Home NAS setup - 4x4 TB RAID 5 + separate JBOD NAS backup?

[Eug]

I currently have 2x2 TB as a JBOD NAS that is getting short on space... although I probably have about a year left before I totally run out of space.

It seems that hard drive pricing is falling through the floor these days. 4 TB Hitachi Coolspin (5400 rpm) drives are $170 now locally, and I can even get a $20 discount if I bring in old drives for recycling.

That means I could get 16 TB worth of drives for $600-700! So, I'm thinking of getting a Synology DS413 and 4 drives for RAID5. If my calculations are correct, with RAID 5, if I do a 3-disk array, that's about 7.9 TB, or if I do a 4-disk array, that's 12 TB.

12 TB is way overkill for me at this point, but I go with a 3-disk array, I'm thinking I'd have to buy the fourth drive now anyway in case I want to add it in later. Is it correct to think I really should have the same drive in there for the 4th one? Or could I just get another 4 TB drive later? I've read different advice on this.

One reason I'm considering it now is because the DS413 has USB 3, eSATA, a dual-core 1.07 GHz CPU, and 1 GB RAM. Pretty good specs for a NAS. In previous years the specs were a lot worse - less future proofed. The DS413+ has not been announced but I'm thinking it would be overkill for me. I'm guessing its main advantages would be a dual-core 2 GHz CPU and dual Gigabit LAN for link aggregation.

I'd use my current 211j as a backup NAS in JBOD mode. Or possibly in RAID. I currently have a 2 TB and a 3 TB I could use, as well as USB drives.

What do you think? Does this make sense for home use? Or would you just wait another year until you had to upgrade? I'm guessing drives won't be that much cheaper by then, but the NAS hardware might improve a bit. Pricing on the NASes seem to be relatively stable year over year though.

BTW, Synology has their own SHR format which is supposedly different from RAID5, etc. Anyone here have any experience with it? Actually, according to Synology's description, that might be a big advantage over true RAID 5, because it allows much more flexibility in drive choice - mixing and matching - but if RAID 5 were safer, I'd choose that.

 

[Ayah]

Why not roll your own? Way more expansion capability and way more performance.
Cheap Q77 board, i3 3220, 16GB of ram sum up to like <260. Add a case, psu and some kind of NVM storage and shouldn't be too much more than one of those predesigned ones.

FreeNAS with ZFS is probably one of the easiest things to configure ever.

 

[Eug]

Thanks but I'd rather just get a standalone unit.

 

[smitbret]

Just hit some wesbsites like wegotserved.com, smallnetbuilder.com, etc. Most people here are gonna be more inclined to set up home brews, myself included. $500 on a driveless 4-bay system seems stupid to me, especially when I was able to build something twice as powerful for less than 400.

 

[rsutoratosu]

Just curious what systems are you building for 400 bucks ?

Im using the hp microserver with 4 4tb hitachi drives.. i came from 1.5tbx4 and did not want to make 2 upgrade when i run out of room on the 3tb drives so I went straight to 4tb.

I have 3 micro server thats on 4tb drives so thats 36tb total just on the microservers.. and those are cheap, newegg just had a sale for 250 each

 

[Eug]

Well, I really like the Synology interface and it includes features that could be somewhat of a pain to home-brew up. eg. IP camera support with 24/7 recording. Plus, space and heat generation are concerns, since this would reside in a closed closet.

The $100 saved isn't worth the hassle to me, even if it's a more powerful setup.

 

[kmmatney]

I was looking into converting my RAID 1 to a RAID 5, but it seems that RAID 5 isn't very safe. There are numerous references to this:

http://informix-myview.blogspot.com/2010/06/raid5-rant.html
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/raidfail-dont-use-raid-5-on-small-arrays/483
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162

For me, I'm sticking with RAID 1 for now, and taking a storage hit, although I'm looking into RAID 6

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/raid-5-or-raid-6-which-should-you-select/2645

 

[Eug]

Hmmm... That is worrisome. I would have a backup, but we all know how much of a time waster it can be to lose the primary drive/RAID.

