Reply to: Help me with buying NAS

[ChimpMaster]

I’m late to this conversation but the all important question is were the hardware on the NAS to die can you pull the disk out of the machine and then easily access the data on the disk

and the one thing the page regarding the NAS doesn’t tell me is what file format is used for the disk - I.e. whether I can pull the disk out plug it in elsewhere and read it.

Beyond that I have a rather expensive machine running UNRAID so I’m not going to recommend cheap options I wouldn’t myself use

The marketing spiel looks like you can plug and play any 3.5" HDD and even SSDs but I won't be using those for this. The 2 NAS disks will be further backed up onto my main PC, and again on an external USB HDD. So in effect I will have multiple backups overall.

The main purpose of the NAS is to shared access of data/media between my family. And of course as one-of-several backups.

[NotAllThere]

why would anyone want to survive in a nuclear winter??

Better skiing. Have you seen snow conditions over the last few years?

[sadkingbilly]

So they can survive the fallout and continue hoovering up all the gold

so they can eat gold??
why would anyone want to survive in a nuclear winter??
i'd rather be at ground zero, personally. instant translation into a cloud of incandescent gas.

[ladymuck]

what IS the point of the swissie's nuclear bunkers???

So they can survive the fallout and continue hoovering up all the gold

[sadkingbilly]

. Both devices are in my nuclear bunker.

I do have another Synology NAS sitting in my (unused) chimney stack.

what IS the point of the swissie's nuclear bunkers???

[NotAllThere]

I’m late to this conversation but the all important question is were the hardware on the NAS to die can you pull the disk out of the machine and then easily access the data on the disk

Not if it's using striping.

I have the NAS die. I replaced it, installed the disks from the previous one and the RAID array built nicely.

[NotAllThere]

I attended a presentation when DEC first introduce RAID.

I use a Synology NAS (two actually).

Simple to set up and use.

I have one. Synology DS1520+. It's been running now for five years. Five 4TB hard drives, using RAID 6, gives me just under 11TB storage. RAID 6 is preferred for resilience, because two drives can fail. It's also hot switchable if you should need that. I have had two drives fail; for that reason it's best to use a mixture of HDD suppliers.

I've also got a Synology DX517 which holds my NAS backups. Since the DX517 is only used for backups (not to expand the storage pool), and is inaccessible from the network, this protects against ransomware. Both devices are in my nuclear bunker.

I do have another Synology NAS sitting in my (unused) chimney stack. It's one of my friend's (yes, I do have some) offsite backup. I think my nuclear bunker is good enough - if that's breached, I've got bigger problems than losing my data.

I've never had to recover from the DX517, but I have had to recover from the DS1520 when my wife's computer got fubared.

[eek]

I just want a simple NAS where the family can backup their files/photos/videos and access them centrally and remotely.

Bonus would be to install something like Plex so that we can watch home movies on TVs around the house.

I think the 2-bay Ugreen will suffice. One disk will be for access and the other will be a backup of it.

I’m late to this conversation but the all important question is were the hardware on the NAS to die can you pull the disk out of the machine and then easily access the data on the disk

and the one thing the page regarding the NAS doesn’t tell me is what file format is used for the disk - I.e. whether I can pull the disk out plug it in elsewhere and read it.

Beyond that I have a rather expensive machine running UNRAID so I’m not going to recommend cheap options I wouldn’t myself use

[ChimpMaster]

I just want a simple NAS where the family can backup their files/photos/videos and access them centrally and remotely.

Bonus would be to install something like Plex so that we can watch home movies on TVs around the house.

I think the 2-bay Ugreen will suffice. One disk will be for access and the other will be a backup of it.

[malvolio]

There is so much wrong with this... You can't do RAID 0+1 with 2 disks. What you then have is RAID-0. While that *is* faster in theory:

1) If you lose one of the drives, you lose all your data.
2) It doesn't matter anyway, you're doing NAS, not DAS, and even if you were doing DAS, it's not what the OP asked for.
3) Fast disks don't matter for the use case. I've been running NAS/SAN for 20 years, and for domestic use I always buy whatever is cheapest at the time.

