NAS Talk 2015

[SeoulSoxFan]

Are you running NAS with your SMB or office? If so what are you running in terms of:

• Case & configuration (Synology? Qnap? DIY box?)
• # of bays?
• # of drives & capacity?
• Which Raid configuration?

My old Mac Pro that has been used as a file server has gone on to reunite with Jobs, and need a new solution.
 
Budget is only around $1k to $1.5k, so can't do the lovely Synology 8-bay monster with a stack of 6TB drives. I'm looking for, in order of priority:

• Capacity 
• Low power consumption
• Media streaming if possible
• Performance/speed

Thanks all!

 

[saintnick912]

Lost my Synology DS411+ to a burst heating pipe.  Managed to migrate the drives to a DS415+ and haven't missed a beat.  The DS415play apparently has better media features.  I mainly use it for photo RAW file storage so that wasn't the biggest concern on my part.
 
The driveless unit is about $600 so you should be able to get some decent sized drives in there under your budget.  I think there are WD Red drives in 4-5TB size now.

 

[SuperManny]

I currently use an old PC to serve media throughout the house but I've been thinking about building a dedicated box later in the year. I saw that Seagate has 8TB Hard Drives at a reasonable price now. Would this be a good idea to use in a NAS? I know that it is slower than the smaller storage available but the storage size and price point make it attractive.

 

[ypioca]

FWIW, Seagate has had a spotty reputation for drive failure - I have had a Seagate 3TB drive fail on me with 2 years of use, and I'm not alone. That 8TB drive is pretty new (read: unproven reliability), so, personally, I would rather go with a Hitachi or WD drive, which have a much better track record over the years.

 

[AlNipper49]

I use FreeNAS and it'll do the RAIDing for you. For some reason they JUST added email notifications for SMART fails, but if you want to use shit drives then just buy a spare or whatever (assuming it's just for bulk media)

 

[Couperin47]

From what I can see of the specs, Those 8 Tb Seagates are designed for very low power usage as offline storage with low thruput per year, use in any Raid setup where they are constantly running should kill them very quickly.

 

[Harry Hooper]

I currently use an old PC to serve media throughout the house but I've been thinking about building a dedicated box later in the year. I saw that Seagate has 8TB Hard Drives at a reasonable price now. Would this be a good idea to use in a NAS? I know that it is slower than the smaller storage available but the storage size and price point make it attractive.

 
Typically you'll be paying premium prices for the higher-capacity hard drives, so think about how much storage you will actually be using in the near to mid term. If it is going to take a couple of years to largely fill the drives, you'll just be burning up their useful lifetimes until you get there. Also, sometimes the new engineering employed to squeeze out capacity on the largest available drives runs into reliability issues. Meanwhile, prices per GB usually will be falling, so maybe buy smaller/cheaper drives now and use those. When they get near full, upgrade at that point with fresh larger drives that now have a reliability track record.

 

[djhb20]

I have a synology 413 that I keep meaning to put on eBay, but haven't.

I upgraded to a 5-bat system (1512+?) that can take an expansion device to add more bays.

The 413 works perfect. 5gb WD green drives are under $200 on Amazon right now. If you're interested in my 413, PM me and I'll give it to you for a good price.

Though, if I have to ship it to Korea, maybe that doesn't work...

 

[djhb20]

double post

 

[cgori]

Synology ds412+ with 2x4TB WD Red drives (amazon order says that they were $188 ea about a year ago, I think).  2 more bays available if needed.
 
Mostly used as MP3/FLAC server to the Sonos, but also to back up local PC storage (and then I back up the critical stuff on the NAS to a portable).
 
Performance is excellent for copying files - no experience with higher-bandwidth streaming.
 
Easy to use and admin.

 

[AlNipper49]

After trying a lot of the prosumer stuff I decided to give FreeNAS another real shot. It's gotten so much freaking better from a few years ago it's not funny.

Small learning curve, extendable, stable. I probably wouldn't use it in production anywhere but for what it is it's pretty awesome.

 

[SeoulSoxFan]

After trying a lot of the prosumer stuff I decided to give FreeNAS another real shot. It's gotten so much freaking better from a few years ago it's not funny.

Small learning curve, extendable, stable. I probably wouldn't use it in production anywhere but for what it is it's pretty awesome.

 
I came thiiiiiiiiiiiis close to rescuing my beastly old Mac Pro, before going with a easier solution. Here's the final purchase:

• Qnap TS-451 4-bay enclosure > had the power supply that handled 110v-240v, which is what I needed. Plus they sell Qnaps in Korea, so I can get support
• WD Red 4.0 TB drives x 4 > the price/GB ratio for the 6TB drives are still too high. 4TB drives seem to be the sweet spot for me, especially for just a 4-bay rig

Bonus is that family was flying out from USA and had them bring the package. Since they live in NH, no sales tax, no shipping, and no tariff (shipped new would be about 12%-20% surcharge).
 
The Qnap was on sale for $449 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822107169), and it sells for about double that here. The drives sell fairly at the same prices but overall not a bad haul for just under $1,100. 
 
I do lament not jumping in by going all DIY route via FreeNAS, but with the workload I could not "justify" the time I'd be spending tinkering with it. 
 
Two additional notes on the Qnap unit:

• Only comes with 1GB of RAM, and really needs much more. Bought a 8GB kit (4GB x 2), as the general recommendation is to add a GB of RAM per GB of HD space
• I can add another 4-bay expansion unit later if need be

One final push to get the Qnap over similar units is the software, which I preferred over ones from Synology & so forth. It'll serve as our small-office backup as well as our media server, using Plex. 
 
Speaking of, for some reason I never really got into Plex until now, and my god it's pretty awesome. 

 

[SeoulSoxFan]

I currently use an old PC to serve media throughout the house but I've been thinking about building a dedicated box later in the year. I saw that Seagate has 8TB Hard Drives at a reasonable price now. Would this be a good idea to use in a NAS? I know that it is slower than the smaller storage available but the storage size and price point make it attractive.

 
Definitely NOT with Seagate's fail rate, especially at high density drives. 
 
For NAS (media servers too), you'd want reliability over anything else. This means choosing 5400rpm units over 7200rpm, and waiting until tech matures on the "bleeding-edge" capacities. As I mentioned above, WD RED 4-5TB drives seem to be the right buys for now.