@postulative Yes but I could still do it more cheaply that way with Seagate IronWolf rotational for $90 or less per drive. But I was looking at what someone would need if they stored videos, pictures and a plethora of other stuff eg music files and needed decent amounts of storage. 4 TB used to be plenty but in these days of HD movies, high quality music, large megapixel photos, it starts to be at the lower end of needs. If 2 TB drives are compared then prices are not so equivalent with NAS rotationals at around $110 and SSDs at $340, so for less than the price of 4 TB of SSD storage using those 960 GB drives, usable between 2 and 3 TB because of parity or mirroring with RAID 5, RAID 01, or RAID 10, a person could have a similar RAID system of nearly 8 TB (4 to 6 TB usable). I also very much agree that prices are falling and soon hopefully will be more at parity with rotationals across all size ranges.
@mark_m Dual drive NAS boxes are good if you either just want purely mirrored sets or donāt worry too much about data security but want more room and speed ie you go for a striped RAID 0. The HDD is the limiting factor most times in a purely mirrored set (not SSDs here).
This was what I took to mean capacity, security, and speed so I think a simple 2 drive RAID box (NAS) can carry that out if using SSDs in a mirrored array but for storage capacity the cost of two decent sized SSD drives at the moment would be high. So something like the QNAP TS-431P 4 bay NAS box (around $290 or slightly more retail) with either RAID 5 or 10 with perhaps 3 or 4 of 1 TB or even better 2 TB sized drives in rotationals would be a very good choice. If using RAID 5 then about 4 to 5 TB of space if using 3 X 2 TB drives. https://www.qnap.com/en-au/product/ts-431p
Absolutely, spinning media remains far cheaper than solid state storage. Alternatively, you could go with a mix and use a small SSD for cache with a large HDD for storage.
While focused on NAS caching, this article (from 2008) discusses some other potential local issues that may hit your performance. (I might bookmark that site now Iāve found it - looks useful.)
With a reminder that this kind of RAID is for availability (i.e. tolerate failure of a disk without even knowing it) and is not a substitute for backup. There are still failure scenarios where RAID does not provide backup (e.g. NAS device goes crazy and corrupts the file content or e.g. NAS device catches fire and wipes out itself and all the disks or e.g. user does something catastrophic) - so backup is in addition to the RAID.
For this reason I am not a fan of mirroring in a home use scenario. Do you need the high availability? Probably not. Could you use the money spent on a second disk instead to buy a backup disk? Yes.
Thank you all for your assistance. The following describes the gear that I have and have ordered. This is not so much show and tell for tech heads but with the aim of helping others who are semi-technical to make their own decision. As with so many things one size does not fit all. The solution depends on the nature of your problem and your bank account. I am describing my problem and my solution.
The current system is two desktops, one smart TV and one tablet. I have NBN fixed wireless that gives great performance and reliability. I am a keen photographer and have about 300GB of images that are currently manually copied on the two desktops and sporadically archived on to DVDs which are kept off site. This is too tedious and labour intensive. The main purpose of the NAS is to be a faster automatic backup that will get done because I donāt have to remember to do it. I will continue to do off site backup on DVD but probably only selectively as my risk of fire (steel/concrete house) and theft (low risk area) is low.
The network is run by a megabit router (Choice recommended) that does very well for me. All the gear is wired with at least cat5e cable except the TV and tablet and I have no problems with WiFi there. I have surge protection on the house and a fairly high spec surge-protected UPS which has the juice to support the network, main PC and now the NAS.
I am adding a Synology DS218J two drive NAS box. The CPU and memory are not high spec which saves some $, as I see it for the purpose it will be fine as I do not want to do much local processing such as video re-coding etc. I like Synology as it has a nice OS and apps and doesnāt use much power.
I will use a pair of nominal 3TB Seagate Ironwolf HDDs. These are moderately fast for a NAS drive and represent a compromise on speed, capacity and price. These will be mirrored. With some 2.6 TB available I have room for growth and to disk image the boot drive of my main machine. There may be room for some video and music too but these can be removed later if growth in pictures requires it.
I will use Easeus ToDo backup software recommended by Choice. I like it because it can automate my backups, it has a nice interface, itās cheap and will not load the machine it is backing up too much like some of the fancier utilities. I try to keep that machine free of too many background processes as I want all the power to do image processing. Zerene makes fans roar!
With the addition of a switch, a new kambrook board and some cables the backup system comes in at $600. I could have spent two or three times as much (get the behind me Satan) but that would have been off in nice to have land and not as cost effective.
Zerene: a good name for a rock band but actually image stacking software.
