Home NAS / Storage

Not sure if this question has come up before, but what is everyone using these days for home NAS needs? I'm really against the "cloud" services that products like Netgear ReadyNAS...I'd like to backup all of my pics/music/video content without it going into the cloud.

So far I'm reading really good things about Synology and QNAP.

Any thoughts?

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Bryzey

I got a Synology a few months ago and love it.

DevilWAH

I had a play with a Synology a few months back and was impressed. Personally I go for a Raspberry Pi with HD attached. But the Synology seemed to have a lot going for it.

tprice5

I have direct attached storage right now but I plan to cut over to the following at some point...

Building a Homemade SAN on the Cheap w/iSCSi: 32TB for $1,500 | Home Server Blog

NightShade03

tprice5 wrote: »

I have direct attached storage right now but I plan to cut over to the following at some point...

Building a Homemade SAN on the Cheap w/iSCSi: 32TB for $1,500 | Home Server Blog

Nice link! That might be a little overkill for what I need, but still bookmarked for later use

tprice5

Yeah, I don't know too many people who "need" 32TB of data but once you have it, it allows you to do a lot of things that you otherwise couldn't, ie, home surveillance, back ups, ridiculous media library.
I've already bought 16 drives for mine, though, it is more for proof of concept since the disks are all 200GBs. If 16 drives seems like too much you could just start with 4 and expand as needed. Also, the system doesn't have to be used for just storage. This could be used as a lab box as well. Cheap, versatile, scalable, reliable... what more could you ask for?

NightShade03

Very true. I could see this being an awesome storage platform for a home lab, although not sure what the wife will think about that

The benefit of this is that I can run whatever OS I want/need and not have to worry about vendor cloud services, blah blah blah.

Expect

I'm also having the same inner-conflicts as you Nightshade, I only store unimportant things in the Cloud (e.g. Dropbox) but am looking for a backup solution for home. at this moment all I do is backup once in a while to an external HDD. but from past experience, this is a bad solution in the long term.

I have had an external 1TB drive that slipped off and fell, it worked right afterwards so I was relieved, 2 weeks later I plugged it in and it didn't read the data anymore. all my personal photos and data were gone.

I'm also looking for some cheap NAS, but don't plan on building it from scratch on a PC.

NightShade03

Yeah that's what happened to father-in-law. Had to pay $1800 to have the HD platters read manually in a clean room to recover the data (he was lucky they could). Rather spend $700 - $900 now to have a multi drive NAS in RAID-5 where I could lose two drives without issues then pay $1800. The Synology seems to be a good choice and I could do a 6 bay device with 6 drives for < $1000. Not bad.

cyberguypr

I have a JBOD e-sata enclosure that work fine, so haven't had the urge to upgrade. Synology has been in my "must buy" list for years. It looks so sexy

For offsite backup of my home backup I am using AWS Glacier. If you want to backup and archive on the cheap to get that extra piece of mind, this is one of the best solutions out there. With their pricing model you pay only if you want to retrieve a lot of data really fast. If you restore a lot it adds up quick, but if you use it as insurance like I do, there's barely any cost involved.

tprice5

NightShade03 wrote: »

in RAID-5 where I could lose two drives without issues...

RAID 5 can withstand 1 disk failure. RAID 6 is recommended for drives larger than 1TB and also provides fault tolerance greater than 1 disk. The page I previously posted recommends RAID 6.

I found the dialogue HERE pretty interesting.

cyberguypr wrote: »

For offsite backup of my home backup I am using AWS Glacier.

How much space do you use and how much do you pay a month? I checked the pricing page on Amazon but have a hard time calculating that into an actual price that is applicable to me.

iBrokeIT

I use a QNAP 469 Pro and LOVE it. The speed and feature list are amazing.

QNAP, Inc. - Network Attached Storage (NAS) - Products - Products - Storage - SMB - 4-Bay - TS-469 Pro

NightShade03

Oops, I meant RAID-6. Note to self: no posting before coffee time.

That link for serverfault is very informative though, thanks!

I was reading last night about someone that did a NAS device with all SSD drives and everyone was telling the person they were crazy because SSD performance just is required, gets very expensive, and would be very hard to hit to multi-TB sizes without a second mortgage. I do like the Western Digital "RED" drives though which are supposed to have enhanced performance for NAS.

@cyberguypr - I like the idea of AWS Glacier (in fact this is big topic for me at work when talking with customers), however I'm still really not solid on the cloud for my personal stuff just yet.

tprice5

NightShade03 wrote: »

@cyberguypr - I like the idea of AWS Glacier (in fact this is big topic for me at work when talking with customers), however I'm still really not solid on the cloud for my personal stuff just yet.

It's appealing to me in that if my house burns down or I script a delete command incorrectly to remove all of a certain file type and it inadvertently wipes my entire 3TB movie library then I have a means of recovery outside of all the awful data recovery tools out there. And yes, this actually happened.

NightShade03

lol I think we all have horror stories like that. I know it sounds crazy, but I currently have an external drive that I backup everything too and every 3 months I rotate that with a different external drive. There are three external drives total and the two currently not in use are stored offsite. If the house burns down I'll lose some data yes, but not the crux of all of my data.

jibbajabba

MicroServer + Nas4Free = win

Cloud ? Only for backups of my backups

JustFred

We have been moving things around at home. At one point perhaps towards the end of the year, i need to pick up a dedicated NAS for all our stuff.