However, if I look to a 4-drive array, RAID 6 offers no storage advantage to RAID 10. With 4x4 TB drives, I'd get 8 TB out of both. Since RAID 10 gives a performance advantage over RAID 6, maybe RAID 10 is the better option. The main problem is I'd have to buy 4 drives. I was thinking of buying 3 and adding a 4th later. (I have a $20 discount for every recycled drive I bring in, but I only have 3. Two are usable but small IDE drives, and the 3rd is a defective laptop SATA drive.)

BTW, I used to be in RAID 1 with my 2 drive array, but 2 TB total got filled up quickly, which is why I switched to JBOD and 4 GB. 8 TB RAID 10 would give me quite a bit of breathing room, at least for a few years.

 

[nehalem256]

Hmmm... That is worrisome. I would have a backup, but we all know how much of a time waster it can be to lose the primary drive/RAID.

However, if I look to a 4-drive array, RAID 6 offers no storage advantage to RAID 10. With 4x4 TB drives, I'd get 8 TB out of both. Since RAID 10 gives a performance advantage over RAID 6, maybe RAID 10 is the better option. The main problem is I'd have to buy 4 drives. I was thinking of buying 3 and adding a 4th later. (I have a $20 discount for every recycled drive I bring in, but I only have 3. Two are usable but small IDE drives, and the 3rd is a defective laptop SATA drive.)

BTW, I used to be in RAID 1 with my 2 drive array, but 2 TB total got filled up quickly, which is why I switched to JBOD and 4 GB. 8 TB RAID 10 would give me quite a bit of breathing room, at least for a few years.

The advantage of RAID6 over a RAID10 is that it can always sustain 2 disk failures without data loss.

If 2 disks fail in a RAID10 you have a 1/3 chance of data loss.

 

[smitbret]

Just curious what systems are you building for 400 bucks ?

Im using the hp microserver with 4 4tb hitachi drives.. i came from 1.5tbx4 and did not want to make 2 upgrade when i run out of room on the 3tb drives so I went straight to 4tb.

I have 3 micro server thats on 4tb drives so thats 36tb total just on the microservers.. and those are cheap, newegg just had a sale for 250 each

Specs-
Fractal Design Define R4 - On sale for 89.99 + $20 shipping
Corsair CW430 430W PSU - 39.99
AMD FX-4100 - 104.99
Asus M5A78L-M Plus - 54.99
Crucial 8GB ECC - $71.99
FreeNAs from a Flash Drive - $8

389.95 and just add drives. If your ZFS array is more than 8GB, then add $60 and still come in $70 less than the Synology.

You could also build an unRAID server for even less money if you have old parts lying around.

 

[rsutoratosu]

That is pretty cheap.. the only thing I steer away from is the 430w psu The good thing about the hp is it clocks in at around 85W with all 4 drives populated. If you're cheap like me, thats a huge savings

 

[Ayah]

Lian Li v2000 = already had it lying around
Supermicro X9SCL+-F = 120$
i3 2120 = 85$
Corsair TX750 = already had it lying around (the CWT original one)
32GB ECC UDIMMs = 190$
Kingston flash drive for FreeNAS = found at school on the ground >_>
Coolermaster Hyper 212 = 30$?

 

[Eug]

Yeah, the Synology NAS is about 20 Watts plus the drives.

I have a P4 in a giant case lying around, but it's just going to get donated or discarded. In fact, I just harvested the 46 GB hard drive to recycle for my $20 discount on the 4 TB drive.

 

[smitbret]

He said 4 drives. That PSU will drive that OK since there's no discret GPU. You'd definitely wanna upgrade if you moved to anything more than 6 drives, though.

You could probably save money of you dumped the ECC memory and put the investment back into the PSU. I just chose the AMD/Asus/ECC route cuz I'm paranoid. In all reality, using ZFS will take care of most errors if you went that way. You could also cheap out on the case and save another 30-40 since it's really nothing more than a box to hold HDDs.

 

[smitbret]

OP may wanna look at QNAP, too. Both make really good NAS systems.

