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Post by creimes on Jan 8, 2018 17:24:59 GMT -5
Hey all,
So after having multiple external drives fail on me and recently losing some cherished photos which I thought I had backed up on another drive I've been thinking hard about a better way to safely store my pictures and videos and also use for storing movies and music for Plex.
It seems the QNAP TS-431p is about the cheapest 4 bay I can find at $350 CAD and 4 WD Red 2tb drives in a raid 5 parity is what I'm thinking to do for maximum storage and 1 drive failure protection. Looking at these QNAP NAS devices there seems to be a lot you can do with them. So for whoever here owns one what are the key benefits to them in terms of backing up all your data at home and I'm sure somehow you can backup all the photos on your smartphone as well when at home on the network.
Please let me know the best setup options that you use and what cool things that one is able to do with them, I haven't looked closely but there seem to be many apps built in.
Chad
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Post by Boomzilla on Jan 8, 2018 17:49:41 GMT -5
Several things to watch out for:
1. Avoid like the plague any RAID that uses its own proprietary formatting. Being able to read a drive without the source box is essential.
2. Consider carefully which RAID option you choose. I use RAID-10 for the maximum hot-swap flexibility.
3. Change out at least one drive each year. This prevents them all failing at the same time.
4. Use an online backup service too.
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Post by garbulky on Jan 8, 2018 18:25:42 GMT -5
HGST drives tend to do quite a bit better in reliability - at least for mechanical units.
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Post by siggie on Jan 8, 2018 18:40:59 GMT -5
I back up everything to Carbonite in addition to a single external back up drive, in case of fire, flood, or burglary.
siggie
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Post by Priapulus on Jan 8, 2018 19:07:41 GMT -5
1) Buy a 8tb WD red hard drive, install it in your computer, and put everything on it.
2) Buy a second 8tb WD red hard drive, install it on a different computer, and copy everything to it (backup).
3) Download mirroring software like "Allway Sync" to automatically update your backup.
4) If you're really paranoid, buy a third hard drive, copy, remove, and put it in your safety deposit box.
KISS. Forget stand-alone NAS's, RAIDs, etc.
Sincerely
/b
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Post by kybourbon on Jan 8, 2018 19:10:09 GMT -5
Family pictures are priceless and cannot be replaced. They also take up much less data than movies. Totally different strategy imo than movies which take a ton more space and are much easier to replace.
Family pics get stored on my NAS and 2 other hard drives.
Movies are stored on my NAS alone.
I'm a big fan of Synology and HGST NAS drives.
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Post by petew on Jan 8, 2018 19:30:04 GMT -5
I am a huge fan of unRaid. It's very easy to use. It does not stripe files across multiple drives like other RAID setups. It writes the entire file to only one drive in the array but stores parity data elsewhere so the file can be recovered if need be.
But RAID is no substitute for backing up your files. My important stuff is replicated to Dropbox, which syncs with three computers in the house plus another at the office. My music is backed up on a usb HDD at the office. Some day I'll do the same with the movie files when USB drives get big and cheap.
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Post by creimes on Jan 8, 2018 19:55:52 GMT -5
HGST drives tend to do quite a bit better in reliability - at least for mechanical units. I'm seeing a lot of reviews saying they are noisy drives ? |
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Post by creimes on Jan 8, 2018 20:01:52 GMT -5
1) Buy a 8tb WD red hard drive, install it in your computer, and put everything on it. 2) Buy a second 8tb WD red hard drive, install it on a different computer, and copy everything to it (backup). 3) Download mirroring software like "Allway Sync" to automatically update your backup. 4) If you're really paranoid, buy a third hard drive, copy, remove, and put it in your safety deposit box. KISS. Forget stand-alone NAS's, RAIDs, etc. Sincerely /b I have a Raid 1 on two 2tb drives on my mac mini's time machine with the majority of my photos on them, so technically on three separate drives but I also want to get all my media in one space on multiple drives to access it from different devices, our android phones backup to google photos but I see you can also use google drive or dropbox to have your smartphones automatically backup to the NAS. I don't really have multiple computers to put hard drives in. Chad |
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Post by creimes on Jan 8, 2018 20:18:43 GMT -5
I am a huge fan of unRaid. It's very easy to use. It does not stripe files across multiple drives like other RAID setups. It writes the entire file to only one drive in the array but stores parity data elsewhere so the file can be recovered if need be. But RAID is no substitute for backing up your files. My important stuff is replicated to Dropbox, which syncs with three computers in the house plus another at the office. My music is backed up on a usb HDD at the office. Some day I'll do the same with the movie files when USB drives get big and cheap. For me pictures are more important then the movies, so unraid is a standalone os or it needs to be ran on a PC or Mac ? I'm a total noob at this lol, I was just thinking a NAS would be the easiest and simplest way to do what I want, I have a Sharp TV upstairs with built in Roku which has Plex but my main setup in the basement which will soon have a Nvidia Shield TV using Plex as well for all my media. My PC is a home build which is an i3 and 8gb of ram and dedicated video, I usually build them good enough to decently last 4 years performance wise as I don't heavily game and my Mac Mini is getting older as it's a 2010 model so I don't want to really to much on the Mini itself and all the data is stored externally on 3 separate drives. |
