Hard Drive Chirruping - NAS Recommendations Please

[TheFaQQer]

I have a QNAP 501 that's been running 24/7 for 7-odd years. Had a couple of drive failures and never missed a beat. Though RAID rebuild does take a nailbitingly long time - 2 days on a 7TB volume during which I'm painfully aware that another drive failure means I'm stuffed. Being old, it is a little slow, so I have recently expanded to a 879 which almost seems quick enough to saturate a 1GB ethernet connection. If that's a bit pricey, look at the other *79 series (first digit is the no. of drives) or the *59's have a smaller processor/memory but still do the job nicely.

The potential issue with many off the shelf NAS solutions is that if you get bit corruption at any stage, you're screwed because you end up with copies of the files with bits corrupted.

You only have to look at the pictures at the end of this blog post which shows the impact of flipping 1, 2 or 3 bits in a JPEG.

Reading that post, and having it happen to a friend of mine, made me move from my QNAP to a ZFS-based solution.

[MikeP]

...true, and neither protects against accidental overwrites and similar data corruption, which is where Amazon Glacier comes in.

[darrylmg]

...true, and neither protects against accidental overwrites and similar data corruption, which is where Amazon Glacier comes in.

You can use snapshots on zfs.
Just remember to remove them after an expiration period.