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NAS RAID Help

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Drerunsit

Member
Hello everyone. I am looking into buying a NAS solution and need some advice on accomplishing a few things. First, the diskless-NAS I want to get is this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822108123

I then plan to load it up with some WD Red drives (probably 3TB). Now, the tricky part is what I want to do with this NAS setup. I want one of my drives to be strictly for my media (TV Shows, Movies, Music, etc), which currently amounts to just under 2 TB. I would like to have my media backed up in some way, even if it's minimal. I can obviously always just re-rip it from my CDs/DVDs/Blu-Rays, though I would prefer not to.

The other task I want to accomplish with the NAS is to back-up the data on my laptop and desktop computers. Is there any way to do everything I want with the four drives I plan on putting into this NAS?
 
Your subject says RAID, but nowhere in the post do you mention what type of RAID you'd like to run. In fact, it sounds like you really don't have any need for RAID at all.

I would dump the Synology and just budget out to build a small, dual core based tower running WHS 2011. Just a small HDD that can hold 50GB or more should be fine. SSD might be nice but really not gonna make much difference since you won't be using it as a workstation.

The built in backup features of WHS 2011 will take care of you laptop backups. You could then designate 1 of the HDD as your media drive and then use Drive Pool to consolidate the other 3, although 9TB seems pretty large if your not storing media and/or RAW video editing.

I've never used a Synology, but WHS 2011 is cheap and easy to run. Makes out of home access to your files very easy as well. The interface is simple.
 
I have the Synology and highly recommend it. Uses way less power than a self build and is far easier to maintain. It's way quieter too. Just set it up and forget it. I use mine in jbod mode and back it up regularly. Like I mentioned in another thread, I gave up on RAID completely. The Synology has what they call "Hybred RAID" in addition to the normal RAID configs. Given Synology's rep, I'm sure they all work just fine. I can tell you from experience that the Synology will flag a bad or failing HD in heartbeat. It turns it's corresponding LED to amber which is hard to miss. It also has many other features that you might find useful.
 
Doomer said:
I have the Synology and highly recommend it. Uses way less power than a self build and is far easier to maintain. It's way quieter too. Just set it up and forget it. I use mine in jbod mode and back it up regularly. Like I mentioned in another thread, I gave up on RAID completely. The Synology has what they call "Hybred RAID" in addition to the normal RAID configs. Given Synology's rep, I'm sure they all work just fine. I can tell you from experience that the Synology will flag a bad or failing HD in heartbeat. It turns it's corresponding LED to amber which is hard to miss. It also has many other features that you might find useful.
Click to expand...

This is very good to know. Basically, you're saying that I should just make full use of all the drive space I throw in there and if one of the HDDs is going bad, the NAS will flag it? I'm assuming it reads the SMART data somehow? In any case, I may very well go with your recommendation.
 
If you have copies elsewhere of your files--IE, backups--then there's not much wrong with JBOD. RAID 5 or similar (such as whatever proprietary RAID may be supported) can offer you convenience in the event of a disk failure, but isn't getting you more practical redundancy for your data. A JBOD array, or even exposing the disks separately (no worries about array-wide losses), will be fine, and you really want backups to be on separate computers, anyway. Same goes when comparing against RAID 10, you just lose space.

OTOH, a proprietary RAID or RIAD 5 can still allow you to lose one disk, so if you consider that worthwhile, compared to copying all the data back to the new drive(s) later after a failure, they're still not bad options.

RAID 1 and 10 offer better/simpler redundancy, but at quite a relative cost, and that still doesn't solve any backup problems (like not having any 🙂).

Set up your NAS as an additional place for that data to be stored, and you'll have a singly-redundant backup, along with a central file access/sharing/streaming device.

Your data is best kept safe with multiple whole copies, each as separated from one another as is reasonably possible (if your house burns down, you probably won't be overly worried about your movie rips...so, as an example, sending it off somewhere, or using a safety deposit box, will probably go beyond reasonable).
 
If my house burned down right now, I would lose everything lol. The only exception would be a few things I have on DropBox. I honestly am not one to put much effort into backups/security (which is ironic, since I have worked in IT for 8 years), but I know it's important. Another option I've looked at, specifically for the backups, is Mozy. I haven't talked to anyone who has experience with their service, but it seems lazy person-friendly. If anyone has any thoughts on Mozy, please feel free to chime in.
 
I also wanted to ask a question regarding hard drive cloning. Once I set up this NAS, I'm going to want to transfer my media files from the current external drives to the ones in the NAS. I was thinking of using Norton Ghost to do a disc-to-disc clone. Does anyone know if this is a reliable method for video/audio files? Is there a better way?
 
Drerunsit said:
This is very good to know. Basically, you're saying that I should just make full use of all the drive space I throw in there and if one of the HDDs is going bad, the NAS will flag it? I'm assuming it reads the SMART data somehow? In any case, I may very well go with your recommendation.
Click to expand...

Yep, I assume it reads the smart data. When I removed the drive and tested it in a computer, CDI said it had bad sectors. I was able to safely remove it from the Synology without loosing any data (I had a backup so this wasn't critical). This episode gave me a bit of confidence in that 1. If a HD goes bad, it will tell me. 2. I may not loose data because it will flag it early enough for me to intervene. Sometime between now and the end of the year I'll be picking up another one.
 
So, I'm trying to figure out if I should upgrade my router to one that has gigabit Ethernet ports. Would there be any benefit to doing this?
 
Yes, or buy a switch. You will get at least double performance, even out of standard spinning disk transfer rates.
 
Yes, or buy a switch. You will get at least double performance, even out of standard spinning disk transfer rates.
 
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