View Full Version : Anybody using Network Attached Storage / RAID Arrays for their files?
I've been thinking lately about building a NAS system with some old computer parts I have here. I'm not really sure what I'm looking for though since I haven't ever used a RAID array.
I also don't know if it's really going to do what I want. Right now I have a 2TB drive that's 90% full, a 750GB that's getting there, and my 1.5TB "Storage" drive decided to quit on me earlier this year. I am looking for a redundant storage system that I can keep all of my audio, video, and photo work. LF scans have really started to eat into my storage, but 36mp D800 files and 50-80GB of video files for a commercial shoot are killing me too.
I suppose that my work flow will be scan/shoot -> RAW / TIFF files edited and then filed away onto the NAS and one copy of my JPEG files will stay on my computer for easy access. What's important is the redundancy - if a HDD goes bad I want the RAID array to be able to recover itself. I don't remember what RAID type that is. Probably looking at putting 3-4 1.5TB or 2TB drives in there, and maybe the whole thing in a fire-proof cabinet if possible.
Anybody have one of these systems, or built one? I'll probably cross-post this to a pro audio site but I figured I'd ask y'all as well!
Yo' Vinny
10-Jul-2013, 20:37
Everyone will have a lot of opinions here, but I eventually ran into this problem and got tired of the constant hard drive swapping, USB/Thunderbolt drives, etc. Ended up standardizing on an internal fast 7200rpm RAID 0 striped array for pictures within the last two years. Moving everything else offline to a Synology NAS device - highly recommended! Don't waste your time or money on Drobo. My offsite backup plan will be cloud storage for the most critical images, but I'm still working through those options Amazon Glacier, Crashplan, etc.
Light Guru
10-Jul-2013, 20:40
Sounds like you need a Drobo.
Well the thing is, I have a mid-ATX box, motherboard, and quad-core Pentium just sitting around from my last computer build, so rather than buy a ready-made NAS box, I want to build my own. I think I just need a RAID controller and NAS OS like FreeNAS that I've read about.
Vinny, which Synology do you have though?
Oh - I also already have a power conditioner and all of that. Disastrous power-fluctuations should not be an issue.
polyglot
10-Jul-2013, 21:11
* DO NOT RAID-0, it increases the chance of data loss. If you want speed (for editing, swap-space, tile-caches, root fs), get an SSD.
* RAID-5 should be your minimum option, e.g. a 3+1 configuration (6TB from 4 of 2TB drives), consider also RAID-6 (3+2 with hot spare)
* thermal & vibration management makes the difference between 1-year and 15-year drive longevity
* if you can use a Unix variant, they generally include excellent software-RAID functionality. You can get PCI 4-port SATA cards for peanuts and most motherboards now have heaps of SATA onboard.
* hardware RAID can be nice but the card becomes your single point of failure. You also can't throw the discs in USB boxes and recover them from a different PC just using software.
* If you're doing NAS, the network connection is the bottleneck anyway so there's no performance gain from HW RAID controllers
* Consider ZFS
* RAID is never a substitute for backups. Backups must be offsite or the thief/fire/whatever will take them too.
* Cloud backups are a nice theory, but how long will it take to pull 2TB down your DSL line with a 100GB/month quota!? Forget it for the bulky stuff like scans & video.
* a couple of 2TB hard drives in a drawer at your work/friends/parents' house is pretty secure, don't forget to update them monthly or whatever
* rsync is your friend!
the longer version of this post... (http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?104644-Flat-panel-monitors!-What-s-the-verdict-for-2013&p=1041642#post1041642)
Daniel Stone
10-Jul-2013, 21:19
Power conditioner is one thing, a decent battery backup with an integrated conditioner (ala APC) is a better option IMO...
It allows you to have enough time to finish gocopying, transferring or whatever you need to do, without a hard shut down.
I would not recommend leaving it running unattended, not unless you have a generator wired into your homes electrical system.
Dan
Thanks polyglot! Lots to chew through. I am definitely leaning towards RAID 5 or 6 with 4-5 2TB drives.
Have not heard of ZFS before. Will investigate.
I've built computers and been at the forefront of technology for most of my life, but somehow or another all this RAID mess has never come up. Grateful for your input!
Daniel - I have a battery backup system for my location audio gear. Probably will get another one for this system when it's completed and running.
Preston
10-Jul-2013, 21:49
I recently read some reviews of Synology products at AnandTech (http://www.anandtech.com/)
Here are the search results (http://www.anandtech.com/SearchResults?q=Synology&=search) for Synology at AnandTech.