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Post by Boomzilla on Jan 8, 2018 20:22:03 GMT -5
Several things to watch out for... 1. Avoid like the plague any RAID that uses its own proprietary formatting. Being able to read a drive without the source box is essential This alone is enough reason to avoid Synology, despite their popularity. DON'T buy Synology! Also, if you follow the first rule of backup "multiple copies in multiple physical locations," you'll instantly see why just backing up to another drive is no good - If your house burns down, for example, then both your data copies are gone for good. So, in short, NEVER ignore the second part of the backup rule. |
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Post by vneal on Jan 8, 2018 20:23:51 GMT -5
Only use SOLID STATE DRIVES
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Post by creimes on Jan 8, 2018 21:06:40 GMT -5
Several things to watch out for... 1. Avoid like the plague any RAID that uses its own proprietary formatting. Being able to read a drive without the source box is essential This alone is enough reason to avoid Synology, despite their popularity. DON'T buy Synology! Also, if you follow the first rule of backup "multiple copies in multiple physical locations," you'll instantly see why just backing up to another drive is no good - If your house burns down, for example, then both your data copies are gone for good. So, in short, NEVER ignore the second part of the backup rule. Yeah I understand that no matter how many drives you have it on things like fire or flood it wont matter, I don't really have many options other than the free google photos backup I use but I just have my photos from our phones backed up to it. |
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Post by creimes on Jan 8, 2018 21:07:35 GMT -5
Only use SOLID STATE DRIVES Not sure if I have the financial resources for that, I gotta somehow come up with the funds in the first place haha |
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Post by petew on Jan 8, 2018 21:14:27 GMT -5
unRaid runs on PC hardware. It boots off of a USB thumb drive so 100% of your HDD space is available for storage. My unRaid box is an ancient Dell 700 server pentium chip. I hacked the case to mount ten drives. I recently built an unRaid box for a friend out of a refurb HP desktop that I bought for about $100. With drives, the USB thumb drive and unRaid license we were well under three hundred bucks. If you have an old dog PC lying around you can get started for free. lime-technology.com/ |
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Post by creimes on Jan 8, 2018 21:31:13 GMT -5
unRaid runs on PC hardware. It boots off of a USB thumb drive so 100% of your HDD space is available for storage. My unRaid box is an ancient Dell 700 server pentium chip. I hacked the case to mount ten drives. I recently built an unRaid box for a friend out of a refurb HP desktop that I bought for about $100. With drives, the USB thumb drive and unRaid license we were well under three hundred bucks. If you have an old dog PC lying around you can get started for free. lime-technology.com/I do have an old PC, prob about 8 or 9 years old, would it be powerful enough for such an application, I'm guessing just as a storage device and not to run as a Plex server haha Also what about the LAN side of it, is it fast enough ?? I did up a little build on newegg.ca right now for $390, the motherboard has 6 x 6gbs ports  |
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Post by knucklehead on Jan 8, 2018 22:11:05 GMT -5
HGST drives tend to do quite a bit better in reliability - at least for mechanical units. HGST is currently owned by Western Digital. If you recall the Deskstar drives from IBM that were terrible units - well - that's why the name change when Hitachi bought IBM out of the hard drive business. Somewhere between then and now WD bought HGST - and now WD owns them. I haven't owned any of the HGST drives in recent years. I had them in laptop size (2.5") and desktop (3.5"). I bought several of them years ago and had zero luck with them. I've always had the impression that those HGST drives were seconds and refurbished units that Hitachi didn't want to sell under their name. I have a pair of Samsung 500GB drives since 2010 I bought new. One is used daily - and has been since 2010 that I use as my storage drive - no op-sys on it - the other one is a clone of the active drive that is plugged in - wiped clean then reloaded with the entire content of the active drive - I do this every month or two to keep my docs music and browser data safe from a system failure. I've only had to rely on that data once! I'm not easy on the active drive. My HTPC is on anywhere from 6-18 hours per day so the Samsung drives are pretty tough. Well - the one I use daily any way. My 4 drive storage array (eSata & USB3 interfaces) has one 5tb - one 4tb one 3tb - & one 1tb drives. The newest two - 5&4tb drives - are Samsung. They are Sata 3 & 5400rpm - slow - and no errors. The smaller two are Seagate. Funny thing - Linux can read the Win 10 partition but Win 10 is not able to see anything on the Linux side without a plugin to read ext3/4 partitions from Win 10 side. This is with a 480gb SSD. I've use the Win 10 side maybe 10 hours in the past two years since