Upgrading my NAS - few questions

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Igurisu

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Advice from the IT pro's please :)

I'm planning to upgrade my NAS as my current Buffalo Linkstation is almost full and I am starting to see drive errors. I have selected the Synology DS413 Synology Network Attached Storage - DS413 Products (unless anybody has a good reason not to), as the enclosure and am now looking at drives.

When I look at the list of compatible drives there are three categories, Desktop, Enterprise and Surveillance. I know about desktop and enterprise but what is surveillance? The reason I ask is that the drives are significantly cheaper than the enterprise (around 50% of the cost). I'm planning to get 4 x 3Tb drives running in raid 5, so should I stick with with the enterprise or would the surveillance class be OK to use?

Also, I have a Logitech squeezebox with the software running on my desktop PC, could this software be installed on the NAS?
 
I looked at bare 3 TB drives recently on eBuyer. Drives with a 3-year warranty were two to three times more expensive than those with 1 year. I tried to work out a logical buying decision & failed

I ended up with two 3 TB Buffalo external drives. Same price as the bare drives, but in a case with power supply and with a 2-year warranty

Up till now my logic has always been to keep drives till the warranty ends then bin them. If you do that, the way prices are now, you might be moving data to new drives once a year

Nick Froome
 
Thanks Spinal, I'll take a look at the list, I might be able to install on my Buffalo.

Good point about the warranties Nick. If I follow that logic through then I could just buy cheap drives. As I plan to run raid5, and the nas drives are hot swapable I shouldn't have any risk of losing data. Just swap the drives out as they fail.
 
I personally have the HP N40L. Can pick it up for £105 after cashback at the moment, with no drives. I have 6 drives in mine at the moment and running WHS 11. Had it a year now, and have been very, very happy with it.

I had a QNAP 409 previously, the HP is far, far better.
 
With the HP, do you have to install an OS? At that price they look like good value

One thing I discovered, having bought USB drives, is how much slower USB is than Firewire. Being Mac-based I've always used Firewire drives, and before that SCSI drives, so have never owned a USB drive. My iMac supports USB 2 but - being ignorant about USB - I didn't realise that mixing USB 1 and USB 2 devices on one port pulls data rates down to USB 1 speeds

USB 1 is like the dark ages, speed-wise. USB 2 is just slow. USB 3 - I don't know. Firewire 400 and 800 feel like SCSI speeds - no complaints at all. The new iMacs dump Firewire for Thunderbolt and USB 3 so that will be a new experience next year

Going back to the NAS, all these devices support Gigabit Ethernet so data transfer should be pretty fast. But I have read lots of reports of sluggish controllers and very slow speeds on the NAS itself. That put me off buying a NAS - that and the fact that I've never found a NAS that supports Apple filesharing AFP 3 properly

I use the USB 2 drive for backup so speed isn't an issue. My main drives are still Firewire - and now out of warranty - so the search continues...

Nick Froome
 
I've never found a NAS that supports Apple filesharing AFP 3 properly

Well, my ReadyNAS easily supports AFP and I have never experienced any difficulty mounting my ReadyNAS on my desktop - or in sharing it between different Macs on the network.

Even so, Firewire is being abandoned by Apple in favour of Thunderbolt. While FW400 offers 480Mbps and FW800 offers 800Mbps IO, Thunderbolt offers 10Gbps per channel IO speed.

What is more, USB3 is now standard on newer Macs, offering 5Gbps IO speed, thereby blowing Firewire out of the water.

The good news is that legacy Mac owners, with only FW IO, can buy a Thunderbolt to ethernet cable for £25.
 
I normally opt for WD drives also.

I use a pair of Synology DS1511+ boxes and they have been excellent in 15 months so far.

I wont use Iomega (EMC) again.
 
What's the speed of the ReadyNAS like across the network?

Nick Froome
 
Surveillance grade drives are aimed at the CCTV market, for use in DVRs where the normal mode of operation is continuous writing with only occasional reading. Probably not the best choice for a NAS, but I guess they'd work.

I've got a Synology NAS (only a little one, DS210j with 2 x 500GB drives set up as RAID 1) that I use as a backup. It wasn't the cheapest thing on the market but it got a lot of good reviews and it seems to work well, and does a whole bunch of other stuff I don't use.

As with all things, you get what you pay for..

Cheers,

Gaz
 
With the HP, do you have to install an OS? At that price they look like good value

Yes, you do.

I am using Windows Home Server 11 as I am very much a windows man, and don't get on too well with Linux. It also works well with my HTPC devices which are running Win 7 and 8.

There are other OS that can run on it too. But it really is a great piece of kit and very, very cheap.