If I were considering an NAS, I would be giving their products a real close look.
--P
polyglot
10-Jul-2013, 23:03
No problem; PM me if you have any questions.
UPSes are a good idea too but if you're using a good operating system with a reliable journalling filesystem (e.g. ext4) then a power failure is not a data-loss event. It's best to keep the journal on a separate fast device though, like your SSD; journal linearity in conjunction with RAID can be a dangerous assumption. And make sure you create your filesystem (block stride etc) to match the RAID settings.
Second-hand UPSes are often very cheap because they have dead batteries (I got a 3kVA unit for $150, it just needed $120 of batteries and was good for another 3 years). Buy more batteries off you go!
A couple of thoughts from someone with 0 experience, but who's been looking ahead to this kind of decision.
There's a tipping point in data volume at which this kind of setup starts to make sense. Exactly where that point is, is hard to say. There are rumors (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9227382/60TB_disk_drives_could_be_a_reality_in_2016) that new hard drive technology will lead to individual hard drives with up to 60TB capacity within the next three years ... this would change things completely.
Ignoring all that, moving to the NAS/RAID solution adds robustness and expandability, but also complexity and vulnerability to different kinds of failures. I would be inclined to make a priority of energy efficiency and cooling, since depending on a large array of drives all the time would suck a lot of juice. Something like RAID level 6 sounds ideal for the sake of failure tolerance.
I'm not so comfortable with Drobo, since their file system is proprietary. But the prices are attractive. I think I'll hold off as long as I can, and then be ready to spend money on a pro-level setup when the time comes.
Interesting link!
Out of curiosity I looked up some prices, and surprisingly 4TB drives are now really pretty cheap. I almost wonder if just another drive is what I really should get. My 1.5TB "storage" drive lasted for over 6 years without so much as a hiccup (WD Green).
But the redundancy is (can be) important. That's the "tipping point" for me - how much I want to "risk." I've never hardly lost any data, and nothing critical, in 15 years of serious computing. Maybe that's just luck, I don't know.
bob carnie
11-Jul-2013, 07:52
I am using a Drobo right now for our images and really like it, beats the hell out of five or 6 portable drives.
Reading and researching it seems that a software RAID solution is likely all I really need. Especially considering that I already have most of a spare computer sitting here.
I'm thinking I should pop 8GB of RAM into this computer, install Win7 on a tiny SSD, and put 4-5 2TB drives in there. Not sure on the best RAID array - either 5, 6, or 10 seems to be the best.
Along with all this a 3 or 4TB storage drive in my working computer for critical backup.
Total cost would be just the HDDs and some RAM. Maybe $700 total.
Amedeus
11-Jul-2013, 09:25
I am using a Drobo right now for our images and really like it, beats the hell out of five or 6 portable drives.
I'm equallly on Drobo now with 8 x 3 Tb drives ... got there after playing for years with NAS, having hard drive failures and slow performance.
My Drobo is backed up monthly on a number of USB drives from the old NAS boxes ... the latter are stored off-site.
Larry Gebhardt
11-Jul-2013, 13:03
I use a Synology Diskstation. It's fast enough, but I usually store a local copy of large scans while I'm working on them (hard to beat the speed of the SSD). I back it up nightly to a pair of local disk that get swapped and stored off site regularly.
rdenney
11-Jul-2013, 16:05
I built an Unraid box, using the Unraid software from Lime Technologies (http://lime-technology.com/). Unraid is a software package that is intended for redundant storage, not for speed.
RAID striping was intended to make slow disks fast by writing to a bunch of them in parallel. A file would get striped across multiple disks. Not good for reliability--if one disk dies, the file is gone.
So, they added redundancy in the form of a parity disk. The parity disk works by adding up the bit value of the array drives. If a disk dies and has to be replaced, the RAID can rebuild the array, because it knows what the other disk bit values add up to in that bit position on the drives. If they add up to odd, and the parity disk says even for that spot, then the replacement disk gets a 1. If they add up to the same value as the parity disk, it gets a 0.
But if two disks fail, the array cannot be restored and you lose everything.
They solved this using mirroring, where two arrays (which may be one disk each) are mirrors of each other. Everything written to one array is also written to the other array. That's fine, except that it cuts the storage capacity of the array in half.
