6 - 8 Bay NAS - Overkill?
Discussion
Background
12 years ago I built a media-PC for sole use as a PVR for all things media and TV, running MediaPortal (similar to XMBC). Over the years, my movie and TV collection has amounted to circa 18TB spread over 5 HDD's. 3 years ago I became fed up with constant tweaking and codec compatibility and was delighted to find how far off-the-shelf media players such as the nVidia Shield TV have come.
So, my current setup is a Shield TV with the old windows box becoming a part-time server running Plex and only getting turned on when we require it. Still a little archaic. However, we do find that most of our media now comes from the likes of Netflix, Prime, Spotify, etc. which only requires the Shield TV and it would therefore be a waste to keep the 'server' on full time.
I want to completely scrap the Windows box and upgrade to a NAS (for the lower energy use and added features). The obvious upgrade would be a 6-8 bay Synology (i.e. DS1019+) with 6GB drives running in RAID 1 or RAID 5/6).
However, I'm unsure whether this is a huge overkill (and expense) based merely on the idea of mass media storage because this is how I've always done things? The world is moving more towards streaming, it's rare we re-watch old movies stored locally, however the quality (high-bitrate 1080p with DTS-HD audio) or infinite choice isn't the norm yet, hence my preference for locally stored large mkv media files.
Has anyone else recently been in this situation with a similar dilemma on whether to spend £££'s on large storage vs deleting a large media collection in return for streaming services (and their future)?
12 years ago I built a media-PC for sole use as a PVR for all things media and TV, running MediaPortal (similar to XMBC). Over the years, my movie and TV collection has amounted to circa 18TB spread over 5 HDD's. 3 years ago I became fed up with constant tweaking and codec compatibility and was delighted to find how far off-the-shelf media players such as the nVidia Shield TV have come.
So, my current setup is a Shield TV with the old windows box becoming a part-time server running Plex and only getting turned on when we require it. Still a little archaic. However, we do find that most of our media now comes from the likes of Netflix, Prime, Spotify, etc. which only requires the Shield TV and it would therefore be a waste to keep the 'server' on full time.
I want to completely scrap the Windows box and upgrade to a NAS (for the lower energy use and added features). The obvious upgrade would be a 6-8 bay Synology (i.e. DS1019+) with 6GB drives running in RAID 1 or RAID 5/6).
However, I'm unsure whether this is a huge overkill (and expense) based merely on the idea of mass media storage because this is how I've always done things? The world is moving more towards streaming, it's rare we re-watch old movies stored locally, however the quality (high-bitrate 1080p with DTS-HD audio) or infinite choice isn't the norm yet, hence my preference for locally stored large mkv media files.
Has anyone else recently been in this situation with a similar dilemma on whether to spend £££'s on large storage vs deleting a large media collection in return for streaming services (and their future)?
I'm in a similar position.
I've got a 918+ with 4 x 10TB drives in it and am constantly eyeing the DX517 to expand it to 9 bays in total.
I've got a large music collection all stored in AIFF, but it is the 4K video that takes up the space.
If I'm honest, the quality of the 4K stream from Apple TV rentals is pretty close to that of a 4K Blu-ray these days. The cost of the DX517 and drives will be well over £1.2k, so rather than buying that lot I should really just rent 250 films from Apple for the same price. That would keep me going for a while...
I've got a 918+ with 4 x 10TB drives in it and am constantly eyeing the DX517 to expand it to 9 bays in total.
I've got a large music collection all stored in AIFF, but it is the 4K video that takes up the space.
If I'm honest, the quality of the 4K stream from Apple TV rentals is pretty close to that of a 4K Blu-ray these days. The cost of the DX517 and drives will be well over £1.2k, so rather than buying that lot I should really just rent 250 films from Apple for the same price. That would keep me going for a while...
I think you have to weigh up the value of the data to you. Which stuff is unreplaceable, and which is not.
I run a two drive NAS that feeds my Shield with vital stuff. I then hang a large USB disk off the back of it for my torrent collection. The Shield maps to that too with Plex.
Inexpensive and at risk storage to stuff I can replace, and raid NAS for the rest.
I run a two drive NAS that feeds my Shield with vital stuff. I then hang a large USB disk off the back of it for my torrent collection. The Shield maps to that too with Plex.
Inexpensive and at risk storage to stuff I can replace, and raid NAS for the rest.
Murph7355 said:
I'd personally be inclined to use multiple smaller units than chuck everything in a larger RAID array with massive disks.
More resilience, more flexibility etc.
