A few questions before I purchase

[Wafflebird]

Good day to all and thanks in advance for your input.

So....... My initial reason for wanting a NAS was for some redundant back up and to clean my desk off of external HDD's. I know that a NAS is not back-up option so to speak so I will also have a 4TB back-up drive for all my critical information. I have went through the selection process between Synology, QNAP and Asustor. At the end of the day for me QNAP seems top be the best rounded with an HDMI. I am looking at the TVS-471 as I want to go with the best I can afford at the time, as we all know everything gets outdated quickly these days. The TVS-463 looks to be a good option as well but after speaking with the QNAP pre-sales team I was steered away from this as it was indicated to me that not all of their apps are working so well with this new processor (AMD) architecture. I have also read there are more than a few reports out there on temperature issues with some of these.

I do have a few questions however.

First regarding the HDMI, is this only for video or does it also carry the sound out as well. The information I have read has not been clear on this. Does the audio go out the HDMI or does it need to go out the SPDIF?

Also due to the expense of the NAS I may only be able to start out with two 6TB drives and set it up as a RAID 1. My long term goal is a RAID 5 set-up with 4 6TB drives. As I understand it it is best to do this one drive at a time, is this your input as well?

My main use of this will be for photography raw file back up and a home server, although to be honest I am still learning what all these devices can do.

I really look forward to your input and forgive the very basic questions being asked as I am sure most of you are way ahead of my understanding of these products. I am very excited about learning how to use this device.

Thanks again,

BC

 

[Trexx]

Hi BC,

The HDMI port is v1.4a spec, so it carries both audio/video information. I have a smaller QNAP (TS-453Pro) and run the HDMI from the QNAP to my AV receiver, which then runs HDMI to my TV.

Personally, I get nervous when getting to the 6TB drive sizes due to rebuild times. If you lose a drive, you are probably dealing with DAYS to rebuild the drive onto a new one. During that rebuild time, you are at risk for complete data loss if you lose your other original drive. The other drawback, is that while you have greater capacity, you are still limited in terms of IOPs to probably 80-100 per drive. So your IOPs / GB drops significantly in terms over performance when you have multiple competing I/O requests.

I would go to RAID-10 when you get to 4 drives, you take the same capacity loss as RAID-6, but get much better performance if you plan on staying with 6TB drives.

I run (4) 3TB drives in Raid-5 on my QNAP.

Here is a great document to get a better feal of what the QNAP can do.

http://files.qnap.com/news/pressresource/datasheet/TVS-x71Series_51000-023762-RS_EN(C)_20150127.pdf

 

[kamina]

From what I gathered in QNAP's documentation there is no migration path from RAID 1 to 5, if that's the case then prepare to have to rotate your data through external backups or similar to add an extra disk. However I do echo what Trexx said, personally I would not go with 6TB drives and RAID 5.

I can understand what you are getting at by going with a high end model for longetivity, however when doing so it's important to understand where that longevity could be coming from. Most of the cheaper QNAP models such as a 453 pro will already easily saturate gigabit links and handle most things you through at it, the difference between that, and the model you are looking at would come when you have tens of clients and link aggregation (expensive switches and you will never have that kind of load at home). For longetivity I'd say a model with 10GB ethernet would be a better bet since one day a few years down the road you will be able to buy cheaper switches to support it and then you will be able to benefit from the speed even when you have less clients...

But now we are talking about a price difference where you could by a 451 / 453 now and the current similar model in a few years and pay less then the expensive model costs now... Personally I'd need a better reason to take that path, rather I'd do what I'm doing now; get a cheaper model and a few years down the road get a replacement from the sweet price point. I can still keep the old NAS for online backups / high availability so it's win win.

 

[Wafflebird]

Trexx/kamina,

Thank you very much for your thoughts and responses. As I am really new to this can you please help me understand the thoughts on going with the 6TB drives? I am unclear on the reasoning on not going with them and I know you have sound logic behind your responses, I am trying to get maximum data space, the 8TB drives are still stratospherically priced and may suffer from the same issues you raise here. . Also I have to say in line with what you are saying I am looking really hard at the TS-651 at the moment. I could get it and this would allow me a few more drives for the difference in price. To be clear at the moment I have one 2TB drive and a 1TB drive currently both around 75% capacity plus a large Lightroom library as well, say another TB. Now I do not have any of my movies on anything yet and we have a bunch, more DVD than Blu-Rays but a ton of Blu-rays as well. I could go with the TV-651 4 gig ram model for just under $700. Also a contender is the TS-653 pro 8 Gig version but it is at a $1003 which would knock out my additional drive purchase option.