 

[billybob-ssd]

I have a QNAP ts-879 pro with a 10 gig Intel X520 DA2 adapter. Its configured with RAID5, and it benchmarks out about as fast as an SSD. A 16 terabyte SSD. It does iSCSI and NFS too, in case you feel like hooking your VMware server up to it.

Building your own box will cost a lot more, wont be as fast, and wont be as reliable.

 

[billybob-ssd]

Specs-
Fractal Design Define R4 - On sale for 89.99 + $20 shipping
Corsair CW430 430W PSU - 39.99
AMD FX-4100 - 104.99
Asus M5A78L-M Plus - 54.99
Crucial 8GB ECC - $71.99
FreeNAs from a Flash Drive - $8

389.95 and just add drives. If your ZFS array is more than 8GB, then add $60 and still come in $70 less than the Synology.

You could also build an unRAID server for even less money if you have old parts lying around.

You are neglecting to mention ZFS is really slow unless you turn off sync. If you turn off sync you risk the whole array disappearing. You could turn off sync if you had a ZeusRAM for ZIL. But that is about $2000 all by itself.

 

[smitbret]

You are neglecting to mention ZFS is really slow unless you turn off sync. If you turn off sync you risk the whole array disappearing. You could turn off sync if you had a ZeusRAM for ZIL. But that is about $2000 all by itself.

Slow compared to what?

 

[Eug]

I just bought a single 4 TB drive for the time being, since I wasn't quick enough on the draw. The store only had 1 left of that $150 model. Other models are significantly more expensive.

So, right now I have only 1x4 TB, 1x3 TB, and 2x2 TB.

With that on a Synology 4-bay NAS, that would give me:

7 TB with SHR (which is like RAID 5 in terms of fault tolerance)
6 TB with RAID 5
4 TB with SHR-2 (which is like RAID 6 in terms of fault tolerance)
4 TB with RAID 6

However, there are no sales on the mid to higher end 4-bay models right now anyway. I'll wait until they go on sale, and until I can find more 4 TB drives under $150. In the meantime I'll just use my 4 TB + another drive, as independent volumes (with backups).

I have a QNAP ts-879 pro with a 10 gig Intel X520 DA2 adapter. Its configured with RAID5, and it benchmarks out about as fast as an SSD. A 16 terabyte SSD. It does iSCSI and NFS too, in case you feel like hooking your VMware server up to it.

Building your own box will cost a lot more, wont be as fast, and wont be as reliable.

Looks nice, but that NAS is over $2000 locally. I'm looking more in the $500+ range.

 

[Zxian]

Synology units are very nice. I've have the 212j for about a month now and have no complaints about it yet. However, the key thing to keep in mind is that RAID should only be used for uptime. Always maintain a separate backup of your data. My suggestion is that you store most of your data on the new 4-bay NAS (or whatever box you decide to use) and then set the existing NAS and 2TB drives for your backup (as you mentioned in your first post).

ZFS seems like it's moving in the right direction, but there are several limitations of that solution. Namely, lack of Solaris and BSD support for a lot of common software and devices (you mentioned IP cameras, so there's likely a bit of extra legwork to make that happen). I also wouldn't touch ZFS on Linux until it's actually a stable, kernel level implementation. If all you want is something to serve files, go for it.

 

[billybob-ssd]

Slow compared to what?

Slow compared to a $500 QNAP box with a EXT3 or EXT4 RAID5 array.

 

[Eug]

Synology units are very nice. I've have the 212j for about a month now and have no complaints about it yet. However, the key thing to keep in mind is that RAID should only be used for uptime. Always maintain a separate backup of your data. My suggestion is that you store most of your data on the new 4-bay NAS (or whatever box you decide to use) and then set the existing NAS and 2TB drives for your backup (as you mentioned in your first post).

Yup. BTW, I just came across this worrisome article:

http://www.wegotserved.com/2012/06/17/raid-attacks-remember-storage-pooling-backup/

I've been testing out a five-bay Synology DiskStation DS-1511+ NAS Server in use as dedicated video server.

