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Jaybird180

Jaybird180

Final Approach
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Jaybird180
I wanted to buy a RAID NAS for storing critical data (family videos, etc), but I also have a lot of non-critical data (PVR video from my now unemployed Snapstream box, mp3s, photos and other media).

I need physical space for the RAID configuration (laptop size HDDs may be a possible solution) and I will need expandability so I can just plug in my full size SATA and IDE drives (about 4 or 5) and access the media already stored and plug in external drives as the need arises.

I need streaming capability all-around, but I need the ability to protect the critical drives from prying eyes, but also make it easy for us (my wife mainly) to upload her cellphone pictures and videos of the family & children for long-term permanent storage to the critical volumes.

This machine will live on my home network (out of the way) and so, I don't intend to need to login and perform much (or any) maintenance and shouldn't even need to connect a monitor to it once setup....I'm thinking a GUI interface to a few admin tools. Smart power management will be a requirement. It should Go into sleep mode when not in use, which will be most of the time.

It will have all the latest streaming media protocols so I can connect it to my iDevices, SmartTVs and whatever else the industry thinks we need or have in our home.

Is there a commercial solution for this that I can simply purchase? Hopefully, this should be $500-$1,000 (or less) sans drives.

If not, consider this a RFP
 
Oh - and it's not super powerful (AMD 2300) but if I can recycle the former PVR, that would be nice, but the case is now physically limited on size and maxed out (as is also the power supply).
 
I recently purchased 2 QNAP TS-469 PRO's

About $800 each and can hold up to 4 3TB drives. They are very robust NAS devices for the price
 
I have been facing the same issue, and haven't decided what to do.

I am wary of storing critical data on a low end NAS appliance (drobo, synology etc.) without a separate backup of the NAS appliance. What happens when the NAS has a non-HD failure (mainboard, power supply)? Do you wait for a replacement box to arrive and hope you can just move the drives without loss of data?

I'm leaning toward building my own and using unraid or freenas as the OS.
 
TedR3 said:
I have been facing the same issue, and haven't decided what to do.

I am wary of storing critical data on a low end NAS appliance (drobo, synology etc.) without a separate backup of the NAS appliance. What happens when the NAS has a non-HD failure (mainboard, power supply)? Do you wait for a replacement box to arrive and hope you can just move the drives without loss of data?

I'm leaning toward building my own and using unraid or freenas as the OS.
Click to expand...
The QNAP allows you to backup to Google Drive, Amazon as well as others. If you have multiple QNAP you can do real time replication between the devices.
 
QNAP or Synology would be my choices. Or build your own with Linux or FreeBSD.

Avoid Thecus at all costs.
 
Check out Netgear. They have some pretty impressive and dependable products.
 
TedR3 said:
I have been facing the same issue, and haven't decided what to do.

I am wary of storing critical data on a low end NAS appliance (drobo, synology etc.) without a separate backup of the NAS appliance. What happens when the NAS has a non-HD failure (mainboard, power supply)? Do you wait for a replacement box to arrive and hope you can just move the drives without loss of data?

I'm leaning toward building my own and using unraid or freenas as the OS.
Click to expand...

I understand that freenas is an app that runs in windows:dunno:. If so, that may be the software side of my solution. Hardware is still :dunno: but I'm finding a few things, now that I've verbalized my need

As for devices, considering that many of them use common file structures if you used a RAID 0 then your pretty well insulated. I was going to buy a Synology DS212J but things just kept conspiring to keep me from executing that decision.

CORRECTION: I meant to say RAID 1
 
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I'm wrong about freenas running in windows. Perhaps if I can run a NAS app alongside BeyondTV, that could work, as BTV has a lot of the medi features I want and my media data is already setup for its menu structure.
 