As I am continuing my photography passion (I have two photos in a pretty prestigious museum that made the final selection currently) it is my plan to use the device as a web-server, once I have my site built (another thing to learn which I love doing) so this is another reason for this move. As a professional I am a heavy construction equipment salesman (CAT). I have many machinery brochures that I usually keep on my phone. As I work and download new brochures it would be much easier for me to copy them to the NAS as I only update my phone to match the computer every month or two at best, this is another reason, and as my sales file folder is massive I have no way of being able (nor do I have the desire to) to put that much data on a phone, it would be extremely nice to be able to have access to all of this data all the time however. Also a ton of music on CD that I could download and listen to all of the time.

I am selecting the QNAP for the HDMI out (I have a nice Yamaha network receiver 9.2 system), I have looked at Synology pretty hard but the ones I am interested in don't do transcoding and no Synology have HDMI out. I know this (HDMI out) is not a requirement to play movies over the network but it seems the QNAP hardware is simply better for the price and after playing around A LOT on the free demos I simply like the QNAP OS better which is probably not the norm. Asustor is a strong contender as well but I simply like the QNAP OS better at the end of the day.

So again when possible a little more info on the concern on the 6TB drives and your thoughts on my selections of the 671, 653 , or the 651 knowing what my long term requirements are.

Thanks again, I had pasted my initial message over at the QNAP forums at around the same time yesterday and no response as of yet so your responses here are very much appreciated.

Many thanks,

BC

 

[Trexx]

If you are looking at the TS-x5x family, I would go with the x53 series over the x51. You get more for the dollar (4x1 GbE ports vs. 2, 4-cores w/2MB cache vs 2-cores w/1MB cache, etc.) In terms of the # of drives, on the x53 series (can't remember for the x51), you do have the option to expand capacity later via an expansion chassis (5 or 8 additional drives) via your USB3 port. That said, if you can get the 6 drive chassis, even if you don't fill it all day one, probably better performance using internal storage than over USB3.

The issues around 6TB drives really boils down to the following... all drives will fail at some point.

So say you have a 4-drive RAID-5 config (setup I am running) with 6TB drives. You can sustain 1 drive failure without losing all your data. When one of the 6-TB drives fails, you no longer have lost your "fail-safe" capability at that point. If you lose another hard drive, you data on the NAS is gone (excluding your backups to external drives/S3, etc.).

So your HDD fails, and you order another one from Amazon which gets there in 1-2 days. Then you pull out the failed 6TB drive, and replace it with the new one. At that point the NAS recognizes the failed drive swap, and starts to rebuild the data on the 6TB drive. This rebuild time will take days to maybe even a week (depending on NAS, RAID type, HDD Size and performance, NAS load, etc.). So say it takes 5 days to rebuild that drive, at this point you are been at risk for a week (including Amazon shipping time). If anything happens to any one of the remaining 3 hard drives during that week, your data is toast. And remember, in most cases all of the drives have been running the same amount of time, so there is a certain amount of chance that another might go.

The bigger the capacity of the drive, the longer the rebuild time is when it fails, and the more risk you incurr because of it. Also 6TB drives are relatively new at this point, and there isn't alot of track record on their longevity.

Backblaze.com has a real good article they post showing hard drive failure rates for their environment (size, brands, # of failures).

I am on the QNAP forums as well, so sorry I missed it there

Hopefully this makes things clearer.
t.

 

[sfx2000]

I would agree with all here - 6TB drives are relatively new - and RAID5 is probably not the best route to go...

I went with RAID10 on 4 3TB drives - syncing the drives took about 8 hours on a TS-453Pro, vs. 28 hours on a RAID5 config...

 

[Wafflebird]

Trexx,

Many thanks again. On my phone so will keep it short. So the TS-653 is $777 for 2 gig and right at 1K for the 8 gig. Knowing my usage criteria would it not be better to just spend another $150 and go for the 671 4 gig at the end of the day? Unfortunately there are still no reviews up on the X71 series that I could find when last I looked. I really could start out with 2 drives. I guess the real question is will I ever see any difference with my planed usage. I don't want to over spend but longevity and long term usage is really important. I would like to see at least a 5 year cycle of life before I would want to consider an upgrade.

