ou81two

NAS and USB 3? NAS is storage on a network. USB 3 is for connecting storage devices locally.

What sort of performance profile are you expecting? Are you doing high end editing work or just watching movies? If the latter, what size are they and what capacity do you need? What's your budget. You've given way too little information here for anyone to really give a good recommendation.

In terms of having the hard drives already, you're talking about a NAS and if you care about your data that means a RAID. As such, having the drives already doesn't mean much since you'd have to have them match to really use them. Consumer level SATA drives are cheap. Quite likely your best bet is a decent NAS with, say, two SATA drives in a mirrored setup. Just move your data onto it, wipe the old hard drives and sell them. It won't cost that much to have new drives. They'll have a longer mean time to failure than the drives you have. You could also spend a little more and get ones designed for NAS use.

Of course, all of this really doesn't give you much disaster recover, so a regular external USB drive as an offsite backup is probably your best bet.

There's also something to be said for not doing that. A decent RAID controller card is going to cost you as much as a commercial RAID device. Then you have to manage all of that software on an ongoing basis. It's a mess.

Dealing with linuxes (I'm using plural as there's not one) is a mess also. You have to deal with driver issues, front end issues, etc. There's a reason why it's free and next to nobody uses it.

richard

I think I'll spring for a 4 or more bay Synology for the support and installed base. I'll spend around a grand for it and it will be a great relief.

Now, I back up various computers with external drives and even two external drives and Dropbox, but it's a kludge. And it doesn't serve me well because it doesn't let me really stream properly.

nkedel

There are plenty of USB-to-network bridges (or routers capable of doing the same) and some of them work pretty well; the performance on the USB2 ones was underwhelming, but enough to keep up with most Wifi -- I haven't looked at USB3 ones to see what's out there but in principle USB3 is limited by the disk inside unless you go SSD.

Or an alternative to RAID that produces similar redundancy; Windows Home server, among other things, or ZFS/BTRFS in the open-source world all offer good ways of giving redundancy that aren't RAID.

Depends on the software used, and if you're not particularly performance sensitive (most home users aren't) "matching" just means "roughly similar capacities."

Sure, there's a learning curve involved -- potentially a steep one if you're non-technical -- and there's some time to physically set things up and to set up the software even if you know what you're doing.

There's absolutely NO reason to use a RAID controller card in a small home NAS system with 4 drives or fewer. Software RAID using the motherboard SATA will perform better, will be easier to manage in most cases, and no less reliable.

Even at 6-8 disks, it's questionable, but a 6-8 bay NAS system is getting rather pricier to begin with.

FreeNAS and similar products do a pretty good job of managing for you, and assuming the system runs at home and doesn't provide services out to the internet at large there's not a whole lot of updating that needs to happen.

Depends on how you look at it. There are differences in distribution (and for a non-technical person, a NAS-focused distribution is best) but it's hardly all that different, and they all have a community around them -- another benefit to using

At their guts, the command lines are all pretty similar, and most importantly -- unless you're working in a support role someplace they use more than one version, or out there apply to jobs -- you only need to know the distribution you actually use. If you build your home server with say, distro X (say, FreeNAS), differences between that and distros Y and Z (Ubuntu Server or CentOS) are absolutely irrelevant.

Linux (or FreeBSD for that matter) won't have any driver issues running on good commodity desktop hardware; if someone here were actually interested in doing this, looking at the various forums for home servers make VERY clear what hardware "just works" right out of the box (it isn't hard; unlike laptops, or high end graphics for gaming, the stuff you'd use in a home server are all very, very, very standard.)

While you'll find religious was regarding what GUI to use on Linux (or a similar thing; FreeNAS is BSD based) for a desktop, that's irrelevant for home server use. Something NAS-specific is as likely to have an all-text UI as a GUI, and tends to be narrowly focussed.

If I were building out a general Linux box for fileserver use, I wouldn't bother putting a GUI on it

*ROFLOL* Define "nobody."

If you mean "it's not very popular for desktop PCs or full-featured laptops," then calling that "nobody" is merely an exaggeration.

If you mean "nobody uses it for home NAS," well, ignoring companies using it under their proprietary skin, you're mistaken -- go look at some of the home server forums. Windows Home Server is probably about equally popular, but there's a sizeable number of people using Linux for exactly that.

If you mean nobody uses Linux for anything, well, you MUST be doing a leg pull.

Many large companies run their file services on Linux or BSD.

While some of the commercial home NAS boxes will use something commercial line QNX, an awful lot of them are just Linux or BSD under the skin. Ditto home routers. Ditto very LARGE network equipment.