I'm not a lover of streaming services. Old school
It always surprises me how many home users invest in a single large NAS with 4+ disks inside. Managing the backup of this data is beyond most people.More resilience, more flexibility etc.
I'm not a lover of streaming services. Old school
For the vast majority of users, two smaller units acting as primary/backup are far superior. Alternatively a single unit with external USB backup is another approach.
EViS said:
Would a 6+ Synology allow for say two disks to run in RAID1 (mirroring) for the most important data (work/photos/etc), and the remaining 4+ in a RAID5 or simply a RAID0 for general media which can be replaced?
Or is this the reason for recommending two smaller units?
Yes, I believe you can create multiple "storage pools" with different RAID levels. However you still have a single point of failure (the device itself). If you have multiple smaller units one failing will only take that unit offline. You can have Synology units mirror each other if you have the need for that level of resilience. Or just backup offsite if you want data safety but don't need immediate recovery and can wait for a new unit to arriveOr is this the reason for recommending two smaller units?
RAID mirroring doesn't seem like the right approach to me for a bunch of films.
Any accidental deletion or corruption of the files will just get mirrored too, erasing the file from both disks. Where do you then restore from? RAID is not backup. All RAID is doing is giving you better uptime when a disk needs replaced. For movies that hardly seems worth halving your useful capacity.
Also, movie files are fairly static. Once a movie file is created, it doesn't change like a word doc or spreadsheet which is continuously edited. RAID is more useful when data is changing frequently, improving access speeds and ensuring a near-line second copy is made immediately, which can then be backed up asynchronously.
I would ditch the RAID idea for your movie archives and instead have a second isolated copy on another NAS, PC or external disks (using a USB caddy to mount them). The second copy would ideally be offsite, to restore from in case of any glitches. If you've got cash left over, do a third copy. And a fourth. You can use slower, cheaper disks for this as read performance won't matter except during a restore.
You could keep a small mirrored RAID partition for changeable data, or just use dropbox for that, depending on the total size, separate to your media archive.
Obviously the above is without knowing your exact requirements, so isn't gospel, but hopefully it's useful food for thought.
Any accidental deletion or corruption of the files will just get mirrored too, erasing the file from both disks. Where do you then restore from? RAID is not backup. All RAID is doing is giving you better uptime when a disk needs replaced. For movies that hardly seems worth halving your useful capacity.
Also, movie files are fairly static. Once a movie file is created, it doesn't change like a word doc or spreadsheet which is continuously edited. RAID is more useful when data is changing frequently, improving access speeds and ensuring a near-line second copy is made immediately, which can then be backed up asynchronously.
I would ditch the RAID idea for your movie archives and instead have a second isolated copy on another NAS, PC or external disks (using a USB caddy to mount them). The second copy would ideally be offsite, to restore from in case of any glitches. If you've got cash left over, do a third copy. And a fourth. You can use slower, cheaper disks for this as read performance won't matter except during a restore.
You could keep a small mirrored RAID partition for changeable data, or just use dropbox for that, depending on the total size, separate to your media archive.
Obviously the above is without knowing your exact requirements, so isn't gospel, but hopefully it's useful food for thought.
I'm currently running a Synology DS1815+ which houses all my movies, tv series and music, served up through a Plex server. I also use this to store all my photos, videos and personal documents, everything I want to backup is done through Crashplan.
There's undoubtedly cheaper ways of doing what I'm doing but the Synology just works and for me I am more than happy with the Synology, I don't see it as overkill more of a convenience.
I do need to invest some time into sorting a few things out, for instance I put all of the photos I take with my DSLR onto a photos share as with the GoPro videos but anything I take with my iPhone goes into the Synology Moments application and I should really look at getting it all into one place.
There's undoubtedly cheaper ways of doing what I'm doing but the Synology just works and for me I am more than happy with the Synology, I don't see it as overkill more of a convenience.
I do need to invest some time into sorting a few things out, for instance I put all of the photos I take with my DSLR onto a photos share as with the GoPro videos but anything I take with my iPhone goes into the Synology Moments application and I should really look at getting it all into one place.
I've never tried it but would Cloud storage be viable? I guess it would depend on the speed of your broadband. I'm not sure how streaming would work but using Amazon S3 / Glacier just to keep things around and pulling them down when needed might be viable. £200 for a NAS would buy quite a bit of cloud storage for quite some time..
I put all of my home videos/photos into Glacier (a few hundred GB) and it costs about $2 a month.
I put all of my home videos/photos into Glacier (a few hundred GB) and it costs about $2 a month.
