Current NAS recommendations

[sal]

That's as maybe but my point was more about the quality of components, everyone here seems to be suffering with failing drives, dead NAS's and ailing HP Microservers, the DS3400 and Oracle 7120 (both second hand) have never missed a beat in 4 years. I don't fire up the DS3400 much tho now - used it for POCs etc before trying it at clientco.

The Oracle box is basically an X4500 I think with 32gb RAM, two Xeon's, 2x1TB 3.5" mirrored boot drives, this odd flash-memory card, and 12 disks stuffed in the front on SAS RAID, pretty powerful even now I think. And a LOM so I can remote on/off it.

Having said that can't be arsed with it anymore - 90% of what's on it is crap.

There is no infallible hardware, no matter the brand, just because you got lucky with yours, doesn't mean the HPE microservers are poor quality. By your logic I have two of them, that have been working 24/7 for 2 and 3 years without a skipping a beat. Even if something goes wrong you can get 3 years next business day part exchange for £20 which is better than any consumer NAS warranty or the complete lack of it in 2nd hand enterprise grade gear.

As for failing drives, they have nothing to do with the microserver itself. If you mean that the overpriced enterprise grade SATA drives are better quality than the consumer grade, this notion has been somewhat dispelled by the latest Backblaze report at least for Seagate drives

[SimonMac]

That's as maybe but my point was more about the quality of components, everyone here seems to be suffering with failing drives, dead NAS's and ailing HP Microservers, the DS3400 and Oracle 7120 (both second hand) have never missed a beat in 4 years. I don't fire up the DS3400 much tho now - used it for POCs etc before trying it at clientco.

The Oracle box is basically an X4500 I think with 32gb RAM, two Xeon's, 2x1TB 3.5" mirrored boot drives, this odd flash-memory card, and 12 disks stuffed in the front on SAS RAID, pretty powerful even now I think. And a LOM so I can remote on/off it.

Having said that can't be arsed with it anymore - 90% of what's on it is crap.

I don't think we are comparing anything like for like, a second hand enterprise rig like yours will of course be better than a prosumer/SOHO unit like my Western Digital, however I have the assurance of a hardware support if any component fails and I doubt you still would. Whereas I don't have the ability to scale up beyond 4 drives, you clearly do.

So its a case of what is best for your individual circumstance.

[Fred Bloggs]

There is no infallible hardware, no matter the brand, just because you got lucky with yours, doesn't mean the HPE microservers are poor quality. By your logic I have two of them, that have been working 24/7 for 2 and 3 years without a skipping a beat. Even if something goes wrong you can get 3 years next business day part exchange for £20 which is better than any consumer NAS warranty or the complete lack of it in 2nd hand enterprise grade gear.

As for failing drives, they have nothing to do with the microserver itself. If you mean that the overpriced enterprise grade SATA drives are better quality than the consumer grade, this notion has been somewhat dispelled by the latest Backblaze report at least for Seagate drives

Seems to me, the best way to enhance reliability of multiple HDDs is to choose from two different HDD brands, or at the very least, two different HDD models from a single manufacturer?

[eek]

Seems to me, the best way to enhance reliability of multiple HDDs is to choose from two different HDD brands, or at the very least, two different HDD models from a single manufacturer?

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

[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

[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]

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]

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.

[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.

[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?