Got an Android phone? That's Linux under the skin.
ChromeOS? Ditto (and a less heavily customized one at that, compared to Android.)

gfunkdave

For what it's worth, my home NAS is an HP tower PC I got on sale at woot.com. I added two 3 TB drives, installed Ubuntu, and set up RAID. Works great. As a bonus, I can use it for other stuff too, since it's a regular computer.

nkedel

The only real possible downside to that is that it probably uses more electricity and may make more noise than a small PC you might have built specifically as a NAS system (and those are only really downsides if you leave it on all the time, and have it somewhere where you care about the noise.)

OTOH, was probably cheaper, and being able to use it as a desktop and not just a NAS is definitely a nice bonus.

(Probably still uses less electricity than mine; even with a low-power CPU, 22 drives uses a lot of juice.)

EmptyKim

What in the world do you store on 22 drives?

nkedel

It's not quite as big as it sounds, since it's RAID6 and has sparing (and mixes 2TB and 3TB drives), and it's not by any means full (although it's about 3/4 full)

25 years of historical documents and source code
A LOT of photos and video I've taken,
A BIG media library
Full backups of my main laptop, my wife's laptop, and my travel laptop

HDQDD

My vote would be for QNAP. Similar to Synology, but slightly more professional grade. They also have a great support/dev community. QNAP also runs linux and allows users to run all kinds of applications.

As for content management, I've tested many, but found Plex to be (by far) the best (and it's free). It supports streaming to both iOS and Android devices. You can actually run it right on a QNAP NAS, but I run it on a separate debian server so I can support more users transcoding simultaneously.

TaipeiWang

How about QNAP? Much better build quality (aluminium instead of plastic), software wise exactly the same as Syno, price is also comparable. qnap.com

gfunkdave

It's in the living room, and happens to be quieter than the smaller desktop PC it replaced. I don't care about the electricity; it probably costs a dollar or two a month to run. I should plug the Kill-a-watt into it to see how much power it actually draws.

It's plugged into the TV so I can watch media directly on the TV, and I donate extra computing cycles using GridRepublic to a couple of scientific endeavors.

I also use it for other server-y things...I play with nginx on it, use it as a torrents host, backup my photos and other stuff, whatever.

One of these days I"ll figure out how to configure it to email me if one of the drives experiences issues.

nkedel

Sounds like electric rates may be cheaper there than here, although I have not checked on my more recent upgrades here have done for power efficiency and up til about 2009 when I got too many disks to do it I usually ran my server on my one-generation-back desktop (although it's kind of hard to point to exactly when between 1995 and the mid-2000s it went from being "my second desktop, which happens to run Linux and stays on all the time" and "my server.")

Newer machines have a pretty broad range of efficiency or inefficiency, but from the past few years most are good at idle; I'd expect it would be interesting try the Kill-a-Watt to see the idle vs. loaded power use.

Yeah, we've definitely got different perspectives on the electric cost.

Being able to do things like that is a very nice thing about having a full machine rather than a dedicated appliance.

Some dedicated NAS appliances can do some of these things (e.g. Plex on the QNAP as mentioned), but none will ever have the flexibility of a non-locked-down general-purpose OS.

Not the only piece to the puzzle, but if you don't already have it set up, check out https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools
(there are also RAID-specific tools that will depend on whether you're using md-based raid or LVM-based RAID.)

HDQDD

If you live in the US, your electricity is cheap compared to the rest of the World. Yes the West coast might be 10-20% higher than the East Coast, but both pale in comparison to other developed countries.

nkedel

Given the percent-of-baseline rates out here, there's a big difference in how much it costs out here depending on how much you use. No idea whether they do that back east, but the difference between baseline (13.6c/kwhr) and 131+ (32c/kwhr) or 200% (36c/kwhr) is pretty huge, and the last is 3x the national average.

Prices are lower in the UK (after currency exchange) than above-130%-of-baseline rates here in California, and appear to go down with greater use rather than up:
http://blog.comparemysolar.co.uk/ele...ttish-and-sse/
http://www.ukpower.co.uk/home_energy...s-per-unit-kwh

Add in the "UK GBP prices are basically the same as US$ prices" and they look particularly cheap compared to California.

See also http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/avera...ity-prices-kwh

IOW, "pale in comparison to other developed countries" doesn't seem accurate unless you can restrict yourself to baseline or close to it.

MareLuce

Can Synology disks be encrypted easily? i.e., as an option during setup?

edmg

We use QNAPs at work for long-term backups of non-essential data, but one of them just died one day. We were able to swap the disks into the replacement box and nothing was lost, but I'm still a bit wary after that.