There is loads of support out there for them. I was able to change the bios and install 2 extra drives in the optical drive area to give me 6 drives. I also upgraded the RAM to 8 gig. It's been very reliable and I far prefer it to my QNAP. Because it runs windows there is tons of support for all applications, also. Only Software RAID though. But that is fine with me.
 
I'm planning to get 4 x 3Tb drives running in raid 5, so should I stick with with the enterprise or would the surveillance class be OK to use?
Synology NAS devices have a good reputation, and yes, there is a plug-in for the OS that supports the Squeezebox.

Regarding disk choice, it really comes down to valuable your data is, your backup strategy (you're not relying solely on RAID, are you?) and how long you're prepared to suffer an outage if a disk fails. Don't forget that rebuilding a RAID5 array after replacing a disk will suck out just about every bit of controller performance and will take a l-o-o-o-n-g time for a 3TB drive.
 
I thought folks were moving to this sort of thing these days

Cloud Storage & Unlimited Online Backup | Livedrive

Still far cheaper to have the physical discs local. Not to mention the transfer rates.

I have 20GB in the cloud that costs me £3 a year with google. I store all my photos there as they are the only thing I backup several times, as they are the only important data I have.

Everything else is RAID 5 only. I can afford to lose it. Although would prefer not to.
 
Synology NAS devices have a good reputation, and yes, there is a plug-in for the OS that supports the Squeezebox.

Regarding disk choice, it really comes down to valuable your data is, your backup strategy (you're not relying solely on RAID, are you?) and how long you're prepared to suffer an outage if a disk fails. Don't forget that rebuilding a RAID5 array after replacing a disk will suck out just about every bit of controller performance and will take a l-o-o-o-n-g time for a 3TB drive.

Thanks for that Phil. I have my photo's backed up on the cloud and round other PC's in the house. Everything else is replaceable so yes just relying on the raid.
 
Still far cheaper to have the physical discs local. Not to mention the transfer rates.

I have 20GB in the cloud that costs me £3 a year with google. I store all my photos there as they are the only thing I backup several times, as they are the only important data I have.

Everything else is RAID 5 only. I can afford to lose it. Although would prefer not to.

I should have thought the savings if any were marginal. I have unlimited backup for five machines plus an extremely handy 5TB briefcase. I can't recall the exact cost but if iirc it was about £120 for a year. Compared to my HP 4 bay MediaSmart server (about £480) which requires an annual McAffee licence I think that's a good deal. I know hard drive prices have come down but they don't last forever and it's a real pain when you have to replace them.

Just my tuppence worth.
 
Thanks Spinal, I'll take a look at the list, I might be able to install on my Buffalo.

Good point about the warranties Nick. If I follow that logic through then I could just buy cheap drives. As I plan to run raid5, and the nas drives are hot swapable I shouldn't have any risk of losing data. Just swap the drives out as they fail.

That's exactly what I do in my server (7 disk RAID 5), as soon as I get a drive warning I replace it it seems to be a good balance over cost/safety (I run regular backups too).
 
I should have thought the savings if any were marginal. I have unlimited backup for five machines plus an extremely handy 5TB briefcase. I can't recall the exact cost but if iirc it was about £120 for a year. Compared to my HP 4 bay MediaSmart server (about £480) which requires an annual McAffee licence I think that's a good deal. I know hard drive prices have come down but they don't last forever and it's a real pain when you have to replace them.

Just my tuppence worth.

I have 12 TB of space that cost me £100 for the server, and I didn't actually pay for the disks, but lets say £100 each. That's £700.

Google charge £500 a year for the same storage space. I don't find that cost effective at all. As for replacing HDs. Mine is just unplug and plug in. Easy. Not hot swap. But just shut it down and swap. My server should last me at least 5 years. I don't need a lot of processing.

And again... I need decent transfer speeds to stream HD video around the house. Which cloud can't give me. Ideally, I'd like to back up all my data to the cloud. But prefer to pay the £4 a year to google for my photos only. And that would be free on Picasa, but I want to keep them at the resolution I took them.
 
I have 12 TB of space that cost me £100 for the server, and I didn't actually pay for the disks, but lets say £100 each. That's £700.

Google charge £500 a year for the same storage space. I don't find that cost effective at all. As for replacing HDs. Mine is just unplug and plug in. Easy. Not hot swap. But just shut it down and swap. My server should last me at least 5 years. I don't need a lot of processing.

And again... I need decent transfer speeds to stream HD video around the house. Which cloud can't give me. Ideally, I'd like to back up all my data to the cloud. But prefer to pay the £4 a year to google for my photos only. And that would be free on Picasa, but I want to keep them at the resolution I took them.

Like I said, mine is unlimited and about £120 pa, nowhere near the Google price you quote.
 

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