Personal Cloud/Storage Solution Opinions - WD MyCloud/OwnCloud/QNAP/Etc

JoJoCal19 · May 2017

After years of plans to 'planning to' work on a solution to put the many thousands of family photos and videos (and other various documents, etc) in one place, and catalog and sort them, I've realized what I wanted to do is not a very good idea (keep them all on my daily use MacBook Pro. It would be cost prohibitive to swap out my dual SSDs to larger 1TB+ ones. I also dislike relying on public clouds and would rather have my files on my own hardware. I'd also like to do more backups of our devices.

I was looking at NAS solutions, but the WD MyCloud, OwnCloud, and QNAP Cloud solutions are more ideal since the differentiator between them and a straight NAS are the client software that let's you access them (correct me if I'm wrong).

I'd like to get feedback on those solutions. The WD solution seems the most polished, the OwnCloud seems the most powerful, and the QNAP seems to have more NAS device flexibility. The downside to the OwnCloud seems to be that I'd have to have to have a server or PC running 24x7 to access my files, whereas the WD/QNAP solutions are purpose built NAS boxes that consume less power.

I'd also like peoples input on which RAID they'd go with for max data protection. Obviously RAID 1 is great but eats two drives as one. Maybe one of the other options is better overall with the 4 drive bays, either 6 or 10.

mzx380 · May 2017

I'm curious, is there a reason why you do not subscribe to a service like Amazon Drive? They offer a pretty low price point for unlimited storage, there will be no operating costs or maintenance on your part and you will always have access to the files. The only downside is that you will have to create a method to automate uploads unless they are from your mobile devices.

JoJoCal19 · May 2017

As much as a techie as I am (aren't we all?), I just want my stuff on my own hardware, and not on someone else's. I don't want to keep up with another subscription, billing, etc. I want total control.

jelevated · May 2017

Good luck, I've been struggling with this for over a year. I had a QNAP that worked fine for a while , then the OS was upgraded and for some reason ISCSI and RAID5 performance went right down the tubes.

What im finding is that there isn't just much horsepower to do much on the lower tier NAS units often running Celeron or something from Marvell. You definitely want something that is running an i3. You can get hotrods with i7 and Xeon but that might be overkill.

You may run into issue trying to drive everything from Mac OS as well. Despite what apple claims, AFP works fast and smooth on my machine when coupled with Acronis Access Connect (formally ExtremeZ-IP). But it is not cheap at ~$700 for three seats. But i experience problem after problem trying to use CIFS on my Macs. Others run CIFS no problems so YMMV.

The main storage box is hooked up to local storage connected to an old LSI card pulled from a server. You can pick these up for 50 or so dollars and get full speed, battery backup RAID. My motherboard has software raid but it isn't supported by ESXI.

NetworkNewb · May 2017

You don't own a Amazon Prime membership!?

"Free" unlimited photo storage with "Prime Photos" and can share access to it with people you want. I'm definitely too lazy to make my own solution. And Prime Photos is too convenient.

cyberguypr · May 2017

So what's the use case? Are you looking to have access to the data 24/7 outside your house and/or share it or is it more of a "house catches fire and I need a plan B so I don't lose digital memories"? I was looking for that plan B but wanted encryption. That left many popular options out. My main goal was to protect pics and other important stuff. I opted to just go with a JBOD setup and do a scheduled encrypted backup to Amazon Glacier. Stupidly cheap and I only pay more if I need quick retrieval. So far in 4 years nothing has failed and I haven't had the need to restore anything. YMMV depending on platforms you want to cover.

Cisco Inferno · June 2017

I just picked up a QNAP 451 with 4 Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives. (you can get WD reds too, but more expensive and same benchmarks)

MAKE SURE you get NAS drives only!!! Their firmware prevents the entire RAID from going down if a downed drive stays down longer than 7 seconds I think. Also, they are suited for 24/7 use and higher vibrations and heat from being next to other drives. They also run slower at around 54-5900RPM which saves power. No use in faster drives if your GigE is the bottleneck. My whole unit with 4 drives pulls around 80w according to my UPS.

Make sure you get 4 bay so you can run Raid 10.
Raid 5 puts too much stress on the drives during rebuild, and drives usually fail together. so youll be screwed.
Raid 6 is too slow with extra parity.
With Raid 10 you can get the speed and redundancy you want.
If, and just If you lose two drives in the same mirror, youre screwed. Ex, lose disk 3 and 4 at the same time. But you can lose two drives in each mirrored set and be fine! ex lose disk 1 and 3 or 1 and 4 at the same time and youre good! just pop in a drive and rebuild.

luckily, with the QNAP QTS OS, you get alot of testing, alerts, etc. A NAS is something I always wanted at home and im glad I took the plunge.