switching to Ubuntu. It's the only way I can reprogram my Harmony remote when the need arises. The Linux side has used 47gb in that two years - the Win 10 partition has 139gb available to it - in those 10 hours over 2 years of use it has ballooned to use 77gb of that 139gb. As for saving anything that simply cannot be replaced (pics mostly) I archived my digital pics on good quality DVD-R's many years ago - and I add to that archive as needed. Those DVD-R's from 2003 can still be read on my computer 15 years later. Make sure anything you archive is in a format that won't be irrelevant technology in 5-10 years. I still have the very first pics I took with my first DSLR in 2002 - a Nikon D100 - and later a D200 - now a D3200, on hard drives - and backed up on those DVD-R's. I haven't lost one single pic in 16-18 years of taking pics. Lately I've been using dual layered DVDs since they can handle much more data than a standard DVD - 8.5gb vs 4.5gb. Best of all is that dual layer can be read by most any computer's DVD player. Movies have been in dual layer for a very long time. I've been experimenting with dual layer BluRay discs but they are even more expensive than the DVD-R-dl discs. What is nice is they will store as much as 50gb. I'm beginning to think I should invest in a couple of SSD drives to store my digital pics. I just don't want Sata 6 to evolve into something that computers in 10 years can't read - sticking me with all those pics and no way to see them. Anyone remember the legacy drive interface? That would be IDE - EIDE - and a couple of variations and used a 40 pin ribbon to connect hard drives and DVD/CD drives. Gone! So put your precious pictures on DVD/BluRay discs - or on SSD drives. Just don't expect to have those pics for years to come if you store them on a hard drive. As they say - it's not a matter of IF, but WHEN. Only use SOLID STATE DRIVES Not sure if I have the financial resources for that, I gotta somehow come up with the funds in the first place haha Then burn them onto DVD-R discs. They are cheap and hold a reasonable amount of data. BluRay would be better but cost more. |
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Post by kybourbon on Jan 8, 2018 22:39:57 GMT -5
Several things to watch out for... 1. Avoid like the plague any RAID that uses its own proprietary formatting. Being able to read a drive without the source box is essential This alone is enough reason to avoid Synology, despite their popularity. DON'T buy Synology! Also, if you follow the first rule of backup "multiple copies in multiple physical locations," you'll instantly see why just backing up to another drive is no good - If your house burns down, for example, then both your data copies are gone for good. So, in short, NEVER ignore the second part of the backup rule. I wish there was a down vote for that Synology comment. Terrible advice. Any NAS is NOT the same as backup and shouldn't be used as such. |
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Post by kybourbon on Jan 8, 2018 22:43:07 GMT -5
Btw physical discs don't last forever either.
Discs rot.
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Post by LuisV on Jan 8, 2018 23:02:07 GMT -5
Hey Chad... Prior to the system that I am running now, I had a Synology DS412+ with four 3TB WD Red Drives giving me just under 9TB of storage. I had it for 4+ years and it worked out great. Very reliable, silent beyond words and worked great as a NAS. I tried to run various apps and or dockers on it and it simply didn't have enough power for my needs. It couldn't run Plex at all. I've since sold the Synology and built my own NAS around a Ryzen 7 1800x CPU, 32GB of RAM, two 500GB SSDs for dockers / VMs and six 4TB WD Reds for a total of 20TB. It runs unRAID for the OS and has enough power to run multiple VMs, Plex, MakeMKV, Unifi Video Controller and other dockers without issue. With the various dockers running, it can handle 8 transcoded streams without issue and many more direct play streams at the same time. I know your requirements might be different, but I went with unRAID as you can mix and match drive sizes, brands, etc. and add to the array at any time without fear of loosing data. unRAID uses parity instead of traditional RAID and you can have multiple parity drives to help in the event of one or multiple drive failures. With unRAID, if you loose a drive and can't rebuild it, you only loose the data that is on that drive and not the entire array. You can mount the drives in another system and read your data. With unRAID you can pass through a GPU and run a Windows 10 baremetal VM, so the system can do double duty as your main PC. Since I have a separate PC, I am not passing through a GPU Example of GPU Pass through: I purchased four HGST 6TB drives during the holidays and will be adding them to my unRAID server shortly. The only caveat with unRAID is the parity drive(s) need to the be the largest sized drive in the system; however, adding and changing parity drives is relatively easy with unRAID. If you're running Windows 10, you can try Storage Spaces and get a RAID like setup; however, I would recommend a dedicated NAS like Synology and QNAP or build your own and run unRAID, FreeNAS, Rockstor and or other operating systems. It all depends on your requirements and no you don't need a CPU / motherboard combo as I went with... unRAID will run fine with an Atom processor and motherboard. It all depends on your use case. Here's some more additional info: emotivalounge.proboards.com/thread/50483/htpc-media-server-discussionDrive reliability data: www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q3-2017/One PC, VR Party with unRAID: www.pcworld.com/article/3222652/gaming/how-we-hosted-a-star-trek-vr-party.html |
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