Hello, I'm new here, I'd like to build my own NAS

[Tech Junky]

Disk Prices (US)

Comparison of all hard drives and SSDs on Amazon, sorted by price per TB

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There are some WD red drives listed @ $150 for 8TB.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QQX27GM/?tag=snbforums-20 - 128MB cache
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D3MWMNZ/?tag=snbforums-20 - 256MB cache / $200 - I picked something similar up a few years back for $160 ( WD80EZAZ )

 

[Quozlator]

so go ahead and snag 4 (6TB) drives in order to go raid 10? Makes sense to me. this way my wife cant complain about the speed and will never be able to cry about lost photos!

 

[Tech Junky]

It will transfer data faster than her phone either way. It provides an extra layer of redundancy.

 

[Quozlator]

is the ram on the NAS drive only for write speed ? Im looking to buy my drives and I see a decent price different in the WD Red NAS drives with the 128 vs 256

 

[L&LD]

Do you mean cache?

This will help with many small files, not maximum write speeds.

The bigger the capacity, the denser the platters, the higher the write speed.

 

[Quozlator]

yes i meant cache sorry, its been a long day of youtube NAS school and I haven't bought drives in a few years. Just was brain dead. Reason I asked as i've seen that they suggest going raid 6 now due to the possibility of having one drive die and having a very minor write issue on one of the repair drives screwing you up totally. that said I'd need to drop to the 6TB drives to be able to afford 5 of them. The sale right now is amazing, at only $125 each canadian, so im just going to grab them and deal with it however this pans out in the end.

 

[L&LD]

Don't blow everything you have on the NAS.

A single NAS solution is not a backup. Not even with RAID6, RAID10, or RAID50.

Budget yourself to set up the NAS as well as you can (Mirrored (RAID1) with 2 or more drives is fine, to begin with).

But also get yourself the hardware to do an independent Backup of the files too (either another NAS box + Drives, or, at the very least, a USB drive with the capacity to hold the files you currently hold important).

The 8TB drives at $150 are a better deal than the 6TB drives at $125 right now.

3x $150 = $450. (RAID1 in the NAS and another drive used in an external USB enclosure for the backup - with a total capacity of 8TB).

Instead of 5x $125 = $625 and no backup (In RAID6 you'll have 24TB capacity with no chance of backing that up before another drive in the array may possibly fail).

 

[Tech Junky]

@L&LD

It's more about perspective here though. What can you NOT live without a copy of is usually pretty limited and could be shuffled off to Google Drive or DropBox for free. Google gives you 15GB of space for free and if you need more just make another account.

At least with R10 you have a mirror + stripe vs dealing with parity recovery from R6.

With the drives though it's best to pick what you can afford and do it right the first time rather than dealing with data migration later when you decide to expand. While R10 isn't a "backup" it's enough to keep your data safe provided you don't physically blow up the PC or the drives. The thing to think about is diversifying the sources of the drives so you don't buy a single batch that might have issues later on that may cause failures of multiple drives at the same time.

Having a USB enclosure with a 16TB drive to backup the Raid10 would be optimal but, that can be postponed a bit due to it running another ~$250 for the drive + enclosure

Disk Prices (US)

Comparison of all hard drives and SSDs on Amazon, sorted by price per TB

diskprices.com

Or in my case I just use a USBC <> SATA cable w/ a wall wart for 3.5 drives https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071GRCGF4/?tag=snbforums-20 - ~$50

 

[Tech Junky]

@L&LD

Forgot to mention I have a 5th drive in my R10 as a hot standby / backup if something fails. In this use case it might be an option for the OP as well to add a 5th drive after creating the R10 w/ 4 drives and using the add / expand commands with MDADM.

How To Manage RAID Arrays with mdadm on Ubuntu 16.04 | DigitalOcean

In this guide, we discuss how to use Linux’s mdadm utility to manage RAID arrays and perform day-to-day administrative tasks. We cover how to start, stop, o…

www.digitalocean.com

/dev/md0:
           Version : 1.2
     Creation Time : Mon Jul 16 14:29:09 2018
        Raid Level : raid10
        Array Size : 19534735360 (18.19 TiB 20.00 TB)
     Used Dev Size : 7813894144 (7.28 TiB 8.00 TB)
      Raid Devices : 5
     Total Devices : 5
       Persistence : Superblock is persistent

     Intent Bitmap : Internal

       Update Time : Tue Dec 27 09:51:37 2022
             State : clean
    Active Devices : 5
   Working Devices : 5
    Failed Devices : 0
     Spare Devices : 0

            Layout : near=2
        Chunk Size : 512K

Consistency Policy : bitmap

              Name : server:0  (local to host server)
              UUID : 4f1abb31:e8466aa3:4b7bea78:28ce6c14
            Events : 259564

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
       4       8       33        0      active sync   /dev/sdc1
       6       8        1        1      active sync   /dev/sda1
       2       8       49        2      active sync   /dev/sdd1
       3       8       17        3      active sync   /dev/sdb1
       5       8       65        4      active sync   /dev/sde1

Considering this has been running w/o making backups since 2018....

 

[eightiescalling]

Sorry, catching up on a few posts on this thread.

WD vs Seagate - Seagate did have a period for a while with a reputation for drive issues. That said I've been using a bunch of their Ironwolf drives without issue for a few years now. I haven't seen anything suggesting the Ironwolf drives retained the old issues but could be wrong.

Meanwhile, WD quietly started tinkering with the specs in their Red drives between CMR and SMR, for costs reasons, giving performance issues. It was only after complaints that they became more transparent about it. That caused a friend of mine issues when he replaced a failed WD Red not realising they had done that.

As for setup, personally I would recommend including LVM rather than just RAID as it gives more flexibility in the long run. I found this out the hard way (aka the comment from @Tech Junky on doing it right first time and data migration...) when I wanted to change drives sizes (limited options on the case/motherboard to just add a new disk at that point). I can't comment on any possible performance implications though - given it is an extra software layer between RAID and the file system, there will be some but I believe it to be minimal.

The setup I run taking that in to account is: Disks -> RAID -> LVM -> ext4

Might be overkill if you're comfortable you'll only ever add drives rather than growing the array with the same number of rives but something to consider.

 

[Tech Junky]

Might be overkill if you're comfortable you'll only ever add drives rather than growing the array with the same number of rives but something to consider

There are some tricks with mdadm such as removing a drive from the array and copy data to it and then build a new array to copy back to and add / grow it. Or make the array with the missing option if you're upping the capacity and then adding the source drive when the data copy is complete.

if I wanted to expand to say 16tb disks I would copy the data to one of the new disks from the existing array. Pull the existing 8tb drives, insert the new drives, make the array with 3 + missing, let it build, copy the data, and then add the fourth drive and let it sync.

since I already have five disks with the hot spare I would peel off two of them and make a raid 0 and copy the data to that and then swap in the larger disks and build/copy form that at a higher speed.

 

[L&LD]

@Tech Junky, none of what you said applies to TBs of data though.

RAIDxxxx isn't a backup, even with a hot standby drive handy.

Think theft, flooding, and power surge/brownouts that takes out the main/aux boards and more.

Or, simply a virus on the NAS itself. Or other online compromises.

A backup is a physically separate entity for a reason. 15GB of data is a handful of pictures vs what most people have now.

And Google already changed the use of their server storage to include photos in their calculations making that 15GB effectively obsolete overnight.

 

[eightiescalling]

Fair point @Tech Junky on the copy approach but that is still build new and copy rather than manipulating the existing structure without down time or extra kit. It's a simpler approach I'd go for if I could though - I just didn't have the option last time with kit available and disks. That said, by its nature a raid10 approach means you always have 50% redundancy to play with vs the 1 disk of X I had with the raid5 array at the time.

Completely agree with @L&LD on the backup. Even the simpler approach of backup versions isn't helped by RAID - the whole "oh crap I overwrite/deleted the wrong file". And I think I've mentioned it before but backups need to have testing to avoid being schrodingers backups. If you're running a Debian based Linux, I can highly recommend Cloudberry as a backup option - allows you to select your off site storage media to suit and no subscription.