I chose QNAP over Synology because of its Intel CPU's and upgradable ram to 16gb. (no real need over 4/8gb unless you host a vm on it).
It is linux based, so you can SSH into it for extra tweaking. The GUI is surprisingly android like. It also can host VMs! one at a time though.
It becomes a pimped out little media server with transcoding to devices, remote access, and other apps you can get for it. its really neat especially with remote access via a browser or your phone/tablet etc.

I also have a UPS hooked into it with USB for triggered graceful shutdowns when on battery. I get little dips and found my qnap off a couple times the first two weeks I got it. The QNAP also sends a msg to my PC over the network to gracefully shutdown too when on battery. real neat.

I feel totally in control of my media now. I lost 2TB of crap just two months ago so i may seem overzealous now. there are newer versions of the 4 bay options nowadays, but I got an older one since Gigabit ethernet caps out at 125MB/s. I hit that just fine with this raid config.

I am glad that you want your data in your control. Vs cloud storage, you can really spend days uploading and days downloading when you need something ASAP. Plus, with comcast caps, recovering from the cloud >1TB will incur more charges! I know Dropbox throttles their bandwidth to customers too.

Also, Netgears and WD mycloud rank very low in throughput in many benchmarks.

Go on youtube and check out the "SPANdotCOM" channel. very informative stuff on Home NASes.

I've used Freenas before at an old job. this really does the trick vs an old dusty computer and raid card hogging electricity and space.

The NAS works EXTREMELY well with Windows Backups (full+inc) and Apple Time Machine backups with no extra programs.
It also supports replication, both local and remote to other NASes. Make sure you take a full backup here and there off site, or onto another drive incase someone breaks into your home and go "oooh cube with lights, might be able to make a buck off this". Luckily, if the actual QNAP itself fails too , you can just replace it and plug the drives in like nothing happened.

Let me know if you have more questions. I'm still in my honeymoon phase with mine.

TheFORCE · June 2017

Jojo, have you looked at Synology? If you haven't I'd recommend any of the DS+ models. I use it exactly for what you want plus more.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/

JoJoCal19 · June 2017

mzx380 wrote: »

I'm curious, is there a reason why you do not subscribe to a service like Amazon Drive? They offer a pretty low price point for unlimited storage, there will be no operating costs or maintenance on your part and you will always have access to the files. The only downside is that you will have to create a method to automate uploads unless they are from your mobile devices.

Yea I just want my stuff housed here, in my house. That's the primary requirement.

cyberguypr wrote: »

So what's the use case? Are you looking to have access to the data 24/7 outside your house and/or share it or is it more of a "house catches fire and I need a plan B so I don't lose digital memories"? I was looking for that plan B but wanted encryption. That left many popular options out. My main goal was to protect pics and other important stuff. I opted to just go with a JBOD setup and do a scheduled encrypted backup to Amazon Glacier. Stupidly cheap and I only pay more if I need quick retrieval. So far in 4 years nothing has failed and I haven't had the need to restore anything. YMMV depending on platforms you want to cover.

Basically it's like you mentioned, if the house catches fire, but also to remove having to save or keep files on my devices, and give me more flexibility to just pick up whatever device I want and work from it (iPads, SP4, MacBook Pro, Wintel laptop, or desktop). I'd also not like to have to worry about disk space when selecting future devices (rMBP specifically). I'd like to just have one place to keep most files. Also Glacier is awesome and I will definitely be using it to do offsite backups, as well as keeping a physical copy elsewhere.

Cisco Inferno wrote: »

I just picked up a QNAP 451 with 4 Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives. (you can get WD reds too, but more expensive and same benchmarks)

MAKE SURE you get NAS drives only!!! Their firmware prevents the entire RAID from going down if a downed drive stays down longer than 7 seconds I think. Also, they are suited for 24/7 use and higher vibrations and heat from being next to other drives. They also run slower at around 54-5900RPM which saves power. No use in faster drives if your GigE is the bottleneck. My whole unit with 4 drives pulls around 80w according to my UPS.

