NAS Drives

[alock]

K50 DEL said:

I'm all ears if anybody sees an issue with my plan?

You haven't mentioned how you're going to backup the NAS. It's always the hardest part to get right so that it works for you.

Get the backup right, it's orders of magnitude more important than disk redundancy for home users. Is it really a disaster if you can't access your Plex server for a couple of hours?

If uptime and redundancy is so important, I assume you have a UPS and maybe a fall-over internet connection as a bare minimum as well?

[Clockwork Cupcake]

alock said:

You haven't mentioned how you're going to backup the NAS. It's always the hardest part to get right so that it works for you.

Get the backup right, it's orders of magnitude more important than disk redundancy for home users. Is it really a disaster if you can't access your Plex server for a couple of hours?

If uptime and redundancy is so important, I assume you have a UPS and maybe a fall-over internet connection as a bare minimum as well?

You rather put your finger on what I was hinting at there.

As I said, people get fixated on redundancy and neglect pretty much everything else. And, as you say, are you really going to suffer anything more than some annoyance on a few hours (or days) of downtime as a Home User?

[Captain_Morgan]

xeny said:

My thinking is drives have a higher failure rate at power on than any other time, and the grim reality is lots of home NAS units aren't terribly well backed up, so I aim for more redundancy than not, especially with larger drives and longer rebuild times.

Another spike in failure rate is when drives are worked hard for a prolonged period much like a rebuild event

When I spec drives for a nas I try to buy from different manufacturers / range and / or vendors to try and minimise the chances of drives from the same batch, the idea is to minimise the chance of multiple failures due to manufacturing faults or firmware failures

This is more for convenience as I ensure data on a nas is replicated elsewhere

[RizzoTheRat]

That's also partly my thinking for buying a 4 bay with only 2 disks initially. I'll probably stick with the same brand/spec (WD Red) but adding 2 more later means they're not all the same age.

[Nimby]

Clockwork Cupcake said:

... If a drive fails then turn the NAS off and get a replacement drive on next day delivery...

If the failed drive is still under warranty it can be a week or two before the supplier / manufacturer replaces it, and most come with 3 or 5 year warranty.

Also won't RAID5 with a hot spare be quieter and use less power than RAID6 as the spare won't be spinning,and you have the same redundancy.

[Captain_Morgan]

Nimby said:

If the failed drive is still under warranty it can be a week or two before the supplier / manufacturer replaces it, and most come with 3 or 5 year warranty.

Also won't RAID5 with a hot spare be quieter and use less power than RAID6 as the spare won't be spinning,and you have the same redundancy.

Generally hot spares are “hot” they are powered up and monitored by the system, they may or may not be spinning depending on the system itself

In a domestic situation I can’t see the value of a hot spare, a drive on the shelf perhaps, but again this comes down to the criticality of up time in the domestic environment

[xeny]

Nimby said:

Also won't RAID5 with a hot spare be quieter and use less power than RAID6 as the spare won't be spinning,and you have the same redundancy.

You don't have the same redundancy though. RAID 5 with a failed drive has no redundancy until the array has rebuilt onto the hot spare. RAID 6 loses a drive and you still have redundancy against a further drive failure.

If I had £1 for every no remaining redundancy array rebuild I've seen fail due to a further disk failure, I'd be into double figures by now.

[eeLee]

Some observations as I have 4 Synology NAS systems.... 1 can never be enough...!

- there is a /usr/syno/etc/rc.sysv/WDidle3Dis.sh which would be nice for those with WD disks that will idle down. It's provided by their platform team
- backups including as Time Machine work well. You can also Cloud Sync to OneDrive, for example: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-synology-na... (Family M365 gets you 6 x 1Tb )
- Syncthing is a great tool; team up with a mate and put a NAS at his place too Reciprocate of course, win/win https://docs.kastelo.net/synology/ I actually sync using this between my place here and in Austria

[outnumbered]

I used to use a Raspberry PI for some NAS-like functions (nfs, smb, photo library, VPN, Radius server etc), but bought a Synology DS918 earlier this year.

I have to say it's a lot less hassle with the Synology. The software is easy to use and does what I need it to. It's been useful for hosting a couple of VMs for experiments as well.

[bmwmike]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Does the Synology DS920 actually go to sleep if you dont access it? My qnap just keeps chattering away and its driving me insane, to the point where i think it needs to get gone.

[RizzoTheRat]

I've also got the 920+. Currently with no computers on the fan is running and the drives (only 2 in there at the moment) do a little chunter ever 15-20 seconds, but they're pretty quiet. I can hear it if I'm sat in the same room with no other noise but don't notice it if there's anything else happening.

[xeny]

bmwmike said:

Does the Synology DS920 actually go to sleep if you dont access it? My qnap just keeps chattering away and its driving me insane, to the point where i think it needs to get gone.

