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Need advice upgrading to a "real" NAS

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If I was going pick a NAS, QNAP and Synology is probably what I would use. The 3 years bothers me.
I just feel a server is a better long term solution.
 
If I was going pick a NAS, QNAP and Synology is probably what I would use. The 3 years bothers me.
I just feel a server is a better long term solution.

I agree, a server is a better long term solution for big pockets, big business and with an always current O/S. :D
 
I've been working from home since 2003, and in 2010, I sold my old company and started my own. One of the things I had to do is setup a server, which housed all of the software we use and data which grows daily. Since my partner is across the country, it was also setup for him to login through RDP to access our software and data. Since then, I've outsourced everything, but before I did that, all of our data was backed up locally, and 2 additional places offsite. The most important data was our SQL Server database, which was 1 file that was approximately 20GB (small number, but also small company). Now, with everything outsourced, backups are made continuously throughout the day and is stored in 4 locations throughout the US. I know the importance of having a secure, up to date backup of our data because it was a federal regulation and was audited every 2 years.

Today, I'm not looking for a solution similar to this. I'm looking for something to backup my personal information, pictures, movies, and other personal files. Nothing that will have me thrown in jail and/or fined and shutdown if I don't comply with our disaster and recovery plan. I worked in the computer industry back when a 286 with a 40MB hard drive was badass, and tape backups were awesome, so I know the importance of having a backup of all your data, similar to having insurance. Some data has more importance than other data, just like you need more insurance coverage on your house than you do on your car.

My data that's most critical is taken care of by a 3rd party and is guaranteed to be restored up to the last hour if there ever were any catastrophe. Currently, I'm not looking for anything like this.

I want a NAS that I can store personal data on. I have a desktop system (which I just finished building) that has a 2TB drive in it, a 1TB drive, 2 256GB Samsung 840 Pros in RAID0 holding my applications, and an M.2 PCIe SSD holding my OS (both of my TB drives hold my data files along with a 2 TB WD MyCloud device, which will be replaced by this NAS), 2 Windows laptops, 1 MacBook Air, an Android phone, 2 iPhones, 2 iPads, 2 Android tablets, and an Nvidia Shield Tablet. Not only do I want to be able to backup data from all of these devices, I also want it to be able to be used as a media server that can stream music, video (1080P & 4K content), and that I can access from outside my network.

The reason I wanted to run a RAID system is for increased performance through striping and redundancy in case a drive goes out. I used a single drive NAS in the past, hooked into my router, but my drive died and I sent it to Seagate to recover the data. I don't want to do that again so I figured mirrored drives that can be hot swapped could avoid this. I figured striping drives would give me better read performance for streaming 4K content over my network to a TV.

Now, hopefully you have a better idea of what kind of backup I want to do, the features I want from a NAS, and I don't want anything proprietary. I would like it to hold drives that I could buy and use from wherever I want.
 
Sorry that was so long. I thought it might be best if you knew as much as possible before making any kind of recommendation.
 
Since you had a network in the past with backups and offsite storage and all the problems associated with the day to day work to keep it running you have the basic idea.

The problem you ran into is you did not have backups of your NAS. As long as your house does not burn down or someone does not steal your computer backups, onsite backups will cover you. It is easy to talk about backups but it is hard to maintain them day to day.

You need to pick a new NAS. How big you need only you can decide. If 4 or 6 terabyte is enough then I would buy 2 matching drives and run a mirror(RAID1). Choose Segate or Western Digital drives built for a NAS or server not the cheap PC drives. If you need bigger, then RAID5 or RAID10 is in order but at this point I would switch to a server. RAID is complicated and takes a lot of processing power and there are many different qualities of RAID cards. Some I trust and some I don’t trust.

No matter what you need a good APC UPS battery backup is required but especially if you run RAID. Don’t plug unnecessary devices like monitors into the APC as it will shorten the battery time. Setup auto shutdown if you expect long power outages.

Just make sure you have solid backups. BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP.

With that said you should be good to go. Happy backups.
 
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Since you had a network in the past with backups and offsite storage and all the problems associated with the day to day work to keep it running you have the basic idea.

The problem you ran into is you did not have backups of your NAS. As long as your house does not burn down or someone does not steal your computer backups, onsite backups will cover you. It is easy to talk about backups but it is hard to maintain them day to day.

You need to pick a new NAS. How big you need only you can decide. If 4 or 6 terabyte is enough then I would buy 2 matching drives and run a mirror(RAID1). Choose Segate or Western Digital drives built for a NAS or server not the cheap PC drives. If you need bigger, then RAID5 or RAID10 is in order but at this point I would switch to a server. RAID is complicated and takes a lot of processing power and there are many different qualities of RAID cards. Some I trust and some I don’t trust.