Make sure you get 4 bay so you can run Raid 10.
Raid 5 puts too much stress on the drives during rebuild, and drives usually fail together. so youll be screwed.
Raid 6 is too slow with extra parity.
With Raid 10 you can get the speed and redundancy you want.
If, and just If you lose two drives in the same mirror, youre screwed. Ex, lose disk 3 and 4 at the same time. But you can lose two drives in each mirrored set and be fine! ex lose disk 1 and 3 or 1 and 4 at the same time and youre good! just pop in a drive and rebuild.

luckily, with the QNAP QTS OS, you get alot of testing, alerts, etc. A NAS is something I always wanted at home and im glad I took the plunge.

I chose QNAP over Synology because of its Intel CPU's and upgradable ram to 16gb. (no real need over 4/8gb unless you host a vm on it).
It is linux based, so you can SSH into it for extra tweaking. The GUI is surprisingly android like. It also can host VMs! one at a time though.
It becomes a pimped out little media server with transcoding to devices, remote access, and other apps you can get for it. its really neat especially with remote access via a browser or your phone/tablet etc.

I also have a UPS hooked into it with USB for triggered graceful shutdowns when on battery. I get little dips and found my qnap off a couple times the first two weeks I got it. The QNAP also sends a msg to my PC over the network to gracefully shutdown too when on battery. real neat.

I feel totally in control of my media now. I lost 2TB of crap just two months ago so i may seem overzealous now. there are newer versions of the 4 bay options nowadays, but I got an older one since Gigabit ethernet caps out at 125MB/s. I hit that just fine with this raid config.

I am glad that you want your data in your control. Vs cloud storage, you can really spend days uploading and days downloading when you need something ASAP. Plus, with comcast caps, recovering from the cloud >1TB will incur more charges! I know Dropbox throttles their bandwidth to customers too.

Also, Netgears and WD mycloud rank very low in throughput in many benchmarks.

Go on youtube and check out the "SPANdotCOM" channel. very informative stuff on Home NASes.

I've used Freenas before at an old job. this really does the trick vs an old dusty computer and raid card hogging electricity and space.

The NAS works EXTREMELY well with Windows Backups (full+inc) and Apple Time Machine backups with no extra programs.
It also supports replication, both local and remote to other NASes. Make sure you take a full backup here and there off site, or onto another drive incase someone breaks into your home and go "oooh cube with lights, might be able to make a buck off this". Luckily, if the actual QNAP itself fails too , you can just replace it and plug the drives in like nothing happened.

Let me know if you have more questions. I'm still in my honeymoon phase with mine.

Thank you!!!! This is incredible information and exactly what I'm looking for here. I will take a good look into that solution. And yea, I don't want to lose all of our pics and vids of our family so that's why I'm trying to get something in place sooner than later.

TheFORCE wrote: »

Jojo, have you looked at Synology? If you haven't I'd recommend any of the DS+ models. I use it exactly for what you want plus more.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/

Perfect, thank you for that! I will take a look at Synology solutions as well!

rwmidl · June 2017

I have used a Drobo 5N for the past 4 years and it's been great. 5x2TB drives gives me more than enough space. The new 5N2 offers dual gig-e ports and you can do teaming on them. The only issues I've had is I've had drives die but I hot swapped them and it was fine. Using the WD Red drives currently. In another year when I move I'll probably upgrade to the 5N2 (my 5N will be 5 years old and will have done two international moves) and hopefully the WD Red 4TB drives will have come down some more in price.

I also back up my Drobo every quarter. I use Carbon Copy Cloner and copy shares (personal files, media, financial, photos) to USB drives (I think they are 3TB). Since CCC only copies changes, it keeps the space used low. I keep one drive here with me in a safe, the other is back in the US. The one in the US is about a year old (I swap it every year). I figure if the Drobo dies, I can recover from a quarterly backup. If it's catastrophic I can recover from a year ago.

Edit: as someone else said use NAS drives. The drives that died on me were WD Green. My Red's have been solid.

Edit 2: We are a Mac family and the Drobo works great. I set up a Time Machine share on it and back up our iMac and MacBook Pro. The only issue I've seen is if I'm logged in to the iMac (I have it set to auto-mount a share drive when I log in) and my wife logs in - it sees that share in use and I have to manually mount the same share for her. Now if I'm logged in to the iMac and she logs in to the MBP no issue. The not mounting a share becomes more of an issue with our entertainment share - iTunes really doesn't play overly well with network shares, but it works (this is more of an Apple issue and not a Drobo issue).

Personal Cloud/Storage Solution Opinions - WD MyCloud/OwnCloud/QNAP/Etc

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