Unraid works differently, and more simply, because it's not trying to make the array fast. There is no striping. You can define a folder across all the array disks, but the files are written to just one disk in that array. If there isn't room for that disk, it moves on to the next disk. The advantage here is that each disk is still fully readable. The array uses a parity disk just as with RAID, so it will automatically rebuild the array on the failure of any one disk. But if disaster occurs, and you lost two disks, you only lose what's on the disks that fail, not what's on all the other disks. So, the Unraid array is much more inherently reliable than the RAID array.
The advantage to this approach is that the disks do not all have to be the same size or type, as they do with RAID. The only requirement is that the parity disk has to be as big as the biggest disk. I have a 3TB parity drive, and a 3TB drive for storage, plus four 2TB drives for storage in the array (there are more drives than are shown in the pictures below, which I took before adding the two 3TB drives). So, there is 14TB total, 3 of which is used for parity, and 11 for storage.
I add redundancy by using a very large disk as my main disk in my computer (it's a 2TB drive, and I use that only for data--software runs off a 1.5TB drive), and then performing routine backups to my Unraid server. I make a full backup every month, and an incremental backup every day. My data disk isn't full, and my Unraid system has a capacity of 11 TB, so I can store at least 7 or 8 full backups handily before I have to go clean something off. I"m using Shadowprotect backup software to manage the backups, and it all happens automatically each night. But it means I'm fully redundant--the current version of everything is on my computer drive, and a series of full copies are on the Unraid server.
My Unraid server comprises an old, crappy Dell desktop motherboard, a nice IBM M1015 disk controller, which provides 8 individual SATA interfaces, each with their own PCI-E lane. I put it all in a nice, big, but cheap case. The network interface is 1000BaseT, so it's fast. I routinely get about 65-80 MB/S file write speeds to the array, and this is MUCH faster than the less expensive prepackaged NAS products. (I still have a DLINK DNS-323 on the network, and the fastest it's ever gone was about 11 MB/S). The Unraid software includes the distribution of Linux under which it runs, and I have the software loaded onto a USB thumbdrive. The thumbdrive is the boot drive in the computer's BIOS, and the software only loads on boot so there is no further activity on the thumbdrive after booting. It's a super-reliable and simple system.
But it was a pain to set up. Fortunately, Unraid has a forum of people who will help and a lot of user interface goodies that have been written by various users. But the Unraid product itself is a commercial product (though it is not at all expensive). Total cost, about $400, including all but a pair of 2TB drives. The drives are cheapie consumer-class drives, not expensive enterprise-class drives. It's been running 8 months with no failures or issues so far.
Here are some pics of my setup:
http://www.rickdenney.com/scratch/un_overall_interior.jpg
The case interior.
http://www.rickdenney.com/scratch/un_drive_stack.jpg\
The drive stack. My version of Unraid allows six array drives, including parity. One of the drives in the upper part of the case is a regular Windows drive that is normally not in the boot sequence and is not part of the Unraid array, but that gives me a way to boot the machine into Windows just by changing the boot sequence.
http://www.rickdenney.com/scratch/un_controller_nic.jpg
The disk controller and network interface. I had to update the BIOS on the Dell board to work with these.
http://www.rickdenney.com/scratch/un_server_complete.jpg
The overall box.
Rick "cheaper than Synology, and perhaps better with higher capacity, but NOT easier" Denney
rdenney
11-Jul-2013, 16:08
I use a Synology Diskstation. It's fast enough, but I usually store a local copy of large scans while I'm working on them (hard to beat the speed of the SSD). I back it up nightly to a pair of local disk that get swapped and stored off site regularly.
I also use a SSD scratch disk in my Photoshop computer, which has 16G of RAM in addition to the disk drives I mentioned above. I have Photoshop setup to write scratch files to the SSD.
Rick "who does not use a NAS for speed--the network would make it too slow" Denney
Thanks Rick! I will have to look into that. It sounds like what I need. I certainly don't need speed, just reliability and redundancy. My main workstation will handle the files and then I can transfer them once finished for archival.
The pre-made NAS boxes are definitely a no-go for me, because it'd be a waste of what I have on hand, and more expensive only for the simplicity of already being done for you.
goamules
11-Jul-2013, 16:38
It's nice to see people still into smart storage solutions. I used to configure RAID for NT and Unix systems, but it was for work systems, never home. And they say film is expensive, welcome to the hardware requirements for professional digital! <rhetorical>How much is this going to cost?</rhetorical>
I think we're going to see a lot of new raid enclosures (with thunderbolt options) now that the new Mac Pro is going to force us to use such things. I'm curious to see what comes.
Rick, I think the generic term for that kind of RAID-like setup is JBOD, which stands for "just a bunch of disks." It's the only version that allows a volume to include different size physical disks. I think that would be an ideal setup for something like a time-machine backup or regular backup.