Open Media Vault, or one of the similar distros, may be worth looking at.
Easy to install on some old kit, then lots of flexibility over arrays and backups. The GUI is similar to Synology etc. The OMV config can be backed-up too, making it easy to move the setup/array to a different machine if any problems.
ZFS is worth checking out too. It overcomes some of the problems with RAID (but ECC RAM is recommended for ZFS).
Hope this helps
Easy to install on some old kit, then lots of flexibility over arrays and backups. The GUI is similar to Synology etc. The OMV config can be backed-up too, making it easy to move the setup/array to a different machine if any problems.
ZFS is worth checking out too. It overcomes some of the problems with RAID (but ECC RAM is recommended for ZFS).
Hope this helps
theaxe said:
I've never tried it but would Cloud storage be viable? I guess it would depend on the speed of your broadband. I'm not sure how streaming would work but using Amazon S3 / Glacier just to keep things around and pulling them down when needed might be viable. £200 for a NAS would buy quite a bit of cloud storage for quite some time..
I put all of my home videos/photos into Glacier (a few hundred GB) and it costs about $2 a month.
A "raw" DVD rip is between 5Gb and 8Gb typically. A high quality MP4 rip of just the main movie is 1Gb to 1.5Gb.I put all of my home videos/photos into Glacier (a few hundred GB) and it costs about $2 a month.
If you have a large collection of movies then you're going to chew a lot of disk space and need decent bandwidth in BOTH directions to make it viable...none of which comes cheap.
Personally I'm not sure I trust an Amazon or a Google to protect my data as well as I can myself too. Admittedly less of a problem with movies but for photos and documents, very much a consideration.
Whilst I do have the DVDs themselves as a last resort backup, I definitely wouldn't relish having to re-rip all of mine
So resilience between NAS units is also important.I have multiple 4-disk RAID5 units. This gives me immediate protection for single disk failure (which does happen), some protection against disk file corruption (as the syncing isn't immediate - which carries its own risks but is a conscious decision) and protection against the whole NAS unit dying or issues where one or the other is located.
It all comes down to a risk/reward balance. You eventually start to get into probabilities that are unlikely to be worth covering...but only the individual knows what risks they want to shoulder now most of our lives are digital in one way or another
I love my nas. It's probably my most satisfying purchase in living memory.
Instead of laying out stupid amounts on a bigger one I switched my existing one, a 20tb ex2 ultra, from raid 1 to raid 0 and spent a portion of what I saved, which is probably a grand or more for a synology and more 10tb drives, on an uninterruptible power supply and a bunch of 4tb portable hard drives to back it up.
No way would I depend fully on streaming and I have a lot of stuff that would never turn up on any streaming service, and others edited by me to get rid of boring bits. I'd never knowingly delete anything as you never know when the desire to see it will pop up again.
Instead of laying out stupid amounts on a bigger one I switched my existing one, a 20tb ex2 ultra, from raid 1 to raid 0 and spent a portion of what I saved, which is probably a grand or more for a synology and more 10tb drives, on an uninterruptible power supply and a bunch of 4tb portable hard drives to back it up.
No way would I depend fully on streaming and I have a lot of stuff that would never turn up on any streaming service, and others edited by me to get rid of boring bits. I'd never knowingly delete anything as you never know when the desire to see it will pop up again.
Maybe slightly off-topic, but I run an old server as a NAS. The motherboard is from a Supermicro 1U server transplanted into an old tower case.
The motherboard has a SATA controller supporting 6 SATA ports plus an onboard SAS controller giving an additional 8 SATA ports, although the onboard SAS controller is so ancient that it has a 2TB drive size limit.
So, I run 5 x 2TB drives in a RAID-Z array off the SAS controller, plus 4 x 8TB drives off the SATA controller in a separate RAID-Z array.
I'm using FreeNAS (based on FreeBSD) as the OS, and run things like an Emby media server as iocage plugins (essentially virtual servers).
I've found that building it and tinkering with it has been far more fun, and rewarding, than dropping a load of cash on an appliance like Synology, although I totally get that I am atypical here and most people just want something that they buy and bung some HDDs in and that's that.
The motherboard has a SATA controller supporting 6 SATA ports plus an onboard SAS controller giving an additional 8 SATA ports, although the onboard SAS controller is so ancient that it has a 2TB drive size limit.
So, I run 5 x 2TB drives in a RAID-Z array off the SAS controller, plus 4 x 8TB drives off the SATA controller in a separate RAID-Z array.