To test out Synology's RAID support, I dropped five drives of various sizes (500GB to 2 TB) in the DiskStation's bays, and set up the array &#8211; Synology&#8217;s Hybrid RAID was the default option. It took some time to initialise, and gave me roughly 3.5 TB of available storage. I set to work filling up the array with recorded TV and Blu-ray rips to test out streaming.

In use, the DiskStation was excellent &#8211; streaming speeds were excellent, data transfer speeds across the network were fabulous. This was certainly looking like a keeper for an in-home media server.

This weekend came the acid test. With the array almost full, it was time to try out a storage upgrade. With all drives populated, the M.O. is to swap out the smallest drive for a bigger drive, at which point the array falls into a &#8220;degraded&#8221; state, repair (rebuild) the array, then repeat for additional drives. I swapped out the smallest, 500 GB drive for a brand new 3TB Seagate drive, and as expected, the DiskStation merrily beeped away at me to let me know the storage had &#8220;degraded&#8221;.

No problem &#8211; go into Synology's Storage Manager, hit Manage then Repair and off it chugged, rebuilding the array. That is, until said array decided to crash during the rebuild.

What once was a &#8220;degraded&#8221; array turns into a &#8220;crashed&#8221; array, with no access to the data on the array from the DiskStation itself, or any other computers on the network. Checking the (convenient) SMART status reports on the DiskStation, there appears to be no hardware problems on the drives &#8211; this looks to me like an issue caused during the rebuild process.

So, as you guys said, it seems the only real main RAID options are SHR-2, RAID 6, or RAID 10. At least with JBOD or "basic" configs, if it crashes you still have the good drives left intact.

Another option I may consider at this point is getting a DS213 2-bay NAS with a 4 TB and a 3 TB drive, and then using my DS211j as a backup NAS and for my 24/7 surveillance camera recording. I will still have secondary backup(s) via USB or eSATA as well. The backup 211j NAS would be in a different physical location in the house.

 

[smitbret]

Slow compared to a $500 QNAP box with a EXT3 or EXT4 RAID5 array.

I'm being trolled, right?

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews/32071-qnap-ts-869pro-nas-reviewed?showall=&start=1

 

[smitbret]

Yup. BTW, I just came across this worrisome article:

http://www.wegotserved.com/2012/06/17/raid-attacks-remember-storage-pooling-backup/



So, as you guys said, it seems the only real main RAID options are SHR-2, RAID 6, or RAID 10. At least with JBOD or "basic" configs, if it crashes you still have the good drives left intact.

Another option I may consider at this point is getting a DS213 2-bay NAS with a 4 TB and a 3 TB drive, and then using my DS211j as a backup NAS and for my 24/7 surveillance camera recording. I will still have secondary backup(s) via USB or eSATA as well. The backup 211j NAS would be in a different physical location in the house.

This is why so many people preach backup. Raid is a great way to keep your data online when something goes wrong, but it's not a substitute for duplication. I'm not an IT Professional but I do know that if 1 drive goes down, there's a strong chance that a second one will go down during the rebuild, among other issues and regardless of the RAID type.

Synology & Qnap make great boxes that seem to be well reviewed. Unless I had a really specific reason to avoid one, I'd get the one that best fits my budget and needs and not look back.

 

[Eug]

Arrggh... 4 hrs later and it's only 1/4 of the way through the parity check of my single 4 TB drive.

I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow before I do the restore process from the backup... with the primary 2x2 TB drives sitting on my desk (away from anything that could potentially erase them). Meanwhile I'm accessing my files off my 3 TB USB backup attached to the NAS.

P.S. I traded in my defective 2.5" 250 GB drive to get this $20 discount off the 4 TB drive. I just read online someone did the same with an ancient Quantum 150 MB drive. Best upgrade ever.

P.P.S. Now that I'm considering a 2-bay, my main choices are the DS213+ and the DS213. I'm thinking the latter because about the only thing the DS213+ offers as an advantage for me is eSATA. However, USB 3 is probably good enough, and the DS213 has that.