Brian Ellis
11-Jul-2013, 18:04
"Cloud backups are a nice theory, but how long will it take to pull 2TB down your DSL line with a 100GB/month quota!? Forget it for the bulky stuff like scans & video."
That's what kept me from going to the cloud a couple years ago. I forget which one I was planning to use but when they told me it would take something like 4 or 5 24-hour days to download everything (and I don't have anywhere near as much as the OP) I decided to forget about it. They did have a system where I could put it all on DVDs, send them the DVD, and they'd download it at a charge (or something like that, I forget the details). But frankly I just didn't want to go to the trouble. I have three external hard drives plus I put everything on DVDs for a total of four different backup systems. If everything disappears at the same time then that's too bad. But the world and I can survive without having my photographs available through the cloud (obviously I'm not a pro, that would be a whole different deal).
polyglot
11-Jul-2013, 21:34
If you have enough uplink bandwidth to cover your data-generation rate, there are cloud-backup services available that will throw your data onto a HDD and courier it to you for quick restoration. There is a cost involved of course and it's not something I'd be willing to pay for non-professional use. For a studio however, it might make sense.
Light Guru
11-Jul-2013, 21:56
I'm equallly on Drobo now with 8 x 3 Tb drives ... got there after playing for years with NAS, having hard drive failures and slow performance.
My Drobo is backed up monthly on a number of USB drives from the old NAS boxes ... the latter are stored off-site.
Yea Dropbox makes it nice and easy. And I LOVE that you can mix and match drive brands and sizes. I've set my Drobo up to send me an email if a drive fails then I can just stop and pick up a new drive on the way home.
rdenney
12-Jul-2013, 07:19
I think we're going to see a lot of new raid enclosures (with thunderbolt options) now that the new Mac Pro is going to force us to use such things. I'm curious to see what comes.
Rick, I think the generic term for that kind of RAID-like setup is JBOD, which stands for "just a bunch of disks." It's the only version that allows a volume to include different size physical disks. I think that would be an ideal setup for something like a time-machine backup or regular backup.
JBOD is a particular RAID configuration. Unraid is not a RAID configuration at all--it's its own thing. JBOD does not, for example, have a parity disk for redundancy, and not all JBOD schemes I've seen keep files whole on individual disks so that they can be recovered separately from the array, as is the case with Unraid.
Rick "who also looked into NAS4FREE in its various forks, but found too many configuration management issues and lack of support" Denney
rdenney
12-Jul-2013, 07:49
It's nice to see people still into smart storage solutions. I used to configure RAID for NT and Unix systems, but it was for work systems, never home. And they say film is expensive, welcome to the hardware requirements for professional digital! <rhetorical>How much is this going to cost?</rhetorical>
If I was building this for a commercial application, I would add some features, particularly a hot-swappable disk case and enterprise-class disks. Lime Technologies sells storage servers in that class, and they seem to be really quiet and well-made. I probably could not do it myself for less than what they charge, and they would deal with all the configuration management issues that I struggled with setting up mine.
By the way, I should have added that my Unraid system is a lower-power solution, too. Unraid has an excellent algorithm for spinning down the drives and reducing consumption. Only the drive in use spins up during a write, so the fans I added are really overkill (but they are low power fans designed for quiet more than air flow).
I should also mention that I used a large power supply with its on extra cooling.
I also have it plugged into a UPS, and it supports the UPS interface standard that APC uses, so it will power down gracefully on power loss. Not powering down gracefully may require a time-consuming parity check on power restoration, but I've had several power losses since running it and have never had to fiddle with it.
I just checked the web interface from here in the basement (the NAS is on the second floor), and Unraid has had an uptime of 143 days, 18 hours. The disks are currently at 39 degrees C (my upstairs is warm), and it's doing an incremental backup as I write, with only one disk spun up.
With the remote terminal server in Unraid's Linux distro, and with several options of very nice web-hosted user interfaces, operating headless is completely reasonable.
Rick "who did, however, have to buy that IBM disk controller off a guy on ebay with a BIOS package that does not use all its features to be compatible with Unraid" Denney
Hi guys. I thought I'd update this thread with what I ended up doing, for posterity.
First of all, thanks very much to Rick who chimed in regarding UNRAID. The more I thought about it, and considered the benefits/risks of a true RAID setup, the more I became convinced that it wasn't necessary, and that the UNRAID solution was elegant, simple, and most importantly, cheap to implement for me, as I had a bunch of spare parts from my old computer.