I'm using FreeNAS (based on FreeBSD) as the OS, and run things like an Emby media server as iocage plugins (essentially virtual servers).
I've found that building it and tinkering with it has been far more fun, and rewarding, than dropping a load of cash on an appliance like Synology, although I totally get that I am atypical here and most people just want something that they buy and bung some HDDs in and that's that.
Thanks for all of the responses so far, plenty of opinions and options.
I've previously looked at the likes of keeping the existing hardware and tower unit, and running a Windows Home Server or FreeNAS, ZFS, etc. However, the unpredictable sleep/wake-on-lan of the system, the power draw if left on continuously and any ongoing tinkering puts me off. Hence, dumping £££ on a stable and low-energy NAS seems to be the way forward for me. Cloud storage is obviously a non-starter for the amount of media I have, although it is a good suggestion for off-site backup of photos and documents.
Going back to the NAS idea, many of you recommend not going down any RAID (5 or otherwise) route as it not offering sufficient redundancy. Running a second NAS, purely for backup seems excessive (from a cost point of view) as none of the hardware/features built into the NAS will be used.
None of my data requires protection from zero downtime. If a piece of hardware fails, I can wait for a new one to arrive. Protecting the data from loss/corruption/accidental deletion is of paramount importance though.
Hence, how does the following setup sound and how could you improve on it, either from a lower cost perspective or from a redundancy aspect?
- 6 bay Synology NAS with 8TB drives run in a JBOD form
- 2 of the NAS drives to mirror each other (RAID 0) and be used for photos/documents/important data (although this doesn't offer protection from corruption/accidental deletion?)
- 4 external 8TB drives (to begin with) which can be stored off-site as backups (literally kept in a cardboard box, although is a USB caddy really the best way to connect these to the NAS when a backup is due?)
- Cloud storage to sync (every 'x' days?) with the 2 NAS RAID 0 photo/document drives (protects from corruption/accidental deletion?)
I've previously looked at the likes of keeping the existing hardware and tower unit, and running a Windows Home Server or FreeNAS, ZFS, etc. However, the unpredictable sleep/wake-on-lan of the system, the power draw if left on continuously and any ongoing tinkering puts me off. Hence, dumping £££ on a stable and low-energy NAS seems to be the way forward for me. Cloud storage is obviously a non-starter for the amount of media I have, although it is a good suggestion for off-site backup of photos and documents.
Going back to the NAS idea, many of you recommend not going down any RAID (5 or otherwise) route as it not offering sufficient redundancy. Running a second NAS, purely for backup seems excessive (from a cost point of view) as none of the hardware/features built into the NAS will be used.
None of my data requires protection from zero downtime. If a piece of hardware fails, I can wait for a new one to arrive. Protecting the data from loss/corruption/accidental deletion is of paramount importance though.
Hence, how does the following setup sound and how could you improve on it, either from a lower cost perspective or from a redundancy aspect?
- 6 bay Synology NAS with 8TB drives run in a JBOD form
- 2 of the NAS drives to mirror each other (RAID 0) and be used for photos/documents/important data (although this doesn't offer protection from corruption/accidental deletion?)
- 4 external 8TB drives (to begin with) which can be stored off-site as backups (literally kept in a cardboard box, although is a USB caddy really the best way to connect these to the NAS when a backup is due?)
- Cloud storage to sync (every 'x' days?) with the 2 NAS RAID 0 photo/document drives (protects from corruption/accidental deletion?)
I think it's a pretty good solution.
Don't rule out using existing hardware. Buying a new NAS enclosure for the energy savings alone can take years or decades to pay off, and who cares what the box looks like? It'll be hidden away and you'll never interact with it once it's set up. Use what you have, and buy yourself more disks, or a nice iPad or some bluerays or some coke and hookers.
I think USB HD caddy is an ok solution for backups. Just treat it like a tape drive and it sort of makes sense.
Don't rule out using existing hardware. Buying a new NAS enclosure for the energy savings alone can take years or decades to pay off, and who cares what the box looks like? It'll be hidden away and you'll never interact with it once it's set up. Use what you have, and buy yourself more disks, or a nice iPad or some bluerays or some coke and hookers.
I think USB HD caddy is an ok solution for backups. Just treat it like a tape drive and it sort of makes sense.
EViS said:
- 2 of the NAS drives to mirror each other (RAID 0) and be used for photos/documents/important data (although this doesn't offer protection from corruption/accidental deletion?)
For info, RAID 1 is mirroring... RAID 0 offers no redundancy and just has the data stripped across the drives.Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff