NAS beginner questions

[edgedemon]

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Im currently looking at a new year tidy up and sorting out my storage once and for all.
I currently run WHS 2011 with extra raid cards and 2 additional PSU's to power all my drives, under my desk is a mess right now.

I want a NAS to store photo's (600GB) music (7TB) TV (6TB) Films (14TB).

Initially I was looking at the Synology DS1815+ but I have seen some very good reviews for the QNAP TS-853 Pro so Im stuck in the QNAP vs Synology debate now and I saw Anandtech mention the QNAP solution for media transcoding as it is hardware based.

What Id like my NAS to do

WHS can't handle more than 1 person streaming a movie at the same time, it hammers the disks, Im presuming because of JBOD so that is a key consideration for any solution I buy, bandwidth is not an issue, more than one user being able to watch a movie at the same time is key.

Synology have their own RAID solution which looks good as I can use different sized disks with no wastage, does QNAP have anything like that as that might force my hand?


Being able to FTP files onto my NAS from external locations is important.

I never have, but maybe running a VM would be good, purely for experimentation/learning

My current set up hosts my photo's for lightroom, Id like this to continue.

Has or is QNAP catching up now as diskstation 5.1 is getting great reviews, what is the day to day usability of QTS 4.1???




Thanks in advance

 

[thiggins]

With that much data, you should also have a solid backup plan. You should not be running JBOD or RAID0 in any case.

Any of the NASes you are considering will be able to support multiple video streams.

More info here
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-features/32517-deciding-between-synology-a-qnap-take-2

 

[edgedemon]

Cheers for that link.
All I backup are the photos online, I have 2 local backups of vital files, but due to the amount of multimedia files, backup solutions online are very expensive. For that sort of cash I might as well just re-rip everything as not only does it cost a lot to backup, it would probably take weeks to restore 30TB from online storage

 

[stevech]

RAID and JBOD have no backup. That's assured data loss someday, likely NOT due to drive failure.

lots of ways to do backup to independent media.
I use USB3 plus other disk drives/flash drives for VIP data.

For consumers, I don't advocate use of 4+ drive RAID. Rather than 2 large drives as independent volumes, plus automated external backup. I also use the NAS's built-in versioning backup for when I hose up a file.

I don't use "cloud" storage for other than photo sharing.

Synology and likely QNAP have both FTP client and FTP server. Don't open FTP to the internet via your router.

 

[AdvHomeServer]

To me, RAID is for fault tolerance, not backup. RAID 1 might be though of as backup, but if your controller goes, so does your data access. Or you have to break mirrors to get at data. To me, RAID 1 is the 2nd backup, the one you find you need when the main backup turns up bad.

RAID won't help if the image of a file or two gets corrupt or is accidentally ruined or deleted.

Thus, a backup plan separate from RAID is, to me, a necessity. USB 3 would be good for that.

I would also avoid third party cloud storage for anything important or private. Assume it will be lost when the cloud company goes bankrupt or goofballs will have free access to all your files.

I've never worked with that much data. Good luck. Sounds expensive to do right.

 

[edgedemon]

I'm going to go for a QNAP TS-853.
Migration plan is to buy 1 x 6TB drive for the initial set up of the NAS and migrate data across drive by drive from my WHS. To start with, after migration is complete I will have 6 drives of varying sizes in what I guess will be a JBOD config.
This will leave me with 2 NAS slots to buy drives and by moving data around on the other drives I should be able to free up a drive to give me 3 drives for raid if I decide to go down that route.

Backups are messy, I'm thinking of local usb for vital files and crashplan online for everything else. There really isn't many options for backing up 30TB of data in a cost effective manner.

 

[stevech]

When I had my own TV DVR (SageTV) I had a very large set of videos. Indeed, we never watched any of them a 2nd time!

Same for a collection of RIP'd movies.

So consider these vs. the 30TB of stuff you have!

Beware 6TB drives... early adopter syndrome.

 

[AdvHomeServer]

When I had my own TV DVR (SageTV) I had a very large set of videos. Indeed, we never watched any of them a 2nd time!

Same for a collection of RIP'd movies.

So consider these vs. the 30TB of stuff you have!

Beware 6TB drives... early adopter syndrome.

Have to agree. I'm using a spare USB drive to copy movies from my Dish DVR for future reference. I find collecting is easier than watching. I'm growing a nice collection of movies I will probably never watch a 2nd time (or a first time). I guess with kids, though, everything changes. It's just the opposite for some movies.

 

[stevech]

How do you beat the copy-once protection on movies and premium TV?

 

[AdvHomeServer]

How do you beat the copy-once protection on movies and premium TV?

Dish DVR permits you to connect a USB powered USB drive to the back of the unit. It's reformatted automatically. Then you select which videos to copy over from the main DVR. It deletes the copied video on the main DVR after the copy. You can't watch the copied videos on non-Dish equipment. You can watch the copied videos any time and move them back to the main DVR any time. It's a free feature for a DVR.

For an additional 1 time household fee of about $40, you can take the USB drive and attach it to a non-DVR receiver and show the copied videos. You can also use the USB drive as a DVR, but without time shifting.

Anything you can DVR can be moved to/from the USB drive. Basically, you're just expanding the capacity of the drive on your DVR without replacing it.

 

[stevech]

Dish's scheme - does it allow you to copy to USB all videos on their disk, then, when you have to get a new set top box, you can restore to the new box? I HATE losing recordings when lovely TimeWarnerCable has to guess that the box is bad and replace it over my objections. And their guess is usually wrong.

I now insist that they leave the "old" box for a week to see if the "new" box fixes the problem.

I read that TiVo users have devised hacks to do real backups and expansion.

I keep thinking that TiVo will go belly-up but year after year they survive. Last time I was in a Best Buy (yikes) the TiVo selection was spartan. Whatever that means. I think Dish used to resell TiVos.

 

[AdvHomeServer]

Dish's scheme - does it allow you to copy to USB all videos on their disk, then, when you have to get a new set top box, you can restore to the new box? I HATE losing recordings when lovely TimeWarnerCable has to guess that the box is bad and replace it over my objections. And their guess is usually wrong.

My old Dish DVR 612 wore out and I replaced it. I moved all recordings to a spare powered USB drive before unplugging it. The recordings were available on the new DVR just by plugging it in. I'm now using a dish DVR 722 with usb overflow storage.

I have no experience with TIVO and don't expect to get any.

Based on what you wrote, I Googled TIVO. From the snippets, it looks like TIVO owners have been creative. First impression is kind of Rube Goldberg stuff. Not worth the effort, not to mention potentially illegal. I'd rather watch a rerun off Dish Anywhere or the network sites.