Best Alternative to a Dual-Bay NAS?

[twitchyzero]

Hi I have some questions to a poor man's NAS on the AC56U

I'm trying to find a way to automatically download torrents to a drive on the router while still being able back it up routinely. I will also throw many large GoPro videos on it from my PC.

Probably easiest to just spring for a NAS but I want consider a workaround before shelling out $500

My options:

1. buy a dual bay RAID enclosure and plug into router's USB 3.0 port. Run RAID 1. Will the router see the dual drives as a single drive?

enclosure for example: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX40154

2. plug 1 into router's USB 3.0 port, the other internally on my PC. Is there a way to backup the one plugged into the router to this internal one? Perhaps set up a cron job that starts a shell script to copy files on a schedule?

Thanks.

 

[System Error Message]

If it is hardware RAID it will be seen as a single drive. RAID for performance is unnecessary because the router will not saturate gigabit ethernet.
If you want the best alternative that would be a low end intel/amd in a small enclosure with drives running freeNAS as that would saturate multiple gigabit NICs.

 

[kvic]

If the RAID enclosure comes with hardware RAID controller, it will be able to present the two drives as a single volume to your AC56U. Most RAID enclosures however do not come with the necessary hardware. RAID is then implemented in OS on the host. I don't believe Asuswrt nor Merlin is capable of software RAID. So very likely an average RAID enclosure will show up as two separate drives on AC56U (which is not a bad thing in your case actually...read on).

There are multiple ways you can backup the RAID enclosure to your PC's internal drive. Mount the PC drive on AC56U over Samba/NFS or vice versa. Depends which way you choose, you've to run the backup on the respective host. Seems to me the former makes a little bit more sense but really doesn't make a huge difference. Software wise a cron job with rsync should do (or take your adventure into Syncthing).

Between the two drives from the RAID enclosure, you can have AC56U doing a daily rsync too (or 12-hour sync or even 1-hour sync...whatever tastes best for you . From the perspective of disk space efficiency, it's same as RAID 1 that you intend to operate. But you get a wider window (24, 12 or 1 hour) of protection from silly act such as accidental wipe out of a whole directory. According to some ppl, that's better protection.

I think your setup will be pretty decent.

 

[taz291819]

I do exactly what you are wanting to do with a Synology DS214SE NAS. And you don't need to plug it up to the USB 3.0 port on the router, just connect it via ethernet. You can even remotely download torrents and send them automatically to the NAS, which has it's own torrent client built into it.

 

[joegreat]

Hi,

I just purchased a RaidSonic Icy Box IB-RD3620SU3 enclosure, which does a fantastic job with 2 of Seagate's 8TB archive drives (for backup purposes)...
You can have the disks as separate devices (Single mode), JBOD - as one continuous drive (starts to fill from drive 1 and then continues on the 2nd) or in Raid 0/1. Over USB3 the Seagate's are lightning fast (write of big files and read all).

This is a highly recommended enclosure with a reasonable price!

With kind regards
Joe

 

[twitchyzero]

yeah as much as I'd like to learn those scripts for backup I doubt I'll ever get around to it. Then again I'll still have to learn how to auto download torrents still.

I will look for enclosures with RAID controller I guess.

Yep I also have a pair of Seagate 8TBs. Are you backing it up to another drive or is RAID 1 redundancy good enough for you?

 

[KenZ71]

You could always cruise Craigslist for old PCS or even servers then put NAS4Free on it.

Like above options it would torrent, run scripts etc

 

[sfx2000]

Hi I have some questions to a poor man's NAS on the AC56U

Easy answer - Router is not a NAS - the USB2/3 fileservers are a marketing checkpoint, and generally they perform poorly, whether ASUS, Netgear, Linksys, whatever...

More importantly - let your router do what it does best - route packets, protect your network with it's firewall...

If you're going to do anything significant - consider a starter NAS box - QNAP and Synology are high tier, but are fast and stable, Asustor is an up and comer, but a Intel based 2 disk NAS, like the QNAP TS-251, is a very good start...

 

[Cake]

OP mentions poor man's NAS. I use a raspi like device with low power consumption. It can saturate the 100 Mb Ethernet connection. 500 bucks can easily get you a Banana Pi Pro, powered USB hub, a bunch of portable hard disks.. 5-6TB worth maybe.
I think you would be happier with a dedicated device acting as a NAS. Power consumption is very low as well.

 

[twitchyzero]

Easy answer - Router is not a NAS - the USB2/3 fileservers are a marketing checkpoint, and generally they perform poorly, whether ASUS, Netgear, Linksys, whatever...

More importantly - let your router do what it does best - route packets, protect your network with it's firewall...

If you're going to do anything significant - consider a starter NAS box - QNAP and Synology are high tier, but are fast and stable, Asustor is an up and comer, but a Intel based 2 disk NAS, like the QNAP TS-251, is a very good start...

True...the Synology 214+/play and the TS-251 was on the top of my list...but if I could get away with 1/4 of the budget by learning script codes then why not? I'm content with the 30MB/s read/write speed of the Asus AC routers from 2013 as I'm not in a huge rush when I transfer large files and they can handle 30Mbps blu-ray remuxes no problem which will be my main use.

 

[sfx2000]

There's some very nice "starter" single bay NAS boxes out there - Synology and QNAP have compelling solutions, but Netgear and Seagate have options on the low end that perform quite well - all are much better than USB drives attached to a Router/AP.

 

[twitchyzero]

wow NCIX shipped my RAID enclosure so fast i didn't even get to cancel it.

I ended up going for this...bit of the shot in the dark as it was just announced yesterday with no reviews out there...hope the measely ARM processor in this $180 NAS can transcode half decently. If only it was Broadcom and Merlin could use his magic in asustor as well

http://www.asustor.com/product?p_id=42&lan=en#tab3

 

[L&LD]

wow NCIX shipped my RAID enclosure so fast i didn't even get to cancel it.

I ended up going for this...bit of the shot in the dark as it was just announced yesterday with no reviews out there...hope the measely ARM processor in this $180 NAS can transcode half decently. If only it was Broadcom and Merlin could use his magic in asustor as well

http://www.asustor.com/product?p_id=42&lan=en#tab3

I would be very surprised if it could even attempt transcoding, let alone do it half decently.

But I wish you luck on that front.

 

[twitchyzero]

it does say it can transcode H.264 (AVC), MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-2, VC-1
how well or at what resolution is up in the air!

 

[L&LD]

it does say it can transcode H.264 (AVC), MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-2, VC-1
how well or at what resolution is up in the air!

Either way, let the rest of us know. Thanks.

 

[ParanoiA]

You could run xpenology as a vm on your existing hardware if you want to at least try synology.