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Is this a good deal (NAS) ?

D

djsvet

Junior Member
Western Digital 12TB WD Sentinel RX4100 1U Rackmount Small Business Network File Storage Server

12 TB , (4x3TB) for $900 shipped.


I could not find anywhere speed performance and power consumption. It seems like the hard drives are WD 7200 rpm rpm enterprise class, hard to find and restrictions of using other HDDs.


My main requirements are: Rack mountable (up to 2U of size), 4 bays, I am leaning towards RAID10 for best redundancy and speed with leas headaches (I hope).

Edit:
There are the drives:
http://store.westerndigital.com/sto...00400/productID.264646000/categoryId.58949100



What do you guys think?


The unit has 3 years warranty but I am not sure if it the same for the HDD. I might have to call WD to verify.
 
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Sounds like a good deal. New or used? If used, I'd insist on SMART reports for all of the drives and either a clarification of when the hard drive warranties expire else the serial numbers so that you can verify the warranties yourself.
 
Yes I have a rack with proper surge and battery back up. No cooling yet.

The unit is brand new. Thanks for your opinions.
 
Holly cow. I was about to pull the trigger when I decided to skim through the manual and I didn't see anything about RAID 0 or 1. They say it comes preco figured with RAID 5 but nothing else. Called WD and they confirmed - RAID 5 ONLY. R u kidding me ? A 2k MSRP and you only support RAID 5.

For those that can settle with RAID 5 only the deal is from buydig.com. They have additional 25 off on top of discounted price with coupon at the product page.
 
djsvet said:
The link is irrelevant to RX4100.
Click to expand...

That's the "more information" link from this page:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1030#Tab2&Tab102

It should apply to the RX4100 even if there isn't a picture - they've all got the same guts. But you might have to wipe the existing startup partition - it doesn't mention if they have a separate boot volume.

It could be worth your time to lurk a bit in the WD support forum.

Windows also has no restrictions in terms of HDD brand/model but this box does.
Click to expand...

Yeah, some manufacturers get tricky like that. Pretty annoying.

So why not pick up a used 1-2U server like an HP GL360 or Dell R320 on eBay, throw some HDDs in it, and call it a day? Probably cost you the same or less.
 
What's the intended application?

I think my biggest reservation, unless someone else was paying for it, would be the cost of replacement drives. I'd want to buy a cold spare to keep on hand, and that looks like it would run at least another $300.
 
dave_the_nerd said:
That's the "more information" link from this page:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1030#Tab2&Tab102

It should apply to the RX4100 even if there isn't a picture - they've all got the same guts. But you might have to wipe the existing startup partition - it doesn't mention if they have a separate boot volume.

It could be worth your time to lurk a bit in the WD support forum.



Yeah, some manufacturers get tricky like that. Pretty annoying.

So why not pick up a used 1-2U server like an HP GL360 or Dell R320 on eBay, throw some HDDs in it, and call it a day? Probably cost you the same or less.
Click to expand...

I am afraid that those HP or Dell will be louder and consume more power.

The application is mainly for media/file server at home.. Perhaps hosting some services later on but nothing crazy.

The only reason I looked into this WD is the price and the specs. The cheapest rack (a must) NAS is from Synology - RS814.. About $570 withouth drives and it has a week Marvel CPU.
 
Carson Dyle said:
What's the intended application?

I think my biggest reservation, unless someone else was paying for it, would be the cost of replacement drives. I'd want to buy a cold spare to keep on hand, and that looks like it would run at least another $300.
Click to expand...


According to WD, the unit has 3 years warranty but the drives have 5 I was planning to use RAID 10 and depend on the warranty for the next 5 years.

In 5 years, 10 Gigabit NICs will be more common and I have wired my house with Cat6a so that unit would be screaming for upgrade.
However I am not buying it. Too many concerns.
 
Rack mount equipment is almost universally loud and obnoxious. If you're trying to keep things quiet in a house, your best option is to install shelves on the rack and use it to store desktop computers or pedestal-type servers.

The NAS in my sig would be an example of something that might work. ECC RAM, out-of-band management and all the other "pro" goodies, but it's about as loud as me scratching my balls. (No, literally, I just checked.)
 
I agree about the rack mount storage being noisy and it's costly for electricity. I just replaced my 20Tb rack server for a Synology (which cost about $900 diskless) but I'll make that up in electricity savings within the year. Went from 350W down to 50W running 24/7. And I love the features of the Synology. Then I picked up an Intel NUC for the few Windows processes that I needed to run.

It all runs silent right on a shelf next to where I work.
 
If you had planned to run RAID 10 (or RAID 1) with 4 x 3TB drives, that would net you about 6TB of storage space. You can do that these days with a single 6TB hard drive and some means of backup, perhaps a second 6TB drive in an external enclosure.
 
Carson Dyle said:
If you had planned to run RAID 10 (or RAID 1) with 4 x 3TB drives, that would net you about 6TB of storage space. You can do that these days with a single 6TB hard drive and some means of backup, perhaps a second 6TB drive in an external enclosure.
Click to expand...

You know what, my initial idea was to build a 24/7 HTPC with a RAID 10 in it. I think I am getting back to that idea.