CCNTrainee

QNAP TS-212 - I invested into one of these when I was still in the states. A very basic model, with two HDD bays. I stuck a 3 TB for media library and I have extra 500 gig drive in there for all my personnel items. The Web Client you use to interface with the server took a bit to get use to but nothing hard at all for IT vets like us to understand. I mainly use this device as a PLEX server as well as a backup for all my personnel things.

The problem I have with this device is that it wasn't powerful enough to Stream movies on its on components. The way I remedy this was using a old laptop and had it mapped to the Server, so it would act as the Streamer Device for my NAS. So now I can play everything and have it play on my cell phone when I am out of town.

PurpleIT

FreeNAS & OwnCloud - I have it set to backup the pics on my phone as well.

Next will be trying to put OwnCloud on my GoDaddy web server and syncing that with that so if there's a fire or such I may lose my movies (I got not time to backup ~6TB of movies I rarely watch anyway), but at least my family's pictures, etc will be safe.

down77

My Synology DS1513+ just arrived from New Egg. I'm putting 5 x 4Tb WD NAS (red) drives in to start

NightShade03

down77 wrote: »

My Synology DS1513+ just arrived from New Egg. I'm putting 5 x 4Tb WD NAS (red) drives in to start

Sweet! Let us know how it works out.

cyberguypr

+1 on the DS1513. Report back and tell me how awesome it is so I can expedite getting one.

jibbajabba

PurpleIT wrote: »

OwnCloud

Which reminds me. Did a double whammy with that. Had Owncloud syncing my Dropbox folder

JoJoCal19

Timely discussion. I'm in the process of deciding what to do for a family photo server. I basically want to copy all of our CDs, DVDs, SD cards, etc onto a single server/device that we can access over the home network. Ive been debating between a NAS with FreeNAS, a cloud server with OwnCloud, a RAID enclosure with two drives in RAID 1 or a fancy 5+ bay drive with RAID + parity. So many choices out there and I could go either way. I've thought about starting simple with a dual bay RAID enclosure, with two 2TB drives in RAID 1 array. Not sure how long that amount would last but I'd guess 3-5 years.

tprice5

down77 wrote: »

My Synology DS1513+ just arrived from New Egg. I'm putting 5 x 4Tb WD NAS (red) drives in to start

Would you mind sharing with us how much you spent?

I don't understand the appeal of qnap and synology or really any OOTB SAN when you can get more storage with better performance in a much cheaper package. Can someone explain to me why you would choose this over building your own?

Asif Dasl

tprice5 wrote: »

I don't understand the appeal of qnap and synology or really any OOTB SAN when you can get more storage with better performance in a much cheaper package. Can someone explain to me why you would choose this over building your own?

I currently have a ReadyNAS Pro 4 but I really want a QNAP TS-670 for VMware/Hyper-V (I am still undecided as there is nothing wrong with the ReadyNAS Pro 4 at the moment).

Pros over building one:
Smaller
Less Electricity
Speed
VMware VAAI or MS ODX acceleration - You could use Server 2012 with built-in ODX support but it requires a license.

Cons over building one:
Locked in to the number of drives
Relatively expensive

I built a NAS using an ITX motherboard and because it only had a single GigE NIC I only got ~110MB/sec. Whereas the QNAP can get upwards of 450MB/sec over 4 NICs and is purpose built for the task at hand.

tprice5

I plan on going through your pro/con list and dissecting tomorrow, if you don't mind. I disagree, but I'll expound on that tomorrow. For now, I am going to bed.

Edit: I misread. I thought you were saying it was more expensive to build and that you were locked into drives as a result. You can imagine my shock when I read that ha. Glad I didn't actually type up a rebuttal. Would've looked like a fool.

cyberguypr

I love it because it's small, power consumption is fairly low, it is relatively simple, has great support form what I hear, expandable, can do LACP, expands to 90TB, and can support any scenario I've come across in my lab.

The absolute top reason for me (this is true due to my OCD): it looks sexy and will match perfectly my Shuttle lab machines.

Asif Dasl

tprice5 wrote: »

Edit: I misread. I thought you were saying it was more expensive to build and that you were locked into drives as a result. You can imagine my shock when I read that ha. Glad I didn't actually type up a rebuttal.

No worries, it's late where you are. I worked it out myself before and I couldn't guarantee the performance of everything. I have TechNet for a little while longer and I could build a server with ODX support (even though I really want VAAI) but when you include a 4 port NIC or say a 10GigE NIC the costs rise and I don't know if you get exactly the same performance as an OOTB SAN like the QNAP. Each to their own I guess.

edit - also on looks alone I would go for a drobo but their performance isn't that great compared to the competition.

NightShade03

There is also a convenience factor with not building your own. I'm all for being a geek and building my own system, with custom install, tweaks, etc....but when I just need something reliable to backup my stuff, I rather pay for the ease of just slapping some drives into a box and go.

cyberguypr

^ amen bro!

I love building my own stuff but hate troubleshooting it as it always fails at the worst possible time. Usually when you have work deadlines, kids have recitals/sports, etc.