It is definitely the NAS and not the drives? I've a 420J, which is the same OS as the 920, so I'd presume similar behaviour and it definitely does not chatter. I don't think the drives ever spin down, but I picked a long timeout, and it's quite possible there's always at least one computer in the house with it mounted.

[mikef]

bmwmike said:

Does the Synology DS920 actually go to sleep if you dont access it? My qnap just keeps chattering away and its driving me insane, to the point where i think it needs to get gone.

Yes, although a known issue is that running Plex prevents hibernation. I too have two four-disk Synology units sitting on my desk without noticeable disk noise.

[RizzoTheRat]

mikef said:

Yes, although a known issue is that running Plex prevents hibernation.

I did not know that. Is there a workaround like a scheduler that shuts down and restarts plex at certain times?

[bmwmike]

xeny said:

bmwmike said:

Does the Synology DS920 actually go to sleep if you dont access it? My qnap just keeps chattering away and its driving me insane, to the point where i think it needs to get gone.

It is definitely the NAS and not the drives? I've a 420J, which is the same OS as the 920, so I'd presume similar behaviour and it definitely does not chatter. I don't think the drives ever spin down, but I picked a long timeout, and it's quite possible there's always at least one computer in the house with it mounted.

Yeah - if i shutdown most of the NAS - kill crond, kill network sharing services, and most importantly kill anything thats writing logs to disk (rather than ramdisk) the disks will spin down. They are 2x 8TB seagates, and at 7200 RPM they are quite noisy anyway, but the head chatter sounds like thunder in the distance, or machine gun fire up close. It was fun at first, but is now annoying especially as i do home recording.

The temporary solution was to put it in the attic and its basically mounted on top of half cuts of pipe insulation which is sitting on top of a cutoff of celotex which is sitting on rubber mounts, on top of a piece of carpet.

If i get time i'll modify all the configs to write to ramdisk but my other issue is that qnap keep pushing updates every 2 minutes and i'll lose my own config changes. I have the qnap sat behind a proxy for internet access so i can turn off ability to check for updates.

I somewhat regret that the NAS OS is basically a platform for delivering paid content/apps rather than doing the job of being a well made NAS. Wouldn't get another qnap for all these reasons, personally (and their support is basically - turn it off and on again ).

[bmwmike]

RizzoTheRat said:

mikef said:

Yes, although a known issue is that running Plex prevents hibernation.

I did not know that. Is there a workaround like a scheduler that shuts down and restarts plex at certain times?

You could add an entry to cron if there is nothing in plex itself.

[RizzoTheRat]

Hmmm, just had a quick google and it looks like you can actually start and stop packages with the task scheduler in DSM so I'll take a look at that.

Re the noisy QNAP, how are the disks mounted. The Synologies have rubber mounting brackets that seem to do a good job, when they disks are being accessed they're noticeably quieter than my PC's drives which are screwed to metal frames, although the NAS's 5400rpm WD Reds are presumably quieter than whatever 7200's I've got in the PC

[dapprman]

I've kept quiet over BMWMike's issues as I'm not sure how his is set up and he has had problems since the very start, however I have a 451 in my living room which is quiet most the time, goes to sleep as expected, and is only noisy for periods when I upload a lot of photos or when I reboot it, the latter down to the media streaming component insisting on re-indexing and refreshing the thumb nails, but that only last 15-30 minutes. I've an older one (an old 219P) acting as a back up, so only written to in the early hours as the main one backs up to it (different volume each day) and that only gets noisy when the backups are in progress, and not that bad.
I have an empty slot in my 451 and I've just checked the disk tray - no rubber mounts on it, so any suspension between that and the disk would have to be on the disk.

[bmwmike]

dapprman said:

I've kept quiet over BMWMike's issues as I'm not sure how his is set up and he has had problems since the very start, however I have a 451 in my living room which is quiet most the time, goes to sleep as expected, and is only noisy for periods when I upload a lot of photos or when I reboot it, the latter down to the media streaming component insisting on re-indexing and refreshing the thumb nails, but that only last 15-30 minutes. I've an older one (an old 219P) acting as a back up, so only written to in the early hours as the main one backs up to it (different volume each day) and that only gets noisy when the backups are in progress, and not that bad.
I have an empty slot in my 451 and I've just checked the disk tray - no rubber mounts on it, so any suspension between that and the disk would have to be on the disk.

qnap 451? interesting, thanks.

[Nimby]

mikef said:

bmwmike said:

Does the Synology DS920 actually go to sleep if you dont access it? My qnap just keeps chattering away and its driving me insane, to the point where i think it needs to get gone.

Yes, although a known issue is that running Plex prevents hibernation. I too have two four-disk Synology units sitting on my desk without noticeable disk noise.

I gave up with Plex as it wanted to transcode much of the time for some reason. I've switched to Emby and that just plays everything first time. My entry-level DS420j is sitting next to me and is virtually silent - just the barely noticeable fan.