I bought some fresh RAM (8GB) and popped it into my old box with a Pentium Core 2 Quad. Overkill on all counts, but I bought the RAM for almost nothing from a friend who never used it. Luckily, my motherboard/video card ended up being compatible on all fronts with UNRAID. I bought 3 Western Digital RED model hard drives, 2TB capacity each, from Amazon for $109/each shipped. I downloaded the UNRAID "free" model to test the 3 disks, and I will probably add a couple more and buy the upgrade to use more than 3 disks. I found the UNRAID wiki and the instructions and Linux commands were easy to use (I've done plenty of command prompt work when I was younger though). As of now, all 3 disks are "pre-clearing," which is basically a full format/write sequence to test the disks. Once I get that done I'll start copying data, which will be the real chore. Not sure how long it'll take to transfer about 3TB of data from my master computer to the server over wireless LAN.
I didn't buy a disk controller, I'm just using the motherboard's SATA ports. There is 8 built-in anyway. The RED drives are not "enterprise" class but made for NAS storage, with extra features but not the full robustness of an enterprise drive - but probably still perfectly acceptable for a home server configuration.
Total cost for me right now is about $350. That's with 4TB of storage after the Parity disk is taken out of the equation. Not bad. Highly recommended if you already have some parts lying around - and even if you don't, some older parts shouldn't cost more than $100 anyway. Basically the cost is about what you'd pay for a lower-cost NAS setup - without disks, so pretty significant savings.
Thanks again for all the helpful suggestions and thoughts.
Ken Lee
16-Aug-2013, 10:48
Re: using an external Solid State drives as an (additional) Photoshop scratch disk:
Any recommended vendor or configuration for an iMac ?
rdenney
16-Aug-2013, 11:55
By the way, I just had my first failure of a disk in my Unraid setup. I'm using a consumer-grade 3TB Seagate as a parity disk, and another as a data disk, in addition to four more 2-TB disks of various brands. The 3-TB parity disk failed. Unraid declared it failed and sent me an email to let me know that the array was no longer parity-protected. I stopped the array, replaced the disk, started the array in maintenance mode, ran the preclear procedure (which took a day), added the precleared disk as the parity drive, and then started the array in production mode. It gave me a "Sync" button to press to rebuild the parity disk. That took about 8 hours. The array is now up again with no loss of data. So, for several days, I could not run backups from my network computers, but now I'm back in business. Unraid is a good solution for cheap disks that will fail sooner rather than later. I had skipped the preclear procedure when I put the failed disk online initially, and that was a mistake. That preclear procedure is a deep exercise of the disk and will usually cause infantile failures before the disk is in production. Most that survive the preclear live long, happy lives, according to the active Unraid user group.
Also by the way, data transfers to the array are running 60 MB/s over my gigabit-Ethernet wired network. The preclear reads averaged 128 MB/s, and the preclear write was closer to 150 MB/s. Parity building (which simultaneously reads from the data disks and writes to the parity disk) ran at 100 MB/s. One would have to spend a LOT of money on an enterprise-class NAS to get that performance. Your wireless network is going to slow that down a lot, though. Time to run some Cat-6!
Rick "who, with 11TB of backup storage, can keep six months worth of monthly full and daily incremental backups" Denney
I'm running dual 2TB drives in a RAID 1 configuration (fully mirrored). Each disc has identical information.
If one fails, I replace it, copy the contents of the good disc to it, and I'm back in business.
I'm using a MacBook Pro, but the same RAID scheme could be used on any computer with ethernet/firewire.
- Leigh
Also by the way, data transfers to the array are running 60 MB/s over my gigabit-Ethernet wired network. The preclear reads averaged 128 MB/s, and the preclear write was closer to 150 MB/s. Parity building (which simultaneously reads from the data disks and writes to the parity disk) ran at 100 MB/s. One would have to spend a LOT of money on an enterprise-class NAS to get that performance. Your wireless network is going to slow that down a lot, though. Time to run some Cat-6!
Rick "who, with 11TB of backup storage, can keep six months worth of monthly full and daily incremental backups" Denney
Yeah wireless is definitely not the way to go, but I just had a thought - I have an extra router, so I can just stick the server in my office with my main box and run some lines direct, and get the router to be a repeater so I can connect to the internet. Or something like that.
bob carnie
17-Aug-2013, 05:43
I hard wired all our devices, to a large router, which is also connected to a Drobo.
We operate all our printers and scanners with this system.
