chgoeditor

Stupid question (but again goes to my point about this being frustrating for non-techies): When a product is described as "diskless" does that mean I'm buying the housing but not the actual hard drives?

tmiw

Correct. One does have to be careful about buying drives for such a system though since some may be incompatible. The NAS manufacturer should have a compatibility list on their website that will help you to avoid those.

chgoeditor

So I took the advice of most here and looked at Synology's NAS. I will say, the interface looks much better than the junk I currently have with Buffalo.

Can anyone help me decipher the personal/home/preconfigured home options? For example, does is the 3TB BeyondCloud Mirrored simply a two-bay NAS where they've simplified things by pre-installing the drives? Or are there other features for one vs. the "diskless" NAS that I'm missing? If I buy a pre-configured one, can I swap out a hard drive if something goes wrong?

gfunkdave

No, you're not missing anything. Their BeyondCloud Mirrored NAS, in addition to coming with hard drives, has also been already set up with a RAID 1 mirror so you don't have to. But from what I remember of setting up Synology NAS at my parents' with RAID 1 mirroring, it was mainly an exercise in checking a box to mirror the drives. The NAS did take about 24 hours to set up the mirror, though.

My advice would be to set your own NAS up. Buy a DS215j (or DS216se if you want to save $50 for a slightly slower machine). Then buy two WD Red drives (1 TB or 2 TB - I'd go with 2 TB just because for an extra $50 why not double your space).

BigLar

Hmmm. I just use an older dual-core machine running XP. A Promise RAID controller (Raid 1). I map the drive onto all my computers and just open it up when I need to store or retrieve anything.

Of course, I don't save every byte that comes into any of my computers, so the total storage is about 300 Gb. GB ethernet gets it to where it needs to go quite smartly.

My total cost was nothing for the computer, I think I got the controller for about five bucks, and I went out of my way to get matching drives. So, maybe about fifty bucks all told. Easy to set up and has been running reliably for years.

nkedel

I'm among those who uses a custom built PC for it; I run Linux, with a large RAID (24 drives, not counting a mirrored pair of SSDs to boot from) but it all grew out of a cheapo box 15 years ago with one hard drive. The software is pretty easy if you're comfortable with a command line, and there are packages like FreeNAS (mentioned above) and a few other open source things that can make it easier. There's also (or was also?) Windows Home Server, or in a pinch even a Windows 7 Pro or Windows 10 Pro system can be used as a file server.

I have enough other things running on mine to need a fairly beefy processor (i7-4770S) but for most people, a very low-power CPU is better: if it's going to be running 24/7 you want to save electricity. There are some very inexpensive fanless motherboards that work great -- the last time I looked (about 18 months ago, not recently) the Intel Celeron J1900-based were the best cheap, fanless option. While they're quite slow, they also use vastly less electricity than using an old system I have kicking around, and require no CPU fan.

I keep looking for a desktop motherboard using a 10-15W ultrabook CPU; haven't found one recently, and the last time I did, it was quite pricy.

There are some very nice 6-drive-bay mini-ITX cases which would handle a decent sized small setup nicely, and for many people even that many drives (in a RAID 6; e.g. 4 for data, 2 for parity) would likely be overkill.

--

As for cloud, it's really good for different things. The big limit to cloud isn't the space, but the network time to get things up and down.

BobbySteel

I'm still a fan of cloud. I love my Synology but it's more hassle than a normal user needs to worry about. What about dropping a new drive in when one fails? That's a hassle.

Backblaze for a 2 year plan is $95. Even if you use Dropbox as well for a TB of day-to-day storage at $10 a month, you're paying $175 a year maximum, or just $45 for the year of Backblaze.

By comparison a Synology plus a couple 1TB drives isn't cheap.

ou81two

I don't know what kind of hardware you've been buying but I've had a 2 bay NAS with drives designed for use in NAS for about 5 or 6 years now. I'll likely update the drives this year, but there's no reason why it should be that hard.