An important aspect of RAID0 implied but not written is that it is less reliable than a single HDD because, using an example of only 2 HDD in the array, if either fails all the data is lost because the data straddles the 2 disks and there is no redundancy of any sort, so a failure of either HDD is catastrophic. They are rarely configured for good reason.
IMHO speed should be the last thing on anyone thinking about āhomeā backup/storage solutions.
Reliability and life of the solutions/hardware far more important
periodically theyāll blog their HDD failure statās its quite insightful!
For those wanting to āstoreā photoās Iād suggest making the effort to make some photo books. If for no other reason than youāll suddenly find out how many of those photoās arenāt worth the digital space
Do you have any figures on the likelihood of the NAS box āgoing crazyā or bursting into flame compared to the MTBF of NAS-purposed HDDs? Has it ever happened to you or somebody you know?
Iāve seen them used in two very specific scenarios where speed was critical for what was in a sense āreal time dataā and total data loss was a non issue because multiple systems handled the stream in parallel for high availability. In each standalone system it was accepted by default that single drive loss required a rebuild and total loss of that copy of the data - noting that āmirrored processingā for want of a better term involves more than just drives and the mirrors can be many ā¦ not exactly a home solution of course ā¦ R0 is rarely mirrored for much the same reason - I was presented with a problem at a customer site once where a āmany driveā mirror was striped then mirrored, rebuild time was huge. Surprise surprise. Apparently it hadnāt occurred to them that striping mirrors was a way better idea than mirroring stripes in terms of exposure time during rebuilds, unless of course the stripes had parity (R5 etc) which Iāve seen paranoid types do, at the cost of some performance and complexity ā¦ some of that has gone by the wayside with modern controllers ā¦ just a bit ā¦
Maybe not last, but Iād agree that most people seem to overestimate what they really need. My home solution mentioned previously is about as low budget and low grunt as you can get, but it never causes me problems ā¦ In my situation, storage and backup are the same solution, but this might not be everyones thing. Mine is also inherently off-site for the copy - at all times - it syncs across a wireless link, so if the house burnt down Iād lose data for the last few hours, maybe ā¦
āThe chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, but still, they comeā - I remember the day a relative had two drives fry and the same day they discovered the backup was non-viable. They had paper - start typing - I think we protect against the strange stuff weāve seen, the things we fear most, and stuff that might never happen - then out of left field ā¦ ie I take no comfort in statistics, Murphy was an optimist ā¦ interesting question though ā¦
Iāve said this before but it bears repeating, success in this life goes to those who accurately assess risk. Every activity entails risk, the best you can do is deal with it as you cannot avoid it.
Those who constantly overestimate risks pay too much to prevent problems that never come, fail to act when they should or worry themselves to death. Those who underestimate have lives marred with failures that are to them inexplicable; hopefully they donāt earn a Darwin Award.
I built my first production business system in 1978. Since then I have had one or more machines at work and at home and never had a HDD failure. Still I know that it happens and I plan accordingly, personal experience is not necessarily the best guide for some things. Rare events with very significant consequences are most difficult to deal with. Since most of us will never observe many such events, or any at all, where statistics are available we should pay attention.
The statistics do actually tell a story. Extremetech has looked at hard drive lives as published by Backblaze, and suggests that HDDs have three life stages.
The drive fails in the first 18 months - and if you look at the graph some of them are dead on arrival.
If it survived to 18 months, it will probably survive to three years.
After that, over a ten per cent failure rate per annum.
It is important to note that Backblaze uses consumer-grade drives for high-intensity business-grade purposes, so these figures are not totally meaningful for the average consumer. Nevertheless, phases one and two are probably fairly indicative.
I have a four drive Synology NAS with 4x3TB of Western Digital āRedā NAS drives. Possibly too expensive for most peopleās needs (about $1300), but I thought when I bought it four years ago that it was better to pay more up front for the storage. I have no regrets about that and the system is still working fine.
I use two of the four drives for data storage, each mirroring the other, so if one dies the other is still available. The other two drives are a backup location for the primary data storage using a daily backup routine. This is quite simple to set up with Synology NAS devices.
I also mirror the NAS to Microsoft OneDrive. Any file created, modified or deleted from the NAS is automatically copied to OneDrive and vice versa. There are some risks in doing it this way (eg malware may harm all copies) but the NAS and OneDrive both have malware protection. This of itself is still not 100% secure but I use further periodic offline backups as well.
In my experience the limiting factor is the speed of the wifi network between the router and the connected device accessing the NAS. On the 2.4GHz wifi band you might get 6-8Mbps, and maybe 25Mbps for the 5GHz wifi band. It can be much lower than these speeds with longer range or more obstacles between router and computer. The NAS can easily push through more data than that.
