Hard Drive Chirruping - NAS Recommendations Please

[Platypus]

Sounds like Jiminy Cricket has crawled into my NAS and is trying to attract a mate. After the recent threads on here, I'm trying to get a copy of the data PDQ which luckily isn't irreplaceable but which I'd prefer not to lose (downloaded TV shows).

This is a Buffalo NAS with no RAID, just a single drive.

Time to upgrade methinks. Any NAS Recommendations?

Buffalo LinkStation Pro gets reasonable reviews, has RAID 5 but is apparently very slow.

TIA

[TheFaQQer]

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.

[garethevans1986]

I cant recommend any NAS's....I've got a 16 Bay Fibre SAN myself but thats another story.

One thing I would recommend is getting the right drives - WD Red NAS Storage

I had 4 x 2Tb Western Digital disks running flat out for nearly 2 years now without any problems.

Thanks
GE

[Platypus]

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 !

Thanks for the advice.


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.

[stek]

I cant recommend any NAS's....I've got a 16 Bay Fibre SAN myself but thats another story.

One thing I would recommend is getting the right drives - WD Red NAS Storage

I had 4 x 2Tb Western Digital disks running flat out for nearly 2 years now without any problems.

Thanks
GE

I can top that!

IBM DS3400 with an EXP3000, 48x250gb it's going tho, I'm chasing my tail keeping going, just gonna rely on Crashplan..

[malvolio]

I use a Buffalo NAS with two 1Tb disks and it's been pretty much bomb proof. However, whatever you use don't bother with RAID 5, better to shadow the drives as RAID 0/1. Not only gives you far better data protection and a disk failure doesn't stop you working but it has a minimal impact on write and double the read capability. I use an attached USB drive so it backs itself up overnight whether the PC is on or not.

Of course you have two drives doing the job of one. For the price of a modern big disk, that's not a problem for the extra safety margins.

[eek]

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...

[stek]

I use a Buffalo NAS with two 1Tb disks and it's been pretty much bomb proof. However, whatever you use don't bother with RAID 5, better to shadow the drives as RAID 0/1. Not only gives you far better data protection and a disk failure doesn't stop you working but it has a minimal impact on write and double the read capability. I use an attached USB drive so it backs itself up overnight whether the PC is on or not.

Of course you have two drives doing the job of one. For the price of a modern big disk, that's not a problem for the extra safety margins.

RAID 0 is stripe/concat and RAID 1 is mirror, you can't do both together with only two disks and certainly not RAID 5.

[stek]

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...

Pretty sure you can do that with RAID 0 concat too. Perhaps that's what it is!

[malvolio]

RAID 0 is stripe/concat and RAID 1 is mirror, you can't do both together with only two disks and certainly not RAID 5.

Sorry, quite right, I meant RAID 1. Too much working with SANs lately!

However if the MTBF of a single disk is 10k hours, that of a pair is 100k hours, so not a bad risk. Also, if I did manage to lose both to a simultaneous hard disk failure I still have a recent full backup ready to go; just plug the USB back into the PC. If the NAS itself fails I can similarly plug one or other disk in directly via a caddy (or even a cheapo link cable I keep just in case). 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.