Hard Drive Chirruping - NAS Recommendations Please

[VectraMan]

My Buffalo NAS overheated and wiped its own firmware in the first 24 hours!

Never again.

I'd go RAID1, just don't do what I did and buy two identical drives. Sure enough they both failed after 4 years about 1 month apart, but fortunately I hadn't dillied or dallied on replacing the first failure.

[Smartie]

Time to upgrade methinks. Any NAS Recommendations?

TIA

I like Synology - they do a lot of other stuff besides storage - web server, vpn server, email server etc. Have a two disk version but this one is shiny.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-DS1...s=synology+nas

[CloudWalker]

I've just got a WD My Cloud EX2 Personal Cloud Storage (disk less) as I want to add my 3TB drive from my PC to it. But was worried if it would try format upon install ? Has anyone set one up before?

[craig1]

I'd thoroughly recommend the HP Microserver as well on the major caveat that you don't want it for anything particularly fast or latency sensitive, I have the G7 version but the G8 is apparently just slightly faster with a few extra bits of tech inside it. I ended up giving up on the suggestions mentioned above by putting Windows Home Server 2011 on it and using it as my all-in-one backup box, iTunes server and general dogsbody device. A bit of extra memory to help it out a bit and it excels in that role given the dirt-cheap price I got it for.

There's something that just gets my spidey senses firing about the RAID on it though, I really don't trust it and have a robocopy script backing up the volumes elsewhere daily.

[Contreras]

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

Could someone hurry up and buy one then because I'd like one too, please.

Any views on the 'hybrid' SSHD drives? Seagate are now up to 3rd generation, like these: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB. Toshiba do similar, not sure about WD and others.

[Boney M]

Build your own with an HP Microserver (normally has £100 cashback), and then install freenas on it.

A friend of mine recently had some bit corruption so lost a LOT of work that he'd backed up on his NAS - using btrfs or ZFS helps reduce this (I'm not confident enough to say that it stops it completely).

I bought a load of TOURO Desk Pro 4TB USB drives, and cracked the case open to get the drive out because it was cheaper than buying the drives themselves, and whacked 5 of them in the Microserver case. You need a USB stick to install the OS on as well.

Took me about half an hour to get it all set up and running.

Exactly what I did, running VMWare on it so can use it as a lab but also have Synology NAS running, great bit of kit for **** all

[Platypus]

I like Synology - they do a lot of other stuff besides storage - web server, vpn server, email server etc. Have a two disk version but this one is shiny.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-DS1...s=synology+nas

Very nice, but expensive for just the enclosure IMO. I'll go the cheapo Microserver route since I don't need the other features in a NAS. Sort of seems to me Microserver = £200 while Synology = £600

[Smartie]

Expensive if you don't want any of the other stuff I guess. I paid around £450 for a two disk setup including 2 x 3Tb drives and that will be cheaper now. There's a new version for media streaming at around £270 ex drives. Great software interface on them.

[Scruff]

I have two HP Microservers N54L's. Just acquired 4 x 4 TB Seagate SSHD's. Looking for a third Microserver so can set two up in ESXi Cluster and third as NAS but waiting for next cashback deal...

[MikeP]

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.
Oh yeah, one of my original motivations for QNap was that they are quiet as they live in my smallish office space at home. With their big fan they are pretty unobtrusive on the noise front - certainly not the case with synology.