When buying my drives I read that ordinary drives can have problems when being used in a NAS, not to do with the durability but because of the way they react to access instructions. I wasnāt sure whether to believe this but I decided not to take any risks and I donāt believe the cost difference justifies taking risks with your data.
I might be misunderstanding (apologies if so) but I would have said that the basic Raid 1 mirror is far better in the scenario you are talking about than ābackup diskā.
As long as one disk is alive and well the data is safe and easy to ārecoverā.
Say you were extra concerned and had 3 disks mirrored. Some power issues meant the PC failed and most of the hardware ādiedā. As long as one of those 3 disks was alive and well you can plug it into just about any compatible system and it will simply look and act like a normal HDD ā¦ data recovered etc.
Its the one raid that most people can DIY fairly safely/easily at home in a PC they already own (so just need to buy x number of drives) its fairly low risk, and low cost.
If backups (offsite etc) are wanted then Iād recommend a google one or similar AWS or Azure/MS consumer cloud storage ($125/yr for TB last I looked)
Flames etc very unlikely (going crazy too). That said I know of multiple times off the shelf NAS have hardware failure (other than the drives) and as a result can mean its an expensive doorstop instantly and one hopes that data is backed up somewhere else.
They tend to be very custom hardware based so if a part fails thereās good chance its hard to replace if possible at all. You are at the whim and mercy of how ruthless the accounting types are as to how cheap that hardware is too. This is even more āprofessional gradeā level too (SMB spent 4 figures for diskless system and it had what looked to be a maybe $20 unrated custom power supply).
If using a mirrored or any other RAID system it is about keeping an eye on the reporting software/hardware to ensure failures/problems are caught early and remedied. Most NAS boxes come with apps to do this reporting work and it should be used. A lot of boxes also support hot swapping so no need to power down, replace, reboot and reset the data, if the box doesnāt it can be a long time before the data is recopied successfully but that is a necessary evil in that case. So basic housekeeping of watching for the data that shows failures are coming and taking early action is best practice.
I wonāt and donāt demand people use one type of RAID or another, I place the information in front of them, explain the benefits and costs of each and let them choose but I do recommend a set of choices based on their stated needs. It is then their ownership of the benefits and problems that accrue from their choice/s. If using a RAID regular backup is still required, 3 X is good practice. This is why perhaps RAID 1 (mirroring) in a home is not always safest as some get complacent about the redundancy and fail to then properly carry out backups and remediation of issues in a timely manner.
@syncretic partly in answer to your question about flames etc I have seen HDDs DOA (Dead on Arrival), fail in hours, days or weeks or months, some still going well years after install. BUT my recommendation is replace regularly say every 2 or 3 years. They can still be used for non critical tasks after or as more backup disks as they shouldnāt get too much workout being used only on a daily or weekly schedule to do a backup and then stored, but do regular disk health checks. MTBF is only that āthe mean timeā, with the majority expected to last the rated hours but failures are expected and accepted. MTBF can be calculated differently and only gets more accurate after a large amount of the drives have been in service for lengthy periods of time. When a drive is first released the MTBF is largely theoretical in nature.
The NAS boxes like any appliance or electronic gear have failures, including smoking shorts, software failures and a number of other similar issues to any gear where electricity, electronics and/or software are involved. Rare but it happens.
There is in fact some difference in how different drives have their firmware programmed - I have some recollection of it being mentioned on one of my podcasts a while ago. A quick search found the following article - which is short on the technical details but does give an extremely broad overview of the subject.
This next article has a little more information about drive specs.
The hard drive reliability data referenced previously comes from a very large number of samples of quality made products in similar duties.
True there is a lack of scatter in the results. Perhaps this is due solely to the massive size of the data sets?
The bath tub failure rate characteristic observed is commonly related to complex electronic/electro-mechanical systems or machines (eg spining hard drives). And one reason why mission critical equipment typically goes through an extended burn in and pre-operational testing phase before release.
For every day home use itās unlikely most of us will ever see a similar pattern. Our first hand at home sample size is just too small to be statistically significant.
The one observation that might help all of us is that the early failure rate of a mechanical hard drive is much greater than failure later in normal use. Most of is probably knew that any way. It pays to be more than prepared for failure of any new hard drive from day one!
There are also many reasons why a large sample size of one product may not exhibit a bath tub reliability characteristic. Some products are doomed from day one! Others, you might hope are not (eg aircraft jet engines)?
From my experience donāt bother with a NAS box at least of my brand get a portable HDD.
I purchased a WD 2 TB NAS drive connected directly to my modem with bachup in mind.
It has turned out to be a dead loss as it keeps changing itās IP address and I canāt find it most of the time from the desktop icons that come with it. Also It seems it is unable to store photos only data like my office documents. Also if the power or network goes off it shows different coloured flashing lights for days.