 

[Wafflebird]

So if I am understanding correctly (could be off as well) a raid 10 is basically like a double raid 1? So 4 6TB drives would net me approximately 12 Tb space as there would be two 6TB drives for storage and one drive mirroring each of those correct? Faster rebuild time but less storage space.

Also any thought on the HGST deskstar vs. WD Reds?

I know I am asking a lot of questions and am grateful for your time and input.

Thanks,

 

[Trexx]

The memory upgrade is easy to do on the x53 family of boxes, and majority of QNAP's I have dealt with. I ordered my box with 2GB and upgraded it to 16GB (non-supported config, but works for about $100 for the DIMMs, so I would by the 2GB version and order the 8/16GB upgrade kit. Takes about 5 minutes to take out 3 screws, take cover off and install the DIMMs.

So for $850-900 you could get an 8/16GB TS-653. The TVS-671 you are looking at contains the entry level Dual Core CPU. The main benefit of the TVS-x71 family is 10GbE, 4k output for QvPC & trancoding (not for XMBC/Plex direct playback as far as I know) and beefier CPU capability.

In terms of your use case: Lightroom storage, File retrieval remote, Website hosting, etc. I think either would handle that. If you don't have commercial internet service at your house I would probably recommend going with a Web hosting site for hosting your website as the cost is pretty minimal, and your service level is going to be much higher.

That is what my wife and I did for our Adoption Outreach site (although initially I started of trying to host myself on QNAP). That way when you are working on your nas, firmware upgrades, etc. you aren't taking your website offline. Or when your internet provider has an outtage. You could still use the QNAP for hosting say a development/test environment of you site too.

In terms of RAID 10, it is basically striping + mirroring. So you get the best performance (w/redundancy), but take a 50% storage hit. In a 4-drive config, this gives you the same capacity as RAID-6 will (which supports 2 drive failure vs. RAID-5 1 drive failure).

I would recommend the Hitachi Desktar NAS models. I picked up the 3TB ones from Amazon when I got my NAS and have been happy with them. Generally better performance than WD Reds due to being 7200 RPM drives. Here is a review on the 4TB Hitachi model. http://www.storagereview.com/hgst_4tb_deskstar_nas_hdd_review

So if you are using 6TB drives, yes you would get 12TB (pre formatting) of space in a (4) drive Raid-10 config.

 

[Wafflebird]

OK got it thanks so much for the input.

Now for a bit of "The fly in thew ointment" so to speak. I called the QNAP sales team again today just to further discuss the opportunity (I do this probably too much when I make a large purchase, well large for me anyway) and the gentleman I spoke to today was much more positive on the TVS-X63 series machines. I am open to what would work the best with the best price for me and was initially looking into this series. The main use will be for photography raw file storage and working with Lightroom and Photoshop.

Do either of you have any detracting reasoning on staying away from this series machine? I know the architecture on the processor is different but the pre-sales guy I spoke to today at length (Really seemed to know what he was talking about) was unaware of any such issues. The 2 HDMI out thing really isn't going to do anything for me that I can think of but I can get a six bay machine 8 gigs of ram 2.41 GHz processor for $999.

Your honest thoughts on this?

In speaking with QNAP and you here today I have kind of narrowed it down to the TS-653 Pro and the 671 (for the price difference of the 4 to 6 bay unit I feel it is worth it to go to 6, I may never use it all but..........). The pre-sales Gent made a strong case for the 653 to me.

I am not confused (Although I do need to keep checking on the numbers of the models to not confuse myself) I just do not want to overlook the 663 based on what could have been an unwarranted comment.

Like always many thanks.

BC

 

[Trexx]

Here is a review of TVS-663. https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/QNAP/TVS-463/ If you skip to the conclusion, the basic gist is nice box, but premium price compared to 453Pro. The 453Pro's run at 2.0 w/"turboboost" up to 2.4.

Just to clarify, are you planning to run Lightroom and Photoshop in QvPC, or just storing their data files/raw files for them on the NAS?