Some glitches , most likely due to the computers that are hooked up to them, getting all the problem areas
solved may take time, usually meaning upgrading hardware or software, but its worth it.
Personally the cabling is not that complicated certain issues about how you cross electical wires and such , I do not think I would
consider wireless , nor would I consider cload storage.
But never say never.
Its amazing for me now to see where we are from where we came.
Lenny Eiger
17-Aug-2013, 11:31
RAID's? No. Not anymore. To me its a foolish waste of time. Sorry if I'm a bit harsh here but this is one of my pet peeves.
I do have experience with this - 20 years or more of it. I have built plenty of RAID's for clients, and for myself. In my other job I do database development and speed is always a concern. Reliability is a bigger one, of course. With the arrival of SATA a few years ago the minimal speed improvement no longer warrants the additional risk. With the arrival of relatively inexpensive huge drives, spanning is no longer necessary, either.
How many of you have been bitten by a LaCie Bigger Drive, the worst piece of garbage ever made? The 1 Terabyte was four cheap 250's in there will extremely poor thermal design. (I took the last one apart.) (Thankfully I only used them for backup - I had 6 of them at one time and they all failed.)
There is some benefit to networking a drive, but only if multiple people need access to the same thing. It's downside is that they use very old operating systems to control it, sort of like DOS. I am not that excited about the Cloud, either. Too little storage for too much money and its in someone else's hands, that I don't know. I have to admit to being a little concerned about privacy issues in general.
The time has arrived that the simple solution is the best. I bought a "Quiet" case from Burley, an external SATA port multiplier. It is, in fact, quiet. It has 8 bays with blue lights. There are now SAS and Thunderbolt options as well. All in the $500-$1500 category.
4 TB drives are $200 each. I buy two at a time. I have one that is the main drive and the other is the backup. You can time machine it, I use something called Data Backup 3 from prosoftengineering.com - cost $49. Does all kinds of things.
The 8 Bay case can handle 16 TB of drives and their backups. What's more I can add only as much as I need, then add more later, if necessary.
SSD drives have now become reliable and sticking one in your computer as a scratch disk, or as a main drive is where the improvement is - in today's technology. Far more than driving everything from a striped drive, no matter how good.
That's my 2 cents.
Lenny
I have the QNAP TS412 box. 7.5 Terabyte Capacity, setup with RAID5.
David Lobato
17-Aug-2013, 15:07
I agree with Lenny. RAID striping increases disk access speed a few milliseconds, but for most photographers the priority is on data integrity and disk redundancy. Disk storage is getting cheaper so paired drives holding redundant data is safe and cost effective. For even better reliability I'd recommend Enterprise class SATA drives in a quality enclosure box with the best cooling capacity (yeah, I read the disk reliability paper Google published, but running them cooler always helps).
7200 rpm drives will perform faster than 5400 rpm drives at the expense of a little more electric power being used. The difference is more noticeable when initially transferring multiple TB of data to new drives with very large transfer block sizes.
Regarding rapid access of frequently used files, SSD's have fantastic performance but be sure you buy a reputable brand from a reputable dealer.
Well, I'm sure not the expert (actually had to have a guy set it up for me) but my little Synlogy DS411Slim NAS has been set up wirelessly on my network for over a year now and I've never had the slightest issue. In fact, the big issue with this particular NAS was supposed to be running HOT (mfgr said it was in spec and fine) but my drive temps never top 50deg.
Currently have four 1TB Western Digital Blue 2.5" HDDs set up in RAID 0 - I think - 2TB+redundant 2TB? Anyway, I can access the drive from anywhere, has a media server for movies and music, automatic backup for all my PCs and store all my image files. If I were a digital photographer sporting a D800 or 5DM3 or something, this drive wouldn't be big enough, but if you don't need tens of TBs of space, this little drive is quiet, tiny and trouble free.
At home on my wireless gigabit network, download and upload speeds are plenty good enough for me, but on the road you need a pretty fast connect if you want to watch a movie or something. All in all, I don't worry anymore about having safe backup and I even have 20GB of Cloud storage to keep the most important stuff offsite too.
It should be said that RAID is not suitable as only backup. In my opinion you're only backed up if you have at least one off-site backup, either in a cloud (I use Crashplan) and/or HDDs at a friend/office/family. RAID or any kind of onsite backup will not protect you from water damage, fire or theft.
rdenney
20-Aug-2013, 23:49
My own standard of protection is the same as with my negatives. I occasionally make blu-rays of my photo folders for off-site storage, and that is already more protection from natural disaster than my negatives receive.