Jaybird180 said:
I'm wrong about freenas running in windows. Perhaps if I can run a NAS app alongside BeyondTV, that could work, as BTV has a lot of the medi features I want and my media data is already setup for its menu structure.
Click to expand...
The QNAP has and HDMI port and XBMC
 
I have been using NAS4Free, It is Linux based but mostly is operated mostly though its Web interface. I.e. you don't have to know much about Linux to use it. I just installed it on an old box I have, I then have an external drive attached to it and stored in a fireproof box that it periodically updates to.

Does take a little bit of setup time, but it is free and will run on an old computer you might have lying around.

Brian
 
brcase said:
I have been using NAS4Free, It is Linux based but mostly is operated mostly though its Web interface. I.e. you don't have to know much about Linux to use it. I just installed it on an old box I have, I then have an external drive attached to it and stored in a fireproof box that it periodically updates to.

Does take a little bit of setup time, but it is free and will run on an old computer you might have lying around.

Brian
Click to expand...

I've done things like that. In fact, I have an old box that I'm considering recycling that way for a friend of mine.

One thing I'll mention is that in my experience, the RAID controller itself can be a troublesome SPOF. Misbehaving RAID controllers can gleefully corrupt all the drives in their arrays simultaneously. That's why RAID, in my opinion, should not be considered a backup solution. Striping improved performance and mirroring reduces downtime (unless the controller farts), but it's not backup.

RAID with periodic imaging or cloning to a drive off the array and on a different controller, plus online data backup, is where it starts to look like a backed-up system to me.

-Rich
 
RJM62 said:
I've done things like that. In fact, I have an old box that I'm considering recycling that way for a friend of mine.

One thing I'll mention is that in my experience, the RAID controller itself can be a troublesome SPOF. Misbehaving RAID controllers can gleefully corrupt all the drives in their arrays simultaneously. That's why RAID, in my opinion, should not be considered a backup solution. Striping improved performance and mirroring reduces downtime (unless the controller farts), but it's not backup.

RAID with periodic imaging or cloning to a drive off the array and on a different controller, plus online data backup, is where it starts to look like a backed-up system to me.

-Rich
Click to expand...

Having developed storage systems and software for something over a decade, yeah, that!:yeahthat:

John
 
TedR3 said:
I am wary of storing critical data on a low end NAS appliance (drobo, synology etc.) without a separate backup of the NAS appliance. What happens when the NAS has a non-HD failure (mainboard, power supply)? Do you wait for a replacement box to arrive and hope you can just move the drives without loss of data?
Click to expand...

Buy two and test it with your two. :)

Frankly the same problem exists with a build-your-own machine... by the time it fails, you can't find that "old" style hardware... etc... so you need two of those also...
 
p.s. There's a study out that showed mathematically that RAID 5 will actually statistically make it MORE likely that you'll experience failures over mirroring. But if you pay attention, you don't have any downtime... you just swap parts constantly.

Anyone who's worked on a large fancy storage array can attest to this. There's always a huge time-suck replacing failed things... but you never lose any data and the world goes on.

So... when you drag that sort of time-sucking tech into your home, just be prepared for the extra time constantly be swapping dead crap.
 
I have DS413j and I've been very impressed with the performance and ease of use. You are correct about RAID 5. It's not used on the field any more due to the hassle and failure during the recovery. With 4 disks RAID 10 is the most desirable configuration.
 
Eight years on a ReadyNAS NV+ with nary a glitch (knocking on wood), including moving through two upgrades of all four drives to increase capacity. No downtime in any upgrade. Have lost a couple of drives and replaced them with no downtime. Proactive drive monitoring tipped me off to failing drives well in advance so I could upgrade before a failure. All system failures/glitches/etc. result in a txt message and email to me.

That said, Drobo is high on my list for my next box.
 
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RJM62 said:
I've done things like that. In fact, I have an old box that I'm considering recycling that way for a friend of mine.

One thing I'll mention is that in my experience, the RAID controller itself can be a troublesome SPOF. Misbehaving RAID controllers can gleefully corrupt all the drives in their arrays simultaneously. That's why RAID, in my opinion, should not be considered a backup solution. Striping improved performance and mirroring reduces downtime (unless the controller farts), but it's not backup.