For lightroom file storage, you probably aren't going to see any difference in performance as your NW will probably be your bottleneck point. If you were running heavier VM's on the box w/4k output capabillity ( I have played with Win10 & Win8 vms on my 453 and they worked fine) or need 10GbE capability (which is NOT a cheap upgrade btw in terms of the add-on QNAP card or 10GbE switches) then you probably are better off with the x63/x71 series.

But I am not hearing that those are your needs.. it is basic file serving and maybe some web hosting which the x53 handles fine.

The only potential downside I have heard on the x63 series is because it used the AMD chipset, it does use a different version of QPKGs than the Intel based QNAPs use and for some things the x63 packages are not out yet. That will likely improve over time for at least the QNAP written packages, but may be a longer timeline on the community built ones especially since it is new and has limited marketshare right now.

 

[sfx2000]

I think the one plus for the 463 is that one can drop in a 10GigE card...

the 453Pro has 4 NIC's onboard, the 463 has two, but it is more USB3 and an extra HDMI...

QPKG's shouldn't be that much different, as they're both x86-64 - QNAP may limit the initial QPKG list, not because of AMD, but just because it's relatively new, and QA takes some time...

 

[kamina]

Being able to drop in a NiC is a positive thing, though if the selection is limited it could be expensive?

Here is the problem with raid 5:

In raid 5 the bits (your data consists of) is split between multiple drives. If you try one disk you will not find any complete files because they are torn into pieces and placed all around the place. One of the drives is for parity, meaning if you get a read error the controller can check what the real value is, and if you lose one drive everything is still accessable (slower).

Harddrives have a specified rate at which they can encounter io errors even under normal conditions. For expensive enterprise drives this is about 10 times lower then for the drives we use in our nas devices (like WD reds). If a drive dies and there is a read error before you get the replacement (not so likely unless you use it a lot) or while rebuilding the raid (more likely since rebuild just reads data from the remaining drives for hours or days) it can just mak the whole raid array as degraded and call it a day. That would leave you with your backups for recovery... The bigger the disks the more reading and longer the rebuild, and the more likely this happens. The specified io rate for a 2TB and 6TB disk is the same but 6TB is already close to the specified error rate.

I'm still going raid 5 on my next nas but with 2TB drives and good backups.

If lightroom is like aperture then you'll only be able to store masters on the nas and the faster one will not make a meaningfull difference. Video is another story if you can get a 10gbit connection.

 

[Wafflebird]

Trexx/sfx2000,

I will still process the photos on the PC as I have an i7 machine I use for that. I am actually going to go with a 6 bay machine I think, the price difference really is not that much and it will allow additional storage space for the future.

The TVS-663 looks more attractive with time. I think I will go with two HGST 6TB drives, with the understanding of the comments above taken in.

Just out of curiosity what are some of the better more popular "Community built" packages on the QNAP NAS's?

I will look a little more before making my final decision, knowing me there very likely may be more questions still..................................

There is a good review of the TVS-463 here:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/QNAP/TVS-463/

Once I make my decision I will post back here after having enough time to dive into whichever one I get. Should you have any further thoughts I really look forward to haring them.

I find this very exciting primarily as it gives me something to learn about and further educate myself on.

Thanks,

 

[sfx2000]

The only thing that would hold back the TVS-x63 is the price premium compared to the TS-x53Pro - it's a jump up in price.

Whatever you pick - if you're on Win7 - give iSCSI a try, it's built in, and is hella faster than a SMB mount.

WRT - community packages - quality varies, some are really good, some, well... I think the key thing though, is run only what you need - nothing more than what is absolutely required.. these are not big processors compared to desktops.

See my notes over on my thread, as many of them would apply to the x63 as well...

 

[Wafflebird]

The only thing that would hold back the TVS-x63 is the price premium compared to the TS-x53Pro - it's a jump up in price.

Whatever you pick - if you're on Win7 - give iSCSI a try, it's built in, and is hella faster than a SMB mount.

WRT - community packages - quality varies, some are really good, some, well... I think the key thing though, is run only what you need - nothing more than what is absolutely required.. these are not big processors compared to desktops.

See my notes over on my thread, as many of them would apply to the x63 as well...

I am currently running Win 8 on an Asus laptop I7 8 gig ram. So the If iCSi should just be enabled when I set the Nas up for the first time in the options? Is there anything I need to do on the laptop as well in order make this work? Does this just enable faster transfer speed and/or other benefits?

