Wanted NAS hard drives

[n210mp]

24 minutes ago, BritManToo said:

I use my NAS for downloading torrents and distributing movies and TV shows around the house.

It's great to be able to do it all without having a computer turned on.

I mainly use this one, 3,000bht, with a 4TB WD USB drive plugged into the back.

https://www.lazada.co.th/products/zyxel-nas-326-2-bay-personal-cloud-storage-i9793261-s12270438.html

I looked at the Zywell and also the Synology DS 418J and plumped for the latter on the basis that it now can incorporate "Plex ", it looked the better all round machine and not much more expensive 

 

Yes I want to do the same thing especially remotely spending time in different locations Etc. I also have about 120Gb of photos and videos to BU as well .

I have access to buy cheaply a AMCC 9650SE-8LPML 8-Port SATA RAID Controller

 

 and enough 1 or 2 TB HDDs laying about the house to go the "Convert a PC to a NAS way"

 

 

 

 

Edited January 14, 2020 by n210mp

[n210mp]

10 hours ago, BritManToo said:

I use my NAS for downloading torrents and distributing movies and TV shows around the house.

It's great to be able to do it all without having a computer turned on.

I mainly use this one, 3,000bht, with a 4TB WD USB drive plugged into the back.

https://www.lazada.co.th/products/zyxel-nas-326-2-bay-personal-cloud-storage-i9793261-s12270438.html

Actually BMT I have slowly come round to your way of thinking and maybe the Zywell 2 bay with 2 x 4Gb for raid 5 and then through the USb a 1Tb normal BU disc for my biggish  photo and video file .

I was thinking that I could turn the BU usb 3 0  disc off when not using or needed but on reflection it seems that all disc are better being continuously run rather than turning off !

[BritManToo]

34 minutes ago, n210mp said:

Actually BMT I have slowly come round to your way of thinking and maybe the Zywell 2 bay with 2 x 4Gb for raid 5 and then through the USb a 1Tb normal BU disc for my biggish  photo and video file .

I'd put the 1TB inside the enclosure (ext4), then the 2x 4TBs As USB3 drives (NTFS) in the back, mirrored if you want some data security.

Then you've got your Data on two standalone USB drives that can be plugged into and read by any PC or laptop at a moments notice.

Edited January 14, 2020 by BritManToo

[robblok]

I got 6 x 6tb disks in my NAS (Qnap NAS) no faillures ever and not really dedicated NAS drives. I love my NAS with programs like Sickbeard (clone). Its great to have all my movies and TV series on the NAS available on TV and all over the world because of Plex.

 

 

[n210mp]

5 hours ago, robblok said:

I got 6 x 6tb disks in my NAS (Qnap NAS) no failures ever and not really dedicated NAS drives. I love my NAS with programs like Sickbeard (clone). Its great to have all my movies and TV series on the NAS available on TV and all over the world because of Plex.

 

 

Thanks for the info Robblok, it's helpful that you are using normal HDDs in your NAS, with all the info available unless you are storing really important data It looks as though I will be using normal ones too.

Just in the process of cleaning up and upgrading a friends old PC with 5 x 3Tb HDDs that must be 10 year old and still running OK, so its got me thinking why do I need dedicated NAS HDDs? 

[robblok]

5 minutes ago, n210mp said:

Thanks for the info Robblok, it's helpful that you are using normal HDDs in your NAS, with all the info available unless you are storing really important data It looks as though I will be using normal ones too.

Just in the process of cleaning up and upgrading a friends old PC with 5 x 3Tb HDDs that must be 10 year old and still running OK, so its got me thinking why do I need dedicated NAS HDDs? 

if you use raid to store it if a drive fails you can still keep all your data safe. Unless you dont replace then and another breaks down.

[n210mp]

My new conundrum!

 

Decided that whatever I do I will need 12 Tb of storage in my NAS whether using my Synology  DS418J or converting one of my old PC i5 desktops because I will be using possibly RAID 5  and so my next question is;

 

Is it better to use less HDDs and lower failure % or more HDDs for the same amount of storage?

 

IE;  

4 x 3Tb HDDS

or 

3 x 4TB HDDS

 

Thank you

[SpaceKadet]

You will not achieve 12TB storage capacity with your proposed configuration using RAID5.

4 x 3TB = 9TB data on RAID5

3 x 4TB = 8TB data on RAID5

RAID5 requires an extra drive to store parity info to achieve the redundancy.

 

So, for 12TB data you would need either 5 x 3TB or 4 x 4TB.

As far as failure rates, more drives will decrease the MTBF for the RAID system, with a higher chance of a drive failure. This is, however, somewhat academic for such a small home system. For Google data centers on the other hand.... they probably replace several drives every day.

 

By the way, Seagate Barracudas are currently the fastest rated spinners in their category, and my favorite. I do have plenty of WD 1TB and 2TB littering the house, being replaced by the Barracudas.

 

Currently my home NAS is running as 7 x 2TB Barracudas RAID5 on an LSI HBA card. I am using FreeNAS, that in turn runs as a virtual instance on my Linux (CentOS7) box. The NAS was running native on the Linux previously, but I just gave up tweaking SAMBA to get it to work properly with Windows10.

It's not the best design, as optimally for RAID5 the number of data drives should be a power of 2. I.e 2, 4, 8, 16, etc, plus one for the parity. This would give the maximum throughput, but the 6 data drives I have still saturate 1Gb/s Ethernet.

 

[n210mp]

13 hours ago, SpaceKadet said:

You will not achieve 12TB storage capacity with your proposed configuration using RAID5.

4 x 3TB = 9TB data on RAID5

3 x 4TB = 8TB data on RAID5

RAID5 requires an extra drive to store parity info to achieve the redundancy.

 

So, for 12TB data you would need either 5 x 3TB or 4 x 4TB.

As far as failure rates, more drives will decrease the MTBF for the RAID system, with a higher chance of a drive failure. This is, however, somewhat academic for such a small home system. For Google data centers on the other hand.... they probably replace several drives every day.

 

By the way, Seagate Barracudas are currently the fastest rated spinners in their category, and my favorite. I do have plenty of WD 1TB and 2TB littering the house, being replaced by the Barracudas.

 

Currently my home NAS is running as 7 x 2TB Barracudas RAID5 on an LSI HBA card. I am using FreeNAS, that in turn runs as a virtual instance on my Linux (CentOS7) box. The NAS was running native on the Linux previously, but I just gave up tweaking SAMBA to get it to work properly with Windows10.

It's not the best design, as optimally for RAID5 the number of data drives should be a power of 2. I.e 2, 4, 8, 16, etc, plus one for the parity. This would give the maximum throughput, but the 6 data drives I have still saturate 1Gb/s Ethernet.

 

Thanks SK for your comments

I am still playing about with all the variables and because of the many choices feel a bit perplexed as to the right course of action .

 

Yes I understood that I would lose some storage with RAID 5 and my estimate of the need for 12 Tb included that there would be some redundancy, in other words 7/8Tb would be more than ample for my needs as a "home user"

 

Based on the more there is to go wrong I have chosen 3 x 4 Tb NAS HDDs.

 

Your positive comments on Seagate also were also welcome in that if go the self build FreeNas way in  one of my own spare  i5  desktop PCs, I would use the seagate 720 HDDs on the basis of their being cheaper,  together with a PCIe 8 port RAID card.