Discussion
Hi techys
I have a desktop which is 5 years old and its been running 24*7*365 and was wondering if its time to do a pre emptive disk change.
I have an SSD for the OS and a 2 TB drive with about 0.8TB of imporant stuff, and it is therefore mirrored on Onedrive, so in theory I should be ok .even if I lose the drive.
I also have a synology NAS drive with 2*4TB drives. One running my CCTV the other has my media (films & TV) on it. These are also 5 years old and have been running 24*7*365. CCTV drive is recording 24*7 and cyles the recordings meaning its running at around 95% disk capacity i.e. almost constant write and delete.
I have recently updated my TV and it cannot access the NAS like my previous one, so I am running Plex on the PC accessing the media from the NAS, which is a bit slow sometimes when Plex has to do the conversion on the fly. I reckon the added transfer time from NAS to Plex is a bottleneck.
TBH I could manage without the NAS for everything except the CCTV as all other data is either shared from the Onedrive worldwide or available thru share from the PC within the house network.
I recently lost one of my HDDs in a second Synology NAS (ripped music), but recovered it from my various MP3 players. The music now also resides on One Drive and my PC HDD.
I have a number of options.
- buy a large 6/8TB drive, tansfer media to PC and continue using Plex and the PC. The headroom could be used for my current 'important stuff' as a safety net
- Media is ultimately replacable or available thru other sources (if a little annoying) so I could just replace the 2TB drive and transfer all my vital stuff across to the new drive. This option would potentially open up replacing it with a SSD rather than HDD.
- dont waste my dosh, wait til I have to.
Are enterprise quality drives worth it? they seem to be expensive to the point of it being cheaper to keep replacing them regularly than actually buying enterprise.
Do you reckon Plex will work better if the HDD is in the PC rather than on NAS and over the network?.
Sorry about the long message
I have a desktop which is 5 years old and its been running 24*7*365 and was wondering if its time to do a pre emptive disk change.
I have an SSD for the OS and a 2 TB drive with about 0.8TB of imporant stuff, and it is therefore mirrored on Onedrive, so in theory I should be ok .even if I lose the drive.
I also have a synology NAS drive with 2*4TB drives. One running my CCTV the other has my media (films & TV) on it. These are also 5 years old and have been running 24*7*365. CCTV drive is recording 24*7 and cyles the recordings meaning its running at around 95% disk capacity i.e. almost constant write and delete.
I have recently updated my TV and it cannot access the NAS like my previous one, so I am running Plex on the PC accessing the media from the NAS, which is a bit slow sometimes when Plex has to do the conversion on the fly. I reckon the added transfer time from NAS to Plex is a bottleneck.
TBH I could manage without the NAS for everything except the CCTV as all other data is either shared from the Onedrive worldwide or available thru share from the PC within the house network.
I recently lost one of my HDDs in a second Synology NAS (ripped music), but recovered it from my various MP3 players. The music now also resides on One Drive and my PC HDD.
I have a number of options.
- buy a large 6/8TB drive, tansfer media to PC and continue using Plex and the PC. The headroom could be used for my current 'important stuff' as a safety net
- Media is ultimately replacable or available thru other sources (if a little annoying) so I could just replace the 2TB drive and transfer all my vital stuff across to the new drive. This option would potentially open up replacing it with a SSD rather than HDD.
- dont waste my dosh, wait til I have to.
Are enterprise quality drives worth it? they seem to be expensive to the point of it being cheaper to keep replacing them regularly than actually buying enterprise.
Do you reckon Plex will work better if the HDD is in the PC rather than on NAS and over the network?.
Sorry about the long message
Your setup has become a bit complicated. Simple is always preferable to reduce probability of configuration error causing data loss.
However it sounds like you've got it all covered with backups, so you might not be quite at the point of worth spending money to consolidate and simplify.
Enterprise disks are more reliable in certain scenarios - typically longer life when under heavy load or continuous operation at a higher temperature. But they tend to cost more than multiple cheap drives. So if you are ok to have failures and recover then it can be cheaper to use cheap disks, but you have the hassle of changing disks when they fail and the risk your backup approach is misconfigured at the time a failure occurs.
Your CCTV use case is continuous write so that will tend to be less 'harsh' on the HDD than lots of individual HDD write/reads. So failure is less likely on them.
Most large data centres (eg Google) moved to cheap crappy HDDs many years ago as they realised it was cheaper and easier to just ensure data was backed up (replicated) so that failures could be tolerated. I once did a calculation for a storage system that would probably have 15,000 HDD failures per week - we even timed staff swapping them and realised we'd need to employ 4 full time technicians to just swap them out!
However it sounds like you've got it all covered with backups, so you might not be quite at the point of worth spending money to consolidate and simplify.
Enterprise disks are more reliable in certain scenarios - typically longer life when under heavy load or continuous operation at a higher temperature. But they tend to cost more than multiple cheap drives. So if you are ok to have failures and recover then it can be cheaper to use cheap disks, but you have the hassle of changing disks when they fail and the risk your backup approach is misconfigured at the time a failure occurs.
Your CCTV use case is continuous write so that will tend to be less 'harsh' on the HDD than lots of individual HDD write/reads. So failure is less likely on them.
Most large data centres (eg Google) moved to cheap crappy HDDs many years ago as they realised it was cheaper and easier to just ensure data was backed up (replicated) so that failures could be tolerated. I once did a calculation for a storage system that would probably have 15,000 HDD failures per week - we even timed staff swapping them and realised we'd need to employ 4 full time technicians to just swap them out!
