAP, and both of us have been happy with our personal choices so I could go either way. I think at this point you can basically flip a coin. Most advice I've seen say to pick the one that you're familiar with. The one plus to QNAP is you can upgrade their ram easily. I'm in the same boat and with Black Friday deals I'm waffling between the QNAP TS-251 and the Synology DS-214play. It's mainly to store files for Kodi on our FireTV. Apparently Jet.com also has the WD 4TB Red drives for $109, which is the same price everyone else is selling their 3TB drives for. http://slickdeals.net/forums/showpost.php?p=79944179&postcount=20 Falco fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Nov 27, 2015 |
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Nov 27, 2015 15:29
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Ashex posted:I'm cycling out drives in my media server right now and I've got a couple 2TB seagate drives in there which have been around for at least 5 years (these are the ones being removed). The current version.  (they give embedding code for this image, it's not leeching)
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Nov 28, 2015 03:40
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I'm going to be getting a fresh FreeNAS install up and running soon using a spare SSD I have for the OS. The space is obviously overkill so I'm wondering if I can partition it out and use the extra for anything useful? Caching doesn't seem necessary so I'm guessing this is just going to be wasted space?
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Dec 1, 2015 19:48
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Raymn posted:I'm going to be getting a fresh FreeNAS install up and running soon using a spare SSD I have for the OS. The space is obviously overkill so I'm wondering if I can partition it out and use the extra for anything useful? Caching doesn't seem necessary so I'm guessing this is just going to be wasted space? Just use a thumb drive to boot it. Use the SSD for anything else.
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Dec 1, 2015 19:54
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Moey posted:Just use a thumb drive to boot it. Use the SSD for anything else. So the talk about moving away from USB drives due to FreeNAS using ZFS for for the OS file system is just them being nerds?
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Dec 1, 2015 21:36
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Raymn posted:So the talk about moving away from USB drives due to FreeNAS using ZFS for for the OS file system is just them being nerds? FreeNAS still loads itself into RAM on boot, ZFS on the USB boot drives allows them to snapshot before upgrades for easy rollback and scrub to check for failing drives and easy mirroring.
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Dec 1, 2015 21:53
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I'd rather get HGST above all else, but since I'm going to be using it for a file server that's only on when I needed I'm willing to risk it and get the Seagate ST4000DM000. Shouldn't be too bad, only 3% failure rate according to Backblaze. What do you guys usually do to test hard drives when you get them? I've heard of some people stress testing them to weed out bad drives.
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Dec 1, 2015 22:11
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skooma512 posted:I'd rather get HGST above all else, but since I'm going to be using it for a file server that's only on when I needed I'm willing to risk it and get the Seagate ST4000DM000. Shouldn't be too bad, only 3% failure rate according to Backblaze. You basically want to do the same thing when you would securely wipe a hard drive, over and over. If it doesn't fall down after fulling writing & rewriting data to it for a week straight, and has no bad sectors show up over the test, you're pretty good. I still use the Unraid Preclear tool even though I moved to SnapRaid, as it does a good job of hitting the entire disk, and providing a report at the end. (http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2817.0).
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Dec 1, 2015 22:29
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My stress test method has been dividing the drive to 4 partitions and then running 4 simultaneous Bonnie++ benchmarks on them for extended time.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:45
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My buddy is a photographer/video dude and he was describing what people typically do to store all the media for the days shoot, and it basically amounts to portable USB drives they carry around that sometimes get backed up to a NAS back home a day or a week later. It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. I was thinking some sort of little NAS on site that starts backing up to glacier as soon as it has a network connection would be better. What do people typically do for this type of scenario?
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Dec 2, 2015 23:59
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fletcher posted:My buddy is a photographer/video dude and he was describing what people typically do to store all the media for the days shoot, and it basically amounts to portable USB drives they carry around that sometimes get backed up to a NAS back home a day or a week later. It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. I was thinking some sort of little NAS on site that starts backing up to glacier as soon as it has a network connection would be better. What do people typically do for this type of scenario? It really depends a lot on the shoot, and on how well the photographer understands technology (most of them, though they work with a digital camera and photoshop all day, don't understand technology at all). Most of the wedding and portrait photographers I've worked with just shoot to cards, which they then transfer to their home/office storage after the shoot. For some of them that's a NAS, for some of them that's just a pile of external drives. If they're doing location weddings they'll transfer it to a portable USB drive when they get back to their hotel. For commercial / product / advertising shoots the workflow varies a lot from photographer to photographer. Most of the time they shoot tethered to a laptop, which is sometimes backing up the shoot folder to an external drive. Bigger shoots or photographers who are working out of their own studio instead of renting space might be shooting to a desktop (usually an imac, occasionally a mac pro, almost never a windows machine) which either backs up across multiple internal drives or onto an external drive. Generally these will get transferred to the photographers NAS or pile of external drives later. Almost none of the photographers I know back their NAS up. Glacier isn't really viable for them as they produce 20-500gb per shoot, and have maybe a 50mbit connection.
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Dec 3, 2015 16:13
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sleepy gary posted:To further elaborate, what I am envisioning is a laptop and a handful of 2.5" USB hard drives, probably in RAIDZ-2. Frequent power loss is probable, so everything will have backup power (the laptop inherently plus something I will probably have to build for the hard drives*). So far this is the best I've come up with that meets the requirements (very small/portable, serviceable, ability to use laptop as a normal computer with the array and disks unmounted). FreeNAS & ZFS documentation specifically recommends that you don't run it on external drives of any sort, unless you specifically want to lose data. Also, what laptop & OS are you using that you're going to run ZFS on? What are you using this solution for exactly? Every time I've seen someone justify a reason for having a portable very powerful PC, or massive storage - there tends to be a much better solution - either: a) Hosting it somewhere secure with good connectivity, then remoting in to it. OR b) Using a video to demo things rather than doing real live tests.
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Dec 10, 2015 15:11
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Video demos really, really don't cut it for technical audiences in my experience - it definitely doesn't for me as a customer. And trying to get Internet egress in a lot of consulting or even pre-sales situations is just not possible either (eg. highly / paranoid secured customer facility). If you're going to do something as crazy as needing 5+ USB ports for a RAID setup, I would say from a practical and usability standpoint that you could just buy a USB 3.0 hub and attach the disks to the hub and have a single upstream cable to the laptop. If that's restrictive on throughput somehow, you can try using 2 hubs and hope that your USB 3.0 controller doesn't just split the upstream negating the point of multiple USB 3.0 hubs. With that said, laptops tend to make poor demo machines for many highly technical demos (Big Data demos, running 10+ VMs to show your wannabe AWS / Heroku, deep learning demo with CUDA) due to so many compromises made for space and power efficiency in part selection. A Mac Pro + a Thunderbolt drive array is probably sufficient for these folks' needs and should cost less to deal with fundamentally than a shoe-horned laptop RAID. If you're unable to afford that setup, you are in ghetto budget territory probably and you will have to accept the very real, likely chance of data loss.
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Dec 10, 2015 16:26
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fatman1683 posted:The first version I sent ProtoCase, which didn't have the lip and was specced to 18ga steel, was still over $100. I knew this wasn't going to be cheap going in, and I'm actually pretty happy with the price. How did this end up?
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Dec 10, 2015 17:08
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So, is there a reason that I don't see Drobo mention in the OP or discussed much? Is there something about them that makes them an inferior choice to Synology or QNAP or whoever else? I am coming to this as a technically competent person, but I don't have any experience working with storage or NAS's and Drobo seems like they offer an apple like experience of working well without having to do much configuration etc.
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Dec 10, 2015 17:19
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Proprietary nature of their stuff, price and better options available. I've never personally owned a Drobo but I've seen several failed recoveries from people who have. In fact I've never seen a successful one. I feel like there are few cases where you're better off going with a Drobo when you have Synology or roll your own solutions around. The NAS as a home server ecosystem is also fully fleshed out on a Synology, tons of application support. Synology also has its own hybrid raid implementation that I don't know much about.
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Dec 10, 2015 17:58
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emocrat posted:So, is there a reason that I don't see Drobo mention in the OP or discussed much? Is there something about them that makes them an inferior choice to Synology or QNAP or whoever else? I am coming to this as a technically competent person, but I don't have any experience working with storage or NAS's and Drobo seems like they offer an apple like experience of working well without having to do much configuration etc. For one, Drobo is super expensive, so for a given budget most people here would rather not. Second, the whole idea behind it is iffy. It basically does a bunch of black magic to create a bunch of RAID-5 and RAID-1 arrays to store your data, but there is very little transparency into this process and if your enclosure dies, you may be SOL for getting your data, even if the drives are fine.
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Dec 10, 2015 17:58
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Their network transfer performance was also extremely lacking (I don't know if it's been improved).
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Dec 10, 2015 18:15
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Cool, thanks for the info. All good to hear. I will look into Synology.
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Dec 10, 2015 18:57
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Speaking of off the shelf NAS setups, how are Qnaps? It looked like for the longest while they had superior hardware specs to Synology but their software wasn't as nice looking. Now they just had a major refresh on the software and it looks as good as the Synology stuff. Are they pretty even or one is better for one market than the other? (Home use vs soho etc)
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Dec 10, 2015 19:26
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Should I be concerned about how this drive was packaged for shipping?
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Dec 11, 2015 03:01
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It's not ideal, but frankly it's unlikely to make much of a difference, as the retail packaging is usually pretty durable itself. It's when you get sent bare/OEM drives and they don't bother with sufficient padding that there can occasionally be issues.
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Dec 11, 2015 03:41
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Just fire it up and run a couple SMART long tests and badblocks on it. If it's gonna fail, make it do it immediately.
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Dec 11, 2015 05:04
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sharkytm posted:Just fire it up and run a couple SMART long tests and badblocks on it. If it's gonna fail, make it do it immediately. Is there a bootable CD I that comes with the utilities to run those tests?
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Dec 11, 2015 06:19
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priznat posted:Speaking of off the shelf NAS setups, how are Qnaps? It looked like for the longest while they had superior hardware specs to Synology but their software wasn't as nice looking. Now they just had a major refresh on the software and it looks as good as the Synology stuff. Are they pretty even or one is better for one market than the other? (Home use vs soho etc) I'm on a home built ZFS FreeNAS box these days, but I bought a QNAP 8 bay SMB Box about 5 years ago and filled it with Hitachi 1GB drives in a RAID 10 for a small business. It's been regularly updated by QNAP, been through many power outages, and never been powered off for more than 2 hours. It's always come back up just fine, without ever losing data (it's their on-site backup array). Just last week, it sent me an alert that one of the drives had its first reported reallocated sector ... after 5 years. It gets about 500GB written to it every single weekday. Just one data point from one dude, but I like that box. insularis fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Dec 11, 2015 |
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Dec 11, 2015 06:31
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My QNAP has been rock solid for the two months I've had it. Easy to set up, easy to use. I actually use mine to serve a pair of ISCSI LUNs to my media server over the second network interface. It's really good.
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Dec 11, 2015 16:50
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We have an old 8 bay QNAP at work that's been there since 2009 and just put in two more 12 bay QNAPS for our main video storage (120tb)... we've had nothing but a good experience thus far. Their software is just fine.
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Dec 11, 2015 16:53
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