I know these are basic questions and I appreciate your input.

Thanks,
BC

 

[sfx2000]

I am currently running Win 8 on an Asus laptop I7 8 gig ram. So the If iCSi should just be enabled when I set the Nas up for the first time in the options? Is there anything I need to do on the laptop as well in order make this work? Does this just enable faster transfer speed and/or other benefits?

I know these are basic questions and I appreciate your input.

Thanks,
BC

Hmmm... with a laptop... but doesn't hurt to give it a try - the iSCSI initiator is built into Win8

http://www.servethehome.com/setup-windows-8-iscsi-initiator-3-minutes/

On the QNAP QTS, one has to enable it (it's turned off by default) - go to Storage Manager, and they've got a Wizard that'll walk you thru the setup on the QNAP side...

Once set up, yes, it's much faster than SMB/Network Share, to the OS it's basically a direct attachment to the storage pool, so there's less overhead..

sfx

 

[Wafflebird]

Well it looks like I am two weeks out from the purchase so this gives me some more time to study up. If I am understanding what you are saying, just don't load the NAS up with a bunch of applications that would just become bloatware. I am really not interested in doing anything more with KODI/QNAP Video Station other than playing my own movies. It seems there is quite a bit of questionable things that could be done with regards to free TV and movies. No offense to anyone that makes use of these features but I am unsure of the legality of it and I would not want to be made an example of so................... I tend to not download much on my PC as I don't care for all of the crap that tends to come with programs in general. I personally despise how "Easy" some programs like to include something else if you do not "Un-check" some box, next thing you know you have some "Tool Bar" that you really didn't want or necessarily "ask" for. We get so used to just clicking accept that if not careful you get something else.

Looking at the TVS-463 reviews the performance of the machine is quite good. They are running a special/price drop on it now for $999 for the 8 gig TVS-663 which seems reasonable as I was budgeting a little over $1000 ($1149) when I was working this out. SO I am looking at $1608 plus shipping at the moment. I will use these two weeks to try and refine my understanding.


One question on the iSCSI, if I do that will it change the way any of the other PC's/devices in the house "see" the NAS? Doing a little research I see what it does as in general it "streamlines" the connection from the PC to the NAS and treats it like a direct attached storage (I know there is some more to it than this just generalizing) just curious if it will affect any other devices connection to it. We have three tablets (one IOS), an Xbox One, PS3, and a desktop all running in the home (Desktop is Win 7). Primarily only one PC (Mine) will be accessing it regularly as I see it, but once I start to load all our movies onto it this could change.

 

[Trexx]

In regards to iSCSi... no. It is just another protocol/method of connecting to the NAS. So for example, on some of my media folders I have them shared out via SMB (MS protocal), AFP (Mac Protocol), and NFS (Linux protocol). So while they all point to the same folder/files, it is just different ways for outside devices to "talk" to the NAS.

iSCSI is slightly different from above. SMB, AFP, and NFS all deal with the NAS on a file-based level, where-as iSCSI is dealing with the NAS on a block-based level. So to use iSCSI you have to create a seperate iSCSI storage volume. The data in that storage volume is not going to be accessible via other "file-based" methods (based on my understanding, I haven't used iSCSI so far). That doesn't prevent/preclude you though from access the other data in your NAS via standard file-based methods.

So you could connect to your lightroom/photoshop data via iSCSI for example, connect to your movies/music files via SMB on your Win7 computer, while your TV connects to the NAS say via Kodi and NFS.

In terms of media streaming, to your tablets, XB1, PS3, etc... that are many ways to do that. Probably one of the SIMPLEST ways is Plex, but there are many other options as well (uPNP, DLNA, etc.)

 

[sfx2000]

One question on the iSCSI, if I do that will it change the way any of the other PC's/devices in the house "see" the NAS? Doing a little research I see what it does as in general it "streamlines" the connection from the PC to the NAS and treats it like a direct attached storage (I know there is some more to it than this just generalizing) just curious if it will affect any other devices connection to it. We have three tablets (one IOS), an Xbox One, PS3, and a desktop all running in the home (Desktop is Win 7). Primarily only one PC (Mine) will be accessing it regularly as I see it, but once I start to load all our movies onto it this could change.

iSCSI will not change how other devices/applications see the shares, so you should be fine there.