No matter what you need a good APC UPS battery backup is required but especially if you run RAID. Don’t plug unnecessary devices like monitors into the APC as it will shorten the battery time. Setup auto shutdown if you expect long power outages.

Just make sure you have solid backups. BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP.

With that said you should be good to go. Happy backups.

Thanks for the info. I never really had a problem with the backups of my data, I outsourced everything because the software we use required a newer version of SQL, R2. So, instead of going through the hassle of upgrading everything, I thought I would let someone else deal it. Plus, with my business, there are lots of regulations to stay in compliance and the company hosting everything has tons of technology and data centers which will always stay in compliance.

Since this is all personal data, I'm not under the scrutiny of the SEC which makes it more lax. One of the things that made me decide to upgrade in the first place is seeing an ad for a QNAP device that said it can stream 4K video across the network and it had either 2 or 4 LAN ports, upgradable to 10GBe. I have 45 devices on my network at a time so speed is very important. I haven't looked into those devices in depth yet, that's why I'm here asking, but do they come without drives? Is there a benefit to load them up with TB SSDs?
 
I saw some ads for NAS without drives. If you buy them with drives they should be fine. I just usually run the manufactures diags on the individual drives before I build a RAID. By that I mean Seagate or WD diags. I want to find problems up front. Old habits.

Having 45 devices can be a lot depends on demand. I would also want to maximize the memory cache in the NAS.
 
Synology has supported 5 year old products with new software releases.
Probably QNAP as well since they compete with vigor.
 
Thanks for the info guys. QNAP I've seen advertised quite as bit lately, which means they're selling more products now, making more money, and can afford to advertise as much as they do. People must be buying their products for a reason. Now, I've started seeing WD ads for NASA devices that look very simple to the QNAP, so they're trying to jump on the bandwagon. I just don't like buying a product built to imitate someone else's trying to capture some marketshare. QNAP and Synology I see and read about the most, so I'm guessing they're going to end up being like the AMD/ATI and Nvidia of the NAS industry, at least for the time being. I'm assuming the features are similar, but they're using different manufacturers for their processors. I haven't read through the details of the different models yet, that's why I'm getting a little input first. Tom's Hardware and a few other sites have lists of what they believe are the best NAS devices on the market. I just wanted to try and avoid reading too much into it because I'm afraid I'll suffer from what we call it at my company, "paralysis through analysis," which is basically reading into something so much, studying it so much, and analyzing it so much that you wind up doing nothing.

I'll take a look and make a decision. Of course, after I make a decision, I might set this going up to backup an image to Google Cloud through my Google Apps for Business account. :)
 
I don't buy based on reviews (positive or negative). I use the reviews to see if someone that knows the product can break it. If you read between the lines, they all can be broken. Just depends to what extent you think broken is still worth buying.

But QNAP and Synology are not going to be 'like' anything in the future. They already are the crème de la crème right now and have been for many years. Dedicated to a single cause.

All the others trying to jump on their bandwagon? In a decade I might start testing and maybe recommending them. Right now? Nice toys to spend a ton of money on and bet your data along with it.
 
For NASes, WD not in the same league as Synology and QNAP.
Nor Seagate or Buffalo.

Synology and QNAP do one thing well. NASes.
 
I don't believe home built systems are bad either
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Challenge with DIY NASes is finding freeware that is comparable to Synology or QNAP's system software. I've tried most.
 
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I don't believe home built systems are bad either
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User built systems can be good. But most are best suited when learning about or dabbling (non-business use) in new areas of computing.

In no particular order.
  • The Good
    1. They can excel in price - especially when using parts that are just lying around.
    2. They are a great way to learn / solve in depth about a range of computing problems / solutions. In addition to reaching / achieving the original goal.
    3. They can take that goal + lots of free time and turn it into something worthwhile.
    4. They can have more performance, for the price / cost.
    5. Satisfaction of doing something yourself.

  • The Bad
    1. Power usage
    2. Optimization of the O/S for a specific purpose.
    3. Not knowing you had to worry about 'X'. 'X' being a specific security, performance or reliability concern with your homebrewed method.
    4. Time. Is money. Even if you value your time at $0/hr.
      • Especially when spouse / kids / friends are being neglected.
    5. Finding out (eventually) that the money saved was not worth the tradeoffs.
    6. Finding out that the gold standard solutions are rated that way for a reason.
      1. (Myself, I find that the cost is more than offset by the benefits offered, no matter how much time or money I could throw at any homebrewed NAS setup).

