RAID set up for media streaming

[jonnyb]

Am planning a NAS setup for 4K media streaming and am wondering what other people are doing here.

I need a RAID setup for a media streaming NAS. Was thinking about RAID 5 for the disk to storage ratio, 3X3TB giving 6TB storage, but have been told the read/write speeds can be slow.

The other option for disk redundancy is RAID 1+0 and add an extra 3TB disk, but then I'm back to the same disk to storage ratio as RAID 1.

Now, there's slow, and then there's SLOW!

So is RAID 5 so slow that it's useless? Or is it fine for my purposes?

Planned set up: DS416PLAY with 3X3TB toshiba p300 disks, 7200rpm.

[jonnyb]

bhstewie said:

Larger drives mean larger RAID sets which means longer rebuild times which means more chance of a URE if you ever lose a drive and need to do a rebuild.

With 3TB drives on a consumer NAS you could be talking several days for a rebuild.

RAID10 is a better though more costly solution, the difficulty is that with all due respect a lot of consumers hear RAID and confuse it with backups so you put your lifes work on this "thing" and it loses a drive, then another one, then all your stuff is gone and you hear "But I had RAID?".

To be fair I am in danger of doing just that.

The main reason Im going for a RAID 5 set up is disk redundancy, so one drive fails I can swap it out and rebuild. What are the chances of 2 drives failing at the same time? Also I do keep off site back ups, but to be honest if I remember to do them every six months I have done well!

The thing is, with 4K becoming more standard, I think about 6TB of storage should see me good for quite some time. Also, a DS416Play with 3x3TB HDDs is cheaper than a DS216 Play with 2x6TB drives, and the drives are cheaper to replace if one fails.

A DS416Play with 4x3TB drives is only slightly more than a DS216play with the 2x6tb drives, and if one fails its £80-100 to replace instead of £250-300. So maybe a 416 with 4 drives running RAID 1+0 is the way to go.

I take the point about the wiring for 4K, I will have to upgrade the wiring when 4K becomes more prevalent.

However, at this point in time, all my media is on one single 3TB drive and thats got to change and soon!

I suppose what I'm trying to do is future proof the NAS set up to cope with whats coming in movies and TV.

[jonnyb]

Thanks guys,

I'm after compressed 4K, Amazon, Netflix that sort of thing.

I suppose why I'm worried about disk failure is that it's the disk that actually holds the data. I'm thinking if the NAS goes down but the disks are ok, swap the NAS for the same type, slot the disks in and away you go! Or is that far too simple?

As for running RAID 0, 1 6TB disk backing up another 6TB disk is actually quite an expensive solution, especially if one goes down.

RAID 10 looks interesting though. Maybe that's the way to go.

Any other things to think about?

[jonnyb]

gottans said:

Not sure where you are getting the content to stream locally? Amazon or Netflix don't make their content available for local storage i.e. stream from their cloud only. You could buy UHD 4k blu-ray discs but these at the current time cannot be ripped as the encryption is not broken and this isn't likely to happen soon either.

This is the case now, but give it 12-24 months and I think things could be very different, also 4K movie files are very large.

This is where the future proofing comes in.

wormus said:

Assuming you own a PC, you could do the same as me: all content is ripped to MKV on the PC and is stored on an external 4TB hard drive connected via USB3.0. I also have a 4TB NAS (single drive so no redundancy). To give me redundancy I set up a robocopy scheduled task that runs a couple of times per week. Takes seconds to run if there aren't any changes and copies in background so you don't even notice it running. Same for music. I also back up all photos and documents on my PC to ICloud. Great thing about Kodi is you can set up a screen saver to play photos so I've got it to access my iCloud library which syncs with the HTPC. It means it shows all the photos taken with my phone good or bad. Can lead to most amusing conversations when we have friends or family round for dinner and it plays in the background. One day it started playing all my kid's baby photos including the ones of them sitting in the bath etc. Teenage son was not amused

I actually run a MacBook Pro (2015). Which is part of the problem, it currently streams all my media from an external drive, bit of a bugger for the rest of the house when I take it to work!

I, too, currently back up all absolutely essential documents and all photos to iCloud, it's my movie collection I'm worried about now. About 2TB worth!

Hence the NAS set-up.

Edited by jonnyb on Monday 16th January 21:37

[jonnyb]

Thanks everyone!

Much to think about

[jonnyb]

scovette said:

gottans said:

Not sure where you are getting the content to stream locally? Amazon or Netflix don't make their content available for local storage i.e. stream from their cloud only. You could buy UHD 4k blu-ray discs but these at the current time cannot be ripped as the encryption is not broken and this isn't likely to happen soon either.

Basically everything is available to pirate - Netflix and Amazon in 1:1 quality, and 80gb+ 4k bluray 10bit h264 captures.

Interestingly, there's already a 4K torrent on a certain bay website.