NAS help

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DexterPunk
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NAS help

Post by DexterPunk »

So i've been using the Western Digital MyBook Live Duo 2 bay NAS for the last few years. It's got 2x 2TB drives in RAID1 mirroring. Not a huge amount of space, but I thought at least my photos are safe there. There's a lot of stuff I shot at uni that I doubt ill ever get the chance to shoot again. I really wanna make sure that data is safe. I spent last night, and some of today moving photos to it, and cleaning it up a bit, when out of curiosity I thought "I wonder what mods people have done to this". Looking at some tutorials about swapping out the drives for bigger ones, I noticed a bloke saying he would no longer recommend this NAS because hardware encryption is forced on the user. Basically, should the bay itself die, even if your HDD's are fine, you won't be able to access the encrypted data anyway. Apparently this is an issue WD don't seem at all interested in fixing. They actually responded by recommending that you back up your data in case of failure. I understand that nothing is bullet proof, but surely you buy a RAID1 NAS to avoid manual backups in the first place. A simple encryption key, or being able to switch encryption on and off would be helpful. I actually really have little interest in encryption anyway.

Anyway sorry about the long post... It's pretty much a deal breaker for me. I'm going to look at something else, while i'm at it, I may as well look at something with around 4TB capacity. Does anyone have any recommendations?

What's important to me is:
- At least 2 bay RAID1 for some redundancy
- Easy to setup, and maintain
- Relatively quick (gigabit ethernet) and reasonable speed drives.
- Prefer to spend under $500 if possible.
wabbit
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Re: NAS help

Post by wabbit »

Synology will have an option for you or you could build your own.
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Cursed
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Re: NAS help

Post by Cursed »

A NAS is never a substitute for having a backup. Consider simple things like a power spike or virus outbreak on your network. Files gone/corrupted/infected. No amount of disk redundancy will save you from that.

That said, I have a Netgear ReadyNAS RN-314, and I've only populated 3 or the 4 disk slots in it with 3 x 2TB disks. Some people I know have Synology NASes and swear by them.

I use Crashplan for some of my backup needs, but backups are a work in progress for me.
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DexterPunk
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Re: NAS help

Post by DexterPunk »

Thanks guys. I'll look into those Synology solutions.

The other ones I was looking at are QNAP. Any idea how they are?

Cursed, yeah I know they aren't a guarantee. But I feel that hardware encrypting the data is ridiculous. It's about covering the most likely scenario. With mechanical drives, it's a drive failure.
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Re: NAS help

Post by wabbit »

QNAP is another good option, however when I was looking to replace my Thecus, QNAP was always a fair bit more expensive for the same stuff compared to Synology.

Just to expand on my experience, I owned a 7 Bay Thecus, ended up selling to a friend (is still going). Replaced it with an 8 Bay Synology (bloody good unit/OS/Ecosystem).

For work we use a 5 Bay Synology for a Hydraulics team and a 8 Bay Synology for a Geographical team. Really good outcomes as the teams haven't had a complaint in the years they've been in use. Paired with a simple UPS each.

Oh yeah, SE1Z has a Synology also, how could I forget, I recommended it to him. Maybe he'll chime in.
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Re: NAS help

Post by DexterPunk »

UPS is a good idea too. Might look into that. Thanks again.
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Cursed
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Re: NAS help

Post by Cursed »

DexterPunk wrote:... With mechanical drives, it's a drive failure.
Yes, but you're looking at a redundant storage solution. That introduces software and that is far more likely to encounter failure.

Just consider how valuable your data is. Then consider how high an eggs-to-baskets ratio you want to employ.

A backup can be as simple as plugging in a USB HDD to your NAS once a month or something and copying the important stuff off.
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Re: NAS help

Post by DexterPunk »

The files still stay on my computer, so it's pretty much a backup anyway. I also have a time machine drive permanently hooked up. I'm probably paranoid.
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Re: NAS help

Post by wobblysauce »

As above, all in one systems are not bad.. if you have any old hardware not in use you could setup one with something like FreeNAS.

No data corruption/loss is good, ZFS will scrub for data in case any of the drives are lying, using a mathematical algorithms.
Snapshots or shadow copy, periodic snapshots, eg 2 per weekday, to a set date say 2 weeks, if you delete something you can get it back.
Ram, roughly 4gig for OS and normally about 1gb of ram per 1tb of storage space required, depending on other options you may chose to use, do not need ECC ram but it is good as another fail safe.
Hdd's it is using a power of 2+1 or 4+1 etc.
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Re: NAS help

Post by SE1Z »

Yep, I've got a 4bay synology (can't remember the model).
Can't fault it.
More than enough power to stream multiple 1080p vids and its read write speed is amazing :)

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