OP, if you just want a really basic NAS, you may find your domestic router has a USB port you can plug a USB disk into which will allow sharing (the last 2 or 3 I've had do that).

If you want something a bit more powerful, I'd recommend FreeNAS and any old PC hardware you have lying around. Because it's ZFS under the covers, even if you have complete hardware failure, you can just swap the disks into anything else, do a ZFS import and you're golden, try that with hardware RAID.....

OK. As I said earlier, I lost one drive after a year or so. No lost data, no lost service. Two new disks bought, one installed and mirrored with the old working one, then the other new one installed the same way.

The NAS box is a Buffalo running Linux on a wired LAN configured with its RAID 0+1 option. Cost about £200 as i recall.

But what do I know about it...

[b0redom]

Faster LANs represent bandwidth and less contention as much as they do download speed, if that helps. Probably not significant for your purposes of course.

I've used a pair of 2Tb disks for many years, in a RAID 0+1 configuration for resilience (and double the read speed) with a separate !Tb USB hard drive as incremental backup, and never got near filling either of them up. Had a disk failure early on and recovered everything with no loss of service. Upgraded to better HDDs later, again with no service loss.

RAID 5 looks good but is not all that disaster tolerant and is slower than RAID 0+1 - although technology has moved on a ways since I set mine up!!

As always, cost is the thing, but get the best/fastest disks you can. Mine are Seagates, been in use permanently for around 12 years now, rather longer than the attached PCs and laptops!

There is so much wrong with this... You can't do RAID 0+1 with 2 disks. What you then have is RAID-0. While that *is* faster in theory:

1) If you lose one of the drives, you lose all your data.
2) It doesn't matter anyway, you're doing NAS, not DAS, and even if you were doing DAS, it's not what the OP asked for.
3) Fast disks don't matter for the use case. I've been running NAS/SAN for 20 years, and for domestic use I always buy whatever is cheapest at the time.

OP, if you just want a really basic NAS, you may find your domestic router has a USB port you can plug a USB disk into which will allow sharing (the last 2 or 3 I've had do that).

If you want something a bit more powerful, I'd recommend FreeNAS and any old PC hardware you have lying around. Because it's ZFS under the covers, even if you have complete hardware failure, you can just swap the disks into anything else, do a ZFS import and you're golden, try that with hardware RAID.....

[sadkingbilly]

WTF is a 'clustered mainframe'??
asking for a friend...................

[malvolio]

Not what the OP was asking for. Anyway, in the early 90s I was speccing off-site backups, e.g. replicating the complete server structure at a secondary plant 20 miles away, because having RAID isn't going to be much good for disaster recovery if the disaster is the server room being blown up. Or a simpler one where a company had what looked like a big generator around 50m from the main building. It was actually a small generator and a server backup connected with redundant fibre cables. We weren't replicating just the data, we were replicating servers. The storage systems with the servers were generally RAID 5, but basically it was RAID 1 over RAID 5.

...but again, your "solution" may be the perfect answer for a business stuck politically and technologically in the 1980s. Home computing and home networks are quite a bit different to the days of playing Jetset Willy on a 16k Spectrum or having VAX terminals.

Yet again, missing the point entirely.

One of those "VAX terminals" solutions ran a £100m semiconductor plant for 9 years at 100% service availability, just for one example.

[malvolio]

Maybe that's why your view on cloud backup is so out of kilter? Pretty much any cloud backup solution will have versioning and point in time restores of single files. Even CrashPlan does and that's crap.

For the benefit anybody reading, I use Backblaze and it's excellent - plus you can pay for indefinite retention of deleted files if you're paranoid about deleting something and not realising.

I think in 2026 a cloud backup solution is the no brainer to meet the "1" bit of 3-2-1.

I did say (if not very clearly!) that I was not up to date with cloud technology. All I was saying was there are potential; problems with using cloud storage and, as an aside, that I have some knowledge of the whole structure and practice of disaster tolerant systems, the basics of which haven't changed.

That discussion however was irrelevant to the OP's request, about how best to use a NAS, which I answered in the second post on this thread.

[woody1]

If this is just about file sharing (not redundancy/DR/backup/security etc), couldn't the OP just share a folder on an existing PC?