Reply to: Current NAS recommendations

[SimonMac]

I was also looking at the WD PR2100 which I think is the pro 2 bay version of yours. How well does the DL4100 stream / transcode?

I upped the RAM in mine, and it's fine for PLEX, I leave it to what ever setting the content is in (usually 720p rather than 1080p), it's fine locally and over the internet and I think I've had three account streaming off it at once

[Dark Black]

I’m more than happy with my WD DL4100, rock solid as a NAS but I’ve started to put grow it in terms of running multiple VMs from it via iSCSI

I was also looking at the WD PR2100 which I think is the pro 2 bay version of yours. How well does the DL4100 stream / transcode?

[d000hg]

When people talk about VM hosting, is that with comms just over Gigabit, or do they support suberfast connectivity if you do a direct connection via USB3 or something?

Is VM use basically just RDP, if so obviously you don't need a fast connection.

[SimonMac]

Resurrecting an old(ish) thread..

Looking at replacing my ageing NetGear ReadyNas Duo - Currently one of the variants of the QNAP TS-251 series (possibly the + or A models) look promising.

Anyone here have any experience with them?

Data storage (obviously) and media streaming are the two main requirements although I'm intrigued by their potential for VM hosting.

I’m more than happy with my WD DL4100, rock solid as a NAS but I’ve started to put grow it in terms of running multiple VMs from it via iSCSI

[Dark Black]

Resurrecting an old(ish) thread..

Looking at replacing my ageing NetGear ReadyNas Duo - Currently one of the variants of the QNAP TS-251 series (possibly the + or A models) look promising.

Anyone here have any experience with them?

Data storage (obviously) and media streaming are the two main requirements although I'm intrigued by their potential for VM hosting.

[Platypus]

Decided to mess around with unraid on one of my microservers. Not bad so far, but the cache drive couldn't help with the initial seed of 4 TB of data that will take 2 days to copy... and then 1 more day for the parity

I liked UNRAID... until the time I had to reboot it and somehow the USB with the UNRAID s/w had become corrupted and I couldn't get the system up. I did have a backup of the USB and managed to get it going, but it put me off using it further. I bought a QNAP which is ok - a bit noisy TBH, and very expensive compared to a Microserver.

Anyone want to buy a Microserver on the cheap?

[worzelGummidge]

I have my NAS configured into 2TB NFS volumes, each which is mirrored.

Every now and then I backup each of these 2TB volumes onto a separate external USB disk, then keep those in a small fire safe.

The NAS contains real data, movies, music, virtual machines and backups of PC's.

Every week or so I backup the important data onto an external drive via a Windows PC by running a DOS batch script. This keeps four copies.

Every year I backup the important data and put a copy on the NAS.

[sal]

adding a hard disk cache drive remedies the issue which was why their introduced the cache drive concept.

Decided to mess around with unraid on one of my microservers. Not bad so far, but the cache drive couldn't help with the initial seed of 4 TB of data that will take 2 days to copy... and then 1 more day for the parity

[eek]

2 8GB drives?

That's why its cheap. And because he's never tried to restore the data he isn't aware that they just continually overwrite the previous files when the disk is full....

[Platypus]

For backup purposes I have an offsite cheap 2-bay NAS (a QNAP TS219P) with 2 x 8GB drives. I use RTRR to backup data (incrementally) from my critical NAS over FTTC.

2 8GB drives?

[jonnieboy]

For backup purposes I have an offsite cheap 2-bay NAS (a QNAP TS219P) with 2 x 8GB drives. I use RTRR to backup data (incrementally) from my critical NAS over FTTC.

[eek]

30-40MB/sec write speeds, I guess adding SSD cache would improve that.

adding a hard disk cache drive remedies the issue which was why their introduced the cache drive concept.

[sal]

In what way is it atrocious. Its a network server and the speed of disk read / writes whilst not fast is more than any home network would need...

30-40MB/sec write speeds, I guess adding SSD cache would improve that.

[eek]

Yeah one of the underlying reasons for the King's College disaster last year was multiple disk failures in quick succession, because most of them where with sequential serial numbers, obviously from the same batch.

Personally i have a "healthy" mix of 2 WD, 1 Seagate, 1 Hitachi 3TB HDDs in my 4 bay NAS + 1 Seagate 3TB in my desktop largely unused, acting as a cold spare. This is a result of 2 out of 4 Seagates dying in the span of 1 week while I was using windows storage spaces which doesn't give decent indication of drive failure, lost the volume, fortunately had backups. Lessons learned I guess.

I was looking at unraid for a box for my father as he is hoarding HDDs of various sizes, but the atrocious performance put me off

In what way is it atrocious. Its a network server and the speed of disk read / writes whilst not fast is more than any home network would need...

[sal]

The bare minimum is to purchase drives from multiple suppliers to ensure you don't end up with 4 drives in the order they came off the factory line which is what you get if you buy a NAS system with disks installed.

Its why I like the unraid or snapraid systems where any disks (of any size) will do - and it means a system has different drives in different sizes from different manufacturers so minimizing risk

Yeah one of the underlying reasons for the King's College disaster last year was multiple disk failures in quick succession, because most of them where with sequential serial numbers, obviously from the same batch.

Personally i have a "healthy" mix of 2 WD, 1 Seagate, 1 Hitachi 3TB HDDs in my 4 bay NAS + 1 Seagate 3TB in my desktop largely unused, acting as a cold spare. This is a result of 2 out of 4 Seagates dying in the span of 1 week while I was using windows storage spaces which doesn't give decent indication of drive failure, lost the volume, fortunately had backups. Lessons learned I guess.

I was looking at unraid for a box for my father as he is hoarding HDDs of various sizes, but the atrocious performance put me off