BTW, the main reason I chose RAID10 - less headaches. I've heard terrible stories about RAID5.
Am I right that the RAID10 is the best of all worlds (except obviously budget) ?
 
Less headaches, how? If you lose one drive in either one, you're running in a degraded state and you'll lose the whole array if a second drive fails before a replacement is put in place and the array fully rebuilds. Unless you have a backup, it would be foolish to use the server at all until then. If you don't have a cold spare on hand, then you either wait for an RMA replacement or you hurry up and buy a new drive somewhere. Then you wait while the array rebuilds.

You don't need much performance from storage for streaming movies. Moreover, those files typically change very seldom and are written to the array exactly once, so you don't need great write performance either.
 
Is there room for expansion? If it's just 4 bays then you end up having to buy a whole new NAS system if ever you need to expand. Something to consider. Also 4x3TB does not give you 12TB, but about 8.3TiB (OS/programs/everything only care about TiB not TB, but usually just call it TB) if it's raid 5. Just something to keep in mind when shopping for stuff like this. They tend to greatly over advertise the actual disk space.

Even commercial SAN vendors do this. It's very deceiving especially to big head honcho managers who don't know much about technology and have to approve IT stuff and think 20TB advertised is a lot when they don't consider the SAN will have several LUNs on it and wonder why IT keeps saying it wont be big enough because there's only about 5TB of usable disk space between a couple raid 10 arrays.

Also *DO* use raid, 1 or above. 5 makes the most sense if there's only 4 drives. No matter how many backups you have, if you lose a drive and there's no raid it's going to be a pain in the ass having to rebuild the file system from backups and if you were in the middle of something you lost everything up until the last backup and your work is interrupted by having to deal with this situation. With raid you just pop a new drive in and let it rebuild and never lose access to your data.
 
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I am reading all over the internet how often RAID 5 fails to rebuild after a disk swap. I think RAID 10 will be less headaches since its a mirrored copy, no parity across disks.

Back up will be done of coarse. I am just tired of "serving" my electronics. I want to setup a reliable solution, even if its mostly for media (in the beggining).
The other thing is, I will have at least 4 clients and the chances that 3 will stream at the same time arr high. Also, I will be recording lots of TV shows and radio shows. I tend to use high quality, low compression audio video files and that is why I think I will need RAID.
 
djsvet said:
I am reading all over the internet how often RAID 5 fails to rebuild after a disk swap. I think RAID 10 will be less headaches since its a mirrored copy, no parity across disks.

Back up will be done of coarse. I am just tired of "serving" my electronics. I want to setup a reliable solution, even if its mostly for media (in the beggining).
The other thing is, I will have at least 4 clients and the chances that 3 will stream at the same time arr high. Also, I will be recording lots of TV shows and radio shows. I tend to use high quality, low compression audio video files and that is why I think I will need RAID.
Click to expand...

I have rebuilt RAID 5 a handful of times and it has never had a single issue.

That being said, there is some truth to the idea that if you bought your disks in batches and one fails, there is a pretty good chance that another will fail during the intense rebuild process.

However, if you are doing backups as you say and the data on the array is OK being down for a day then RAID 10 is really a waste of money that grows exponentially with the # of disks in the array. If you have 4 x 2TBs in a RAID 10, you only have to invest in 1 extra drive over RAID 5. If you have 10 x 2TBs in a RAID 10, though, you just invested in 4 extra drives in the name of redundancy.

RAID 6 is a really solid choice once you get more than about 4 or 5 HDDs in the array. You might want to consider that. Just about any set up will be able to serve media to 3 clients at the same time. Speed is just not an issue for home media server usage.
 
Raid 10 is more resilient but costs more as you only get half the disk space of what the total disks are. Personally with my setup I only do raid 10 now but I have a 24 bay enclosure. Raid 5 is still fine for small amounts of drives. I have an old raid 5 with 8 1TB drives (idealy should convert that to raid 6) and only had a few issues related to power before I built my big UPS but never lost the array. I would not do raid 6 with only 4 drives though unless you plan to expand. May as well do 10. With 6TB and 8TB drives on the horizon you can always expand by adding bigger drives too.

That's another thing you want a good UPS.
 
Burner27 said:
I made my NAS for 1/2 the price.
Click to expand...
One would imagine a "showing off" post like this to be acceptable for a newbie, perhaps like me (on this forum), but a moderator?

Joke a side, please share some insight (Platform, mobo/cpu, drives).
 
djsvet said:
One would imagine a "showing off" post like this to be acceptable for a newbie, perhaps like me (on this forum), but a moderator?

Joke a side, please share some insight (Platform, mobo/cpu, drives).
Click to expand...

I am far from showing off. I went to the egg and found a machine for $215. Check the DIY section. if you go to eBay you can find the hard drives cheap
 
Carson Dyle said:
Still a mystery... Maybe you like secrets?
Click to expand...

What's so mysterious about getting a refurb mini tower or pedestal server from Newegg and buying HDDs on eBay? For most purposes it doesn't even matter the specifics.

My home server/NAS is in my sig - the current config is probably closer to $1200 though. I'm waiting for E3-1230s to be cheap in a couple years.
 
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