Largely what you're talking about is the ability of different software to integrate with the NAS which is something different entirely. Something basic like FTP works wonders.

chgoeditor

Isn't Backblaze just backup cloud storage, similar to Carbonite? I didn't get the sense I could easily access individual files, etc.

I use Dropbox for some limited stuff, but hate the interface. I really wouldn't want to use it for streaming music, etc., that I'm storing there.

The one that's currently dying is a Buffalo LinkStation. I can't remember what the prior one was, but there's a chance it was also a Buffalo. Fool me once...

nkedel

NAS and cloud and backup are all good for different things. Running your own NAS is best if you have a lot of media you want fast, convenient access to at home -- e.g. for streaming movies to your own TV, or for a giant photo collection you want to browse through. Cloud is MUCH better for remote access and sharing. Neither one is backup, and both (even with RAID) are far more likely to lose data than most people think.

But dropping a new drive in when one fails (or better yet when it starts failing) is no trouble at all if you hardware and software are good.

The cost, OTOH, is annoying. I lose about 3 drives a year out of 24, and that's about $350 at today's prices. ZFS/btrfs/Windows Storage Spaces or something else that can do parity across different-size drives wasn't part of my last build, but it's getting to be annoying that I have to replace 3TB drives with like when they are no longer the sweet spot for price/capacity.

ou81two

Does your device/card not allow for dynamic array rebuilding? If so, you might be able to pull out the drives for larger ones and then dynamically rebuild the array once they're all in place.

nkedel

The main array is 100% Linux software (mdadm) -- I'm not sure if it's doable. The external array is hardware (LSI megaraid) and I should heck on that.

I've done the equivalent before in a hacky manner (striping a second partition) but it becomes a bear to manage and hurts the assumption that each RAID is a dedicated pool of drives for performance reaons.

Plus going across 10 drives for replacements is going to take a very long time to do that; at 3 failures per year give or take by the time the 3TB drives all get replaced the 5TB drives will probably be obsolete too.

I'm retiring 6 2TB drives soon and I suspect the next step will be experimenting with btrfs-vs.-zfs for RAID like pools.

tmiw

Google did a survey a while back within their own datacenters that concluded that anything under 30C or over 40C has a detrimental effect on reliability. SMART monitoring will easily let you see the temperature of each drive and make corrections to your cooling setup as needed.

Personally, I haven't lost many drives ever by keeping that in mind but YMMV.

nkedel

Heat is definitely a big issue. I've never had an adequately cooled drive fail precipitously, and I've seen a lot more failures of 7200RPM drives than cooler-running 5400RPM and 5900RPM drives.

KRSW

I suspect your problems are with being unfamiliar with networking rather than NAS issues. Unfortunately, some of this can't easily be fixed, as the same things which would anyone to connect to anything, would also permit unfriendly people to also do the same. I'm also guessing you aren't running a static IP (fixed network address) for the NAS, which would get you into trouble when the router decides to hand out different addresses.

No, I mean the OLD FreeNAS. It doesn't care what it's running on. Pentium II 350MHz with 512MB RAM and it's happy. Not a lot to it -- install it, give it an IP, and name a Samba share or two. The whole process took <15 minutes and that's what it's been doing ever since. The shares automatically show up on all of our computers, no issues.

Cloud = another name for Someone Else's Server. At least for me, I'm not a fan. No one's going to take care of your data like you would. If you do use a cloud-based solution, use encryption before you send your data to them! I've seen more than a couple of them, including some of the larger ones, where someone with moderate technical expertise could look at EVERYONE's files. Maybe alright if you're just saving your travel photos, but not good if it's your tax/investment/banking docs. They do have the advantage of being off-site, but that's about it in my book.

24 3TB drives? 72 TB? That's a lot of pr0n dude!

I wish I could say the same. Temperature-wise, my drives are treated nicely. Actual usage-wise, they get clobbered, and it shows. I just RMA'd a 2TB Seagate HDD/SSD hybrid drive last month. Lasted barely 8 months. Fortunately SMART did catch it in time. I usually lose 1-2 a year.