Risk = consequences of failure X likelihood of failure
I try to minimize the consequences of inevitable disk failures, and the likelihood of a fire. But all life is a risk.
Cloud storage is not an option for me--my internet access is limited to 4G cellular service and 8GB a month. My image backups from my computer are 425GB, and nearly that much from my wife's computer. Cloud storage is not even in the right galaxy.
As I said before, and as Lenny and others have confirmed, the point of RAID striping was speed. When discussing network-attached storage, speed is not relevant. Even a gigabit network like mine will be slower than even slow disks. For backups, this is not a problem. My full image backups take six hours, but that's why I only do them monthly, with daily incremental backups.
Unraid spans for convenience. The spanning of my shares (folders) means that my backup software can be configured for only one network location, and the Unraid system will spread that across all the disks in my array without striping and without dividing up any one file. I back up three computers to that NAS. Unraid uses the Reiser file system on a Slackware distribution of Linux, with Samba for managing the shares. Pretty simple stuff, requiring only rudimentary Linux command-line stuff.
For me, the greatest risk is a backup system that requires ad-hoc action on my part. I need a system that can operate automatically without me having to get around to it.
Synology makes great NAS units for moderate prices--far better than the lethargic D-Link NASes I have used in the past. Unraid was cheaper, has more efficiency than mirroring, less vulnerability than striping, and the speed of a Synology NAS. All in all, a good solution for me.
Rick "who takes routine backups seriously" Denney
Jim Cole
21-Aug-2013, 05:46
My system that has operated just fine for 6 years now is a three disk RAID 5 array for my data on the computer that is automatically backed up to a four disk RAID 10 array on a Netgear Ready NAS+. I've had disk failures on both arrays, but replacing a disk is simple and once the array is rebuilt, it hums along just like always. The Netgear NAS, allows me to grab the box in an emergency and not worry about the large computer enclosure. My "C" drive which holds OS and programs only is cloned (using XXClone) to another internal drive that I can select on boot up if the "C" drive fails. Seamless. I only wish there was a simple, affordable off site solution for two terabytes of data.
I've got a homemade off-site NAS for backups.
Main work computer has SSD OS and normal 3tb drive. I have a fiber ethernet connection (lightning & surge proof) between my house and detached garage.
Garage has an Atom-powered PC running centos linux and samba. It has 5TB disk non-raid. It's on a UPS. I use synctoy to backup to it.
I've used Drobos, which are excellent and simple. But unless you have a new one, they can be slow. My work Drobo has usb2 and firewire and has much capacity but isn't fast. Newer drobos (such as with usb3 or thunderbolt) are much more highly regarded. Homemade raid systems tend to be less automatic than the drobo as far as taking bad disks out of service, etc...If you want to save a few $ and DIY raid, you then can potentially shut the computer down to change a drive (not always possible in a shared business environment), use software and detective work to show which drive is bad, rtfm/learn as you go on how to add the new drive to the array and rebuild onto it, etc...
I only wish there was a simple, affordable off site solution for two terabytes of data.
I've had multiple terabytes on Crashplan for a few years. Their "unlimited" offers start at $4 per month for multi-year contracts.
They have a seeding service where they send you a HDD so you don't have to upload everything. They have versioning, prioritization of folders to be backed up, and pretty decent recovery UI.
Jim Cole
22-Aug-2013, 07:36
I've had multiple terabytes on Crashplan for a few years. Their "unlimited" offers start at $4 per month for multi-year contracts.
They have a seeding service where they send you a HDD so you don't have to upload everything. They have versioning, prioritization of folders to be backed up, and pretty decent recovery UI.
Thanks, I'll check into Crashplan. Security is always a concern of mine with someone else holding my data. I probably need to just get over it.
Thanks, I'll check into Crashplan. Security is always a concern of mine with someone else holding my data. I probably need to just get over it.
Crashplan offers encrypted option. Given recent news I would give it exactly zero trust, though.
Alternatively you could encrypt files and put them on a HDD and store them at the office, neighbor/friend/relative.
Finally got done pre-clearing my drives, now the long and arduous process of copying several TB of data...
Jim Cole
22-Aug-2013, 19:00
Crashplan offers encrypted option. Given recent news I would give it exactly zero trust, though.
Alternatively you could encrypt files and put them on a HDD and store them at the office, neighbor/friend/relative.
I gave up on CrashPlan after reading user forums about extremely slow upload speeds vs what they advertise. I don't think there are any viable cloud solutions for 1-2 TB of data. The current plans may work well for those with a couple of hundred MB of data, but not for those in the TB realm.