RAID with periodic imaging or cloning to a drive off the array and on a different controller, plus online data backup, is where it starts to look like a backed-up system to me.

-Rich
Click to expand...

The little bit of research I did on the Raid option, brought me to the same conclusion. As a result I just run 3 seperate drives, a main drive and two drives that it is automatically, perodically backed up to.

Brian
 
LDJones said:
Eight years on a ReadyNAS NV+ with nary a glitch (knocking on wood), including moving through two upgrades of all four drives to increase capacity. No downtime in any upgrade. Have lost a couple of drives and replaced them with no downtime. Proactive drive monitoring tipped me off to failing drives well in advance so I could upgrade before a failure. All system failures/glitches/etc. result in a txt message and email to me.

That said, Drobo is high on my list for my next box.
Click to expand...

What do you like better about the Drobo?

I reviewed the ReadyNAS and it looks like my envisioned solution. One additional thing that I dont know if it can do: My brother-in-law has also expressed a need for the same capabilitites and we agreed to provide backup space for each other. I wonder if we can provision a partition for the others data and set a schedule for automatic backups over the internet?
 
And there's the old adage... any backup solution that hasn't been tested, isn't a backup solution. If you're planning to restore whole machines from your backups, make sure you've tried it... :)
 
denverpilot said:
And there's the old adage... any backup solution that hasn't been tested, isn't a backup solution. If you're planning to restore whole machines from your backups, make sure you've tried it... :)
Click to expand...

BTDT :rofl::rofl:

I used to regularly backup my whole 386 with about 80 3.5" FDDs. when I needed to recover, it failed at about disk 60 something:mad2::mad2::mad2:
 
BTW, I'm much less of a fan of buying hard drives from Newegg than I used to be. Last one I got was wrapped in standard bubble wrap, with no anti-static envelope. It came DOA.

Their HD packaging hasn't ever been great, this was the worst I've seen. It cost me $13 to RMA the drive.
 
Jaybird180 said:
My brother-in-law has also expressed a need for the same capabilitites and we agreed to provide backup space for each other. I wonder if we can provision a partition for the others data and set a schedule for automatic backups over the internet?
Click to expand...
Not sure about the ReadyNAS can or not but the QNAP can
 
wsuffa said:
BTW, I'm much less of a fan of buying hard drives from Newegg than I used to be. Last one I got was wrapped in standard bubble wrap, with no anti-static envelope. It came DOA.

Their HD packaging hasn't ever been great, this was the worst I've seen. It cost me $13 to RMA the drive.
Click to expand...

The RMA charge sucks, but hard drives are a commodity product now. Should have bought three, just like anything else at the hardware store... :)
 
I have a lacie 5big sitting on my home network, setup as a RAID 5 2.5TB backup, with a hot spare.

so far so good... knock on wood and all that.
 
denverpilot said:
The RMA charge sucks, but hard drives are a commodity product now. Should have bought three, just like anything else at the hardware store... :)
Click to expand...

At $150+ for the enterprise drive (server), I wasn't going to eat that. A $50 drive I probably would have eaten rather than RMA. Microcenter is local, but they carry only a limited selection of drives - slightly higher than Newegg, but less risk of damage and no shipping fee to return.

There are two things I hate about Microcenter: 1) the argument EVERY time I check-out when they insist on having my name and address to add me to their junk-mail list, and 2) the sales people (who want to slap their sticker on every item you pick up so that can get commission).

Sometimes I wish we had Fry's. Mostly I don't.
 
I have Tiger Direct about 10 minutes away. Comes in handy.
 
Bob Noel said:
I have a lacie 5big sitting on my home network, setup as a RAID 5 2.5TB backup, with a hot spare.

so far so good... knock on wood and all that.
Click to expand...