 

[degrub]

even with raid 10 you have a single point of failure - the motherboard and anything on it.
No substitute for an independent backup no matter how you do it - tape, USB drive, second NAS, etc.
Rotating backup drive copy offsite is the gold std., either by cloud or physical drive.
Depends on if you can afford to loose the data on the NAS.

 

[Tech Junky]

Remember there used to be a day when "data" didn't exist and everything was just fine? It's not the end of the world if this stuff just goes away. You can always make new data to covet. It's just handy to have access to it by clicking a couple of buttons on a device. No data is sacred anymore either.

If you have more than 15GB of photos you have bigger problems than storage. If you're a pro you have redundant copies anyway.

Chances are if you really need the data for something you have a specific backup in place in the event of something catastrophic were to occur.

It's a dead subject of this off site / external backup / prevention discussion. If there's a priority need to absolutely not lose particular files then you do what you need to do.

 

[Quozlator]

So to clarify, I will have 1 copy of my photos on my personal PC, and back up drive, and a drive I leave at my buddies house.

The NAS drive will have a copy, but will house my media collection that i wish to share with my buddy and possibly family members if I deem them worth the hassle of teaching, as may parents are near their 80s and only my mom has a small possibility of taking it in, and she lives 2 hours away, so teaching opportunities are not often.

So I have more than 4 copies at 3 different locations, (the 5th is my in-laws place).

And yes we have google as well now that i think of it.

But my wife wants 1 place she can go to in order to find her photos that wont change, she hates that i have a collection of back up drives with 20+ years of photos spread across them. This way I can build it, and point her to it. she doesn't ever have to know about the other safety copies.

 

[Quozlator]

@L&LD

It's more about perspective here though. What can you NOT live without a copy of is usually pretty limited and could be shuffled off to Google Drive or DropBox for free. Google gives you 15GB of space for free and if you need more just make another account.

At least with R10 you have a mirror + stripe vs dealing with parity recovery from R6.

With the drives though it's best to pick what you can afford and do it right the first time rather than dealing with data migration later when you decide to expand. While R10 isn't a "backup" it's enough to keep your data safe provided you don't physically blow up the PC or the drives. The thing to think about is diversifying the sources of the drives so you don't buy a single batch that might have issues later on that may cause failures of multiple drives at the same time.

Having a USB enclosure with a 16TB drive to backup the Raid10 would be optimal but, that can be postponed a bit due to it running another ~$250 for the drive + enclosure

Disk Prices (US)

Comparison of all hard drives and SSDs on Amazon, sorted by price per TB

diskprices.com

Or in my case I just use a USBC <> SATA cable w/ a wall wart for 3.5 drives https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071GRCGF4/?tag=snbforums-20 - ~$50

which of course is what i just screwed up on buying the drives from the same place last night. I'd seen the price on amazon the day before but yesterday it was gone, so i was afraid the sale was over and that my big computer store was just slow revoking the price. while my wife doesn't begrudge me spending money on systems and stuff, she hates with a passion buying something just to upgrade later, or to miss out on sale prices and having to pay more today than we would have yesterday. that usually means jump first and ask questions later, but i rarely ever have her grouse when i do it that way. SO 5 RED drives are coming my way from the same place

 

[sfx2000]

At least with R10 you have a mirror + stripe vs dealing with parity recovery from R6.

I always hate hearing about mirrors - thing is, they're not a backup - if something goes wrong, for example, ransomware...

the image gets encrypted as well...

 

[sfx2000]

A single NAS solution is not a backup. Not even with RAID6, RAID10, or RAID50.

A NAS is not a direct backup - one has to have a plan to back the NAS up...

RAID - stats show that MBTF is an issue - the more drives the in the array, the higher the probability that something will go wrong...

 

[L&LD]

@Quozlator, thanks for the clarification.

Just don't become complacent and dump new data into only that new NAS. Continue to also copy to the other drives (both onsite and off).

As I hope you now understand, the NAS is not a backup, on its own. Ever.