I gave up on CrashPlan after reading user forums about extremely slow upload speeds vs what they advertise. I don't think there are any viable cloud solutions for 1-2 TB of data. The current plans may work well for those with a couple of hundred MB of data, but not for those in the TB realm.
I have 7TB+ backed up with them, and I didn't use a seed service. It took well over a year to do the initial seeding at 3mbps (CP consistently saturates my line).
After Mozy cancelled their unlimited plan I was forced to move to another service, and at that time CP was by far the best value. There are other options which offer better options for backup and recovery, but are much more expensive. We're talking thousands of euros per year for 1TB+.
I wanted to do a little update on this thread. I just added 3 more drives to my unRAID array, for a total of 10TB of storage. I bought a "Plus" version of unRAID for only $69.
The whole process was relatively easy. There are a lot of helpful online tutorials and Linux isn't hard if you are moderately computer-savvy. I am very happy with the stability and transfer rates. I am connecting via a direct network cable connection.
I used Western Digital RED hard drives, designed for these types of NAS builds. All 6 of the drives worked perfectly. I love WD drives and highly recommend them. I've had way better experiences with them than Seagate, personally.
For anyone looking for a large storage array, unRAID is perfect. I built my array with spare parts I already had lying around so my total cost was only the 6 drives and the unRAID license (about $100/drive).
Thanks Rick for the suggestion to look into unRAID!
http://www.oceanstarproductions.com/photosharing/unraidserver.jpg
Thanks. I think. I just have one small question. While raid products have come down below the 1 kilobuck range, why would I spend that kind of money for something that sits in my house? My current method at least gets most of my work on another set of hard drives that are more secure. And compared to the expense of on-line storage, $600 a year, my method is even less expensive. Too, whats wrong with storing the most important negatives/transparencies in a safe deposit box for $25 a year. Forgive me for sounding like a Luddite, but I'd much rather spend that money on film, scanning, and lenses. My choice, I guess.
Thanks, however, for the input. Very interesting, just not practical for a retiree....BAB
I'm afraid I don't know what "your method" is?
If you are putting backups on another HDD and keeping it "off-site," that creates its own problems. HDDs sitting and not spinning up are also a failure waiting to happen. I've replaced computers and copied data, and then had the HDD as a backup many times, and almost every one, if I've tried to use it, say, 3-4 years later, has been corrupted, unreadable, or at least partially messed up. I think there's a reason for this but I can't remember what, but essentially they need to be spun-up occasionally.
Storage of negatives is a completely different issue. Data is data, negatives are negatives. If my house burns down, my scanner is trashed, etc., I won't be having "instant access" to thousands upon thousands of images because I had the negatives in a fire-proof box. Realistically, an online backup of at least the "finished" jpeg images edited as appropriate and resized to ~20 megapixels is all I would really want. Anyway, I also have 5 years of digital images to think about too.
$700 is practically nothing (IMHO) for this powerful, flexible, safe, and essentially perfect backup system, and it's already saved my bacon a few times (I will mention here that I am doing quite a lot of side business with photography, and it's mostly digital, so, this is an essential business expense).
I still need to look up options for fire-proof computer safe boxes. Maybe with next year's tax return, that'll be the final piece of the puzzle. Bolt that thing to the floor and lock it up, there will be no way it's getting stolen or burned up.
I thought this thread was a reply to one I started earlier. Sorry for the confusion on my part. The off-site hard drives are rotated into use every month or two. If I were doing a good business in photography I'd want on line storage as well. But I'm not, at least yet. And to a retiree, $700 could be quite a bit.
Thanks. I think. I just have one small question. While raid products have come down below the 1 kilobuck range, why would I spend that kind of money for something that sits in my house? My current method at least gets most of my work on another set of hard drives that are more secure. And compared to the expense of on-line storage, $600 a year, my method is even less expensive. Too, whats wrong with storing the most important negatives/transparencies in a safe deposit box for $25 a year. Forgive me for sounding like a Luddite, but I'd much rather spend that money on film, scanning, and lenses. My choice, I guess.
Thanks, however, for the input. Very interesting, just not practical for a retiree....BAB
Simple: I pay a lot more than what my server cost to get limited, unreliable, and slow Internet access. Online backups are completely infeasible for me.
Occasionally throwing it on a USB drive and putting it in a safe deposit box is a good idea. But it's a backup to the backup.
Rick "in the country and ignored by broadband carriers except cellular" Denney
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