And, this is from someone that still builds / spec's their own desktops.
 
Agr
User built systems can be good. But most are best suited when learning about or dabbling (non-business use) in new areas of computing.

In no particular order.
  • The Good
    1. They can excel in price - especially when using parts that are just lying around.
    2. They are a great way to learn / solve in depth about a range of computing problems / solutions. In addition to reaching / achieving the original goal.
    3. They can take that goal + lots of free time and turn it into something worthwhile.
    4. They can have more performance, for the price / cost.
    5. Satisfaction of doing something yourself.

  • The Bad
    1. Power usage
    2. Optimization of the O/S for a specific purpose.
    3. Not knowing you had to worry about 'X'. 'X' being a specific security, performance or reliability concern with your homebrewed method.
    4. Time. Is money. Even if you value your time at $0/hr.
      • Especially when spouse / kids / friends are being neglected.
    5. Finding out (eventually) that the money saved was not worth the tradeoffs.
    6. Finding out that the gold standard solutions are rated that way for a reason.
      1. (Myself, I find that the cost is more than offset by the benefits offered, no matter how much time or money I could throw at any homebrewed NAS setup).

And, this is from someone that still builds / spec's their own desktops.

Agreed. I just finished building my first PC since the mid 90s, and it's top of the line with a custom water cooling system and everything. I could have easily bought something, but I wanted to build it so I could learn more about all the parts, how they work together, how to optimize it to increase the speed, how to apply higher voltages to certain parts so they could be overclocked, etc. I saw it more as a hobby and something that I could do in my spare time. I don't think building a NAS would be as fun as building my PC, plus, when I had my server in the past running Microsoft Server 2008, SQL, and then finding a good software package that would integrate with everything and have a user friendly interface, I just think it would produce too many headaches, especially since I could go buy something decent that's already setup and ready to go for $1000.

Someone mentioned a diskless NAS, and I could go out and buy whatever drives I want, which I would rather unless I can buy something with drives in it that aren't proprietary and could be bought off Newegg or Amazon if needed. Also mentioned was a good quality drive (server grade). Could someone give me some examples of the kind of drives that would work best in a NAS? I'm assuming certain drives can be bought that have higher performance, longer lasting, etc than what's usually put into a desktop PC.

In my PC, I'm running my OS off a Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD running off the maximum number of lanes and has a transfer rate of 32GBps. Then I have 2 Samsung 840 Pros SSDs setup in RAID0 to install my software to. What type of drives would perform best in a NAS because not only am I wanting to stream 4K content from it, I'm wanting to be able to stream to multiple devices at the same time. I saw an article for a NAS, I believe it was QNAP, which not only would stream 4K content, but it would also encode content on the fly into 4K content. If that works, it would be great since 4K videos take up so much space.
 
I don't think you're getting 32GBps from your XP941 SSD. :)

The best NAS drives I've used are the WD REDS 3 or 4 TB's (the 3TB versions are actually faster for me).

No point in buying higher quality HDD's. They all fail at roughly the same rate vs. consumer drives. I avoid Seagate drives like the plague though. Just garbage.
 
I'm sorry, the XP941 in a PCIe 2.0 x4 connection it's 20GB/SB.
I've had a bad experience recently with Seagate so that's not even being considered. It's been so long since I bought an actual hard drive with moving parts, I'm not sure which ones to look at. Do hybrid drives provide any benefit, or can the drives in the NAS be setup to cache to an SSD?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk
 
Hybrid drives are junk too. Especially for NAS use. SSD caching is also not a method for higher performance from most normal network uses.

The best HDD I've used are Hitachi. WD a not so close second.

Not picking on you, but what is 20GB/SB?
 
Hybrid drives are junk too. Especially for NAS use. SSD caching is also not a method for higher performance from most normal network uses.

The best HDD I've used are Hitachi. WD a not so close second.

Not picking on you, but what is 20GB/SB?

Sorry, spell check did that. It's 20GB per second.
 
Ok, after skimming through the plethora of information about NAS drives, functionality, etc, I think I've decided to go with the QNAP TS-470. It seems to have lots of functionality, and unless they just market this thing well, it seems to have features I like using it as a home media server too. Unless any of you have prior experience with this or can tell me that other models come with the same features/functionality for a cheaper price but just isn't marketed as much, this will be my NAS of choice. It comes with an optional 10GBe adapter, but does anyone make something like this for a PC or is there additional hardware I would need to add, like maybe a switch with LAG, to take advantage of this speed?
 

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