... just noticed the plex question. Yes, it probably is slow from moving data around. You could do a number of things:
- put the original data on the PC. To avoid taking it off the NAS you might have some sync function on the NAS to sync to the PC (rsync or something similar - I've seen that on QNAP NASes)
- change to view things on your TV from the NAS using DLNA, not plex. might depend on the TV and the NAS, but this just directly streams the data from the NAS to the TV. Not recoding.
- Run Plex on the NAS - some NASes support this, not sure if yours do.
- put the original data on the PC. To avoid taking it off the NAS you might have some sync function on the NAS to sync to the PC (rsync or something similar - I've seen that on QNAP NASes)
- change to view things on your TV from the NAS using DLNA, not plex. might depend on the TV and the NAS, but this just directly streams the data from the NAS to the TV. Not recoding.
- Run Plex on the NAS - some NASes support this, not sure if yours do.
I have an Lenovo Server in my basement that I built 5 years ago with part I had lying around. It has all our tax documents and photos from the last 15 years on it but I have a back up on a separate PC. It also runs Plex for the house soo not that unlike your set up. I took a look recently and I had 4 drives, 2 1tb and 2 500Gb. They varied in age from 5 years to 9 years. For those not familiar with RAID, having mixed size HDDs is more than a little stupid but it was what I had at the time.
I bought WD Red (Plus) HDDs and put Windows 10 on instead of Windows Server 2012 I had been running. The Red plus HDDs are made for NAS and are suitable for your needs. This is where it gets a little complicated though. WD got caught making WD Reds with SMR on some versions. This is slow and not fit for what you want. Once discovered, they created the WD Plus drives so you would know they were CMR. But, they are phasing out the SMR drives and going back to CMR across the red range. That means you may see retailers with old stock selling Reds as if they are new CMR. Or, you will see Plus branded drives. I bought mine from Amazon with the guarantee they were CMR.
I bought WD Red (Plus) HDDs and put Windows 10 on instead of Windows Server 2012 I had been running. The Red plus HDDs are made for NAS and are suitable for your needs. This is where it gets a little complicated though. WD got caught making WD Reds with SMR on some versions. This is slow and not fit for what you want. Once discovered, they created the WD Plus drives so you would know they were CMR. But, they are phasing out the SMR drives and going back to CMR across the red range. That means you may see retailers with old stock selling Reds as if they are new CMR. Or, you will see Plus branded drives. I bought mine from Amazon with the guarantee they were CMR.
eein said:
... just noticed the plex question. Yes, it probably is slow from moving data around. You could do a number of things:
- put the original data on the PC. To avoid taking it off the NAS you might have some sync function on the NAS to sync to the PC (rsync or something similar - I've seen that on QNAP NASes)
- change to view things on your TV from the NAS using DLNA, not plex. might depend on the TV and the NAS, but this just directly streams the data from the NAS to the TV. Not recoding.
- Run Plex on the NAS - some NASes support this, not sure if yours do.
I'm worried that the NAS wont cope with DNLA,. cos as well as utilising all the disk space the CCTV utilises all the CPU (3 cameras recording 24x7 and I am also logged into the CCTV app on NAS monitoring the three cameras real time on one of my computer screens (I have 3))..- put the original data on the PC. To avoid taking it off the NAS you might have some sync function on the NAS to sync to the PC (rsync or something similar - I've seen that on QNAP NASes)
- change to view things on your TV from the NAS using DLNA, not plex. might depend on the TV and the NAS, but this just directly streams the data from the NAS to the TV. Not recoding.
- Run Plex on the NAS - some NASes support this, not sure if yours do.
The NAS solution is 'old solution' to my problems of sharing media and files and backups. I originally had 2x4 TB raid for media and file backups linked to the TV and anywhere in the house network. It was open externally, but was constrained by the upload speed, so apart from basic stuff ,external access was a little pointless as it was just too slow.
When I got 365 licence and the accompanying 1TB of onedrive, all my importan files went onto the PC and Onedrive mirrored - this also is a far far better and faster solution while on the go than external access to the NAS.
Then when I got the CCTV I de-raided the disks and separated the volumes into Media and CCTV.
TBH apart from the CCTV I dont really have any need for the NAS's anymore, as the PC can do everything else with enough disk space put in it.
I think explaining all this has helped me work out what I should do.
xeny said:
DNLA is pretty low load if you've got half sensible file formats - I used it for ages with a DS211J, which is far wimpier than anything remotely recent.
Yup - I have a nearly 13 year old (!) QNAP NAS that is successfully doing DLNA duties for me. It has been running 24*7 with only a fan replacement in that time.xeny said:
DNLA is pretty low load if you've got half sensible file formats - I used it for ages with a DS211J, which is far wimpier than anything remotely recent.
I have the wimpy 211j and like I said its running >90% CPU just handling the CCTV. Now, whether that's cos 'it can' utilise >90% or whether it 'needs' >90% I don't know.sparkyhx said:
When I got 365 licence and the accompanying 1TB of onedrive, all my importan files went onto the PC and Onedrive mirrored - this also is a far far better and faster solution while on the go than external access to the NAS.
I also use 365. A lot of cloud hosting review websites seem to miss the fact that it's 6TB of storage, not just 1TB. At least it's 6x1TB. While you can't (easily) sync form 1 PC to multiple accounts, most NASes can. So I put all files on my NAS at home and then have multiple sync jobs running on the NAS to the multiple OneDrive accounts. With a 2 way sync it means I can use either home network access or general OneDrive to do stuff. However I still keep a physical static occasional full backup on a portable drive that lives in my drawer at work. I don't fully trust cloud reliability or the sync mechanisms on NASes.Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff