RAID / NAS / Backup

[8bit]

Type R Tom said:

Come across this too:

http://www.ebuyer.com/616877-hp-proliant-microserv...

The Synology does look good but they are quite pricy. Does anyone know with 4 bays NAS if you can add 2 x HD’s then when they are full add another 2 x HD’s? Running two separates RAIDS

You can on the Synology, yes. Buy a 4-bay NAS, install two disks and configure them as SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID). You can then add another two disks at a later date and add them to the array.

Worth noting that some of the 2-bay models support the expansion unit. So to keep costs down now, just buy a 2-bay unit and install 2 disks, then if you need more later you can buy a 2 or 4 bay expansion unit and some more disks. On most models you'll have these as a separate array but you will at least have more space available.

[red_slr]

red_slr said:

Pulled the trigger on a 213J a couple of days ago - will be setting up this weekend will report back when done!

Ok so all the gear arrived, before using the 213J I had watched a few videos on how to set up the unit - fairly simple set up, install h/w, download DSM s/w and save for later, load sinology assistant onto PC, power on disk drive and connect to network, use assistant to find disk, follow on screen prompts to set up disk and upload the DSM onto the drive.

After that it was a case of leave it to settle for an hour (don't know if I needed to do this or not but it said it was doing a parity check) and after that I started to build my folders.

Overall quite happy. Not getting particularly fast transfer speeds (10mb/s) which I suspect is down to my fairly old router and pc not having gigabit network. So I have to put up with the slower speed - that all said - some testing shows it will stream 1080p no problem at all. Nice and responsive.

I am a basic user, not using any of the add ons as of yet but might do later, so for now its just a basic folder set up for music, photos, backups etc.

I have 3TB to play with (SHR) and so far used about 12%. I am slowly putting all my media over from physical to electronic format so will see how long it is before I burn the 3 gig...

So far more than happy with it.

[mikef]

red_slr said:

I am slowly putting all my media over from physical to electronic format

I just went through this - one recommendation is to RIP your CDs to FLAC format (I've used dbPowerAmp). If you stream music to your hifi the improvement over MP3 is more than worth the additional disk space