Hard Drive Chirruping - NAS Recommendations Please

[TheFaQQer]

The Microserver looks like the way to go although the cashback offer isn't on at the moment. I think I'll do that instead of a NAS. I don't understand why a Synology with 4 empty bays is £350 but the HP microserver is £220 !

If they aren't on offer at the moment, they will be shortly after you buy it. That seems to be the way HP works

P.S. WD Red 4TB drives don't score well for reliability. I use Seagate 3TB drives and they're pretty grim too (I lose one every 9 months). Next time I'm going to spend more to get more reliability.

I can't remember who posted it earlier this year, but there is a good blog post here on the reliability of different drives that BackBlaze have used over the years.

Based on that, I went for the Hitachi drives, but as I said, they were marginally cheaper inside the USB housing, which I cracked open and binned.

[Platypus]

Would strongly recommend Unraid rather than freenas but to an extent that's personal preference...

Unraid has the advantage that except for the parity disk the other disks are still readable outside the array. Hence even if you lose multiple disks you don't loss the data on the remaining disks...

As for raid 1/0 that's great provided you don't lose both drive a's at the same time...

Unraid looks awesome! Thanks!

EDIT: Purchased

[Platypus]

I can't remember who posted it earlier this year, but there is a good blog post here on the reliability of different drives that BackBlaze have used over the years.

Based on that, I went for the Hitachi drives, but as I said, they were marginally cheaper inside the USB housing, which I cracked open and binned.

Yes I read that too, was going to look it up again. No need now, Hitachi it is !

[doodab]

P.S. WD Red 4TB drives don't score well for reliability. I use Seagate 3TB drives and they're pretty grim too (I lose one every 9 months). Next time I'm going to spend more to get more reliability.

Avoid the low power & green ones, they tend to spin down more often which causes more wear and tear so they fail early. There was a good blog on this a while back:

Backblaze Blog » What Hard Drive Should I Buy?

I've found Hitachi Deskstar NAS & Seagate Barracudas to be reliable in the time I've been using them (6-24 months depending on drive) but then 4 data points don't count for much.

Personally I think RAID is a waste of time for backups unless you need huge space. Having 2 copies of your backup on standalone drives is more reliable than a 4 drive RAID5 set. Both will survive a single drive failure, but that failure is twice as likely in the RAID set. It's also a lot cheaper.

[doodab]

Deliberate or accidental data corruption or loss by other means isn't protected no matter what you do outside of a fully mirrored and log-shipped DBMS anyway.

I use some quite old but proper backup software that takes a snapshot of current data and backs up the changes without overwriting what is already on the backup media. I have a rolling backup set going back to 2012. Two copies of it.

The paranoia set in after I deleted all ~5000 photos from my 3 month tour of Italy

[TheFaQQer]

There was a good blog on this a while back:

Backblaze Blog » What Hard Drive Should I Buy?

There's an echo in here...

I can't remember who posted it earlier this year, but there is a good blog post here on the reliability of different drives that BackBlaze have used over the years.

[doodab]

There's an echo in here...

Indeed. Sorry about that, I posted before reading the whole thread. Although there is some follow up to that post that's worth reading:

How NOT to evaluate hard disk reliability: Backblaze vs world+dog

My personal take was that enterprise drives are 2-3x the cost, so I can buy 2-3x as many consumer drives and double or triple things up which I reckon (very scientific that...) is more or less guaranteed to be more reliable than having the better drives. I chose Hitachi & Seagate cos simply cos I'm only interested in regualar 7.2k drives and WD Blacks were ~50% more expensive.

I actually had about a dozen Samsung drives over the last 6 years and they were fine too but they don't make them any more.

[stek]

Indeed. Sorry about that, I posted before reading the whole thread. Although there is some follow up to that post that's worth reading:

How NOT to evaluate hard disk reliability: Backblaze vs world+dog

My personal take was that enterprise drives are 2-3x the cost, so I can buy 2-3x as many consumer drives and double or triple things up which I reckon (very scientific that...) is more or less guaranteed to be more reliable than having the better drives. I chose Hitachi & Seagate cos simply cos I'm only interested in regualar 7.2k drives and WD Blacks were ~50% more expensive.

I actually had about a dozen Samsung drives over the last 6 years and they were fine too but they don't make them any more.

Also enterprise-class SATA drives are dual ported, as I found when sticking desktop single port ones in the IBM DS3400. (Loop redundancy lost...)

[Platypus]

IBM DS3400

Nice to hear of someone who get stuck in to proper big kit !

[stek]

Nice to hear of someone who get stuck in to proper big kit !

XIV too but not got one in my shed. Yet!