My experience wasn't so good. I had a LaCie 2big that I liked, although it was a bit slow. Then it completely died on me. The power supply was OK and the drives seemed OK under Windows although I couldn't recover the data because the filesystem isn't supported by Windows. I assumed that the motherboard had failed, and when I took it apart it seemed easy to replace, so I contacted LaCie technical support and asked to buy a new motherboard. Their response was that they don't sell replacement motherboards, so I could send the unit back to them and they would recover the data for somewhere between $300 and $1200, and then sell me a new unit.

To make a long story short, I recovered the data myself and bought a new diskless NAS from Synology. I installed the old drives from the failed LaCie, and it has been working fine. It is so much faster and has so much more functionality than the LaCie that I'm actually glad that this happened. Unlike most other NAS companies that use Linux under the hood, with Synology they make Linux completely accessible at root level. They provide downloadable apps for just about any service you need, but if necessary you can compile and run just about any other Linux app, so it's pretty unlimited in what it can do.
 
Jaybird180 said:
What do you like better about the Drobo?

I reviewed the ReadyNAS and it looks like my envisioned solution. One additional thing that I dont know if it can do: My brother-in-law has also expressed a need for the same capabilitites and we agreed to provide backup space for each other. I wonder if we can provision a partition for the others data and set a schedule for automatic backups over the internet?
Click to expand...

Only advantage of drobo is more flexible provisioning with variable drive sizes and more available drive bays. But I have zero omplaints on ReadyNAS. You can set up multiple volumes.
 
wsuffa said:
At $150+ for the enterprise drive (server), I wasn't going to eat that. A $50 drive I probably would have eaten rather than RMA. Microcenter is local, but they carry only a limited selection of drives - slightly higher than Newegg, but less risk of damage and no shipping fee to return.

There are two things I hate about Microcenter: 1) the argument EVERY time I check-out when they insist on having my name and address to add me to their junk-mail list, and 2) the sales people (who want to slap their sticker on every item you pick up so that can get commission).

Sometimes I wish we had Fry's. Mostly I don't.
Click to expand...

Same here.

They need to make some "member only deals" in return for the personal info.

As far as the sticker thing goes, I just take all my stuff back to the Apple area and let the Apple area long-timer back there slap his stickers on all of it -- when I go see what he's up to at the end of my run through the store to get whatever I came for, and the inevitable three other items. ;)

Everyone lately in the Windows area asks, "Can I get this without Windows 8?" LOL. Sad.
 
Last week, the server of an old tech support client of mine got infected by some ransomware that encrypted all their files and deleted all their backups, including the RAID array and their external hard drive.

They also have online backup, but their present I.T. guy never bothered to include the new local backup location in the online backup after he changed the local path. I sent another guy to them (an old friend of mine in the business) and he's sending the encrypted files to some security outfit in Russia that claims to be able to decrypt them.

This is a problem with automated backups that I've thought about for years, and I've yet to come up with a completely satisfactory solution. The problem is that a device that's always mounted or mapped (that is, even between backups) is vulnerable. In addition, I always worried that skillfully written software could even mount a device that's unmounted between backups if the backup software is known to the malware writer, could delete files from a remote server that's mapped on the machine, or could even delete files on a remote server accessed by FTP if the user name and password are saved in the FTP application.

Even unmounting or physically disconnecting the device between backups, or requiring a manual login to the backup path, is no guarantee of safety. A skillfully-crafted ransomware program could lie in wait for a few days waiting for the event to happen.

What it comes down to is three things: One, you can never have too many backups; two, there's only so far you can go with automation; and three, whereas most backup strategies were designed with machine failure in mind, we now have to develop strategies to protect data against malware that's far more sophisticated than anything that was out there a few years ago.

-Rich
 
Been running a DroboFS for 3 years with no issues. It holds 5 drives (currently have 4.5TB of storage about 1/2 full), we've had a drive fail and lost no data. We've also upgraded some some drives to larger sizes on the fly (one at a time, of course) and it handled it with no problem. If you're willing to give up the management aspect (ie...not picking what RAID level you want etc...), then it's a good solution. We stream TV shows and Movies (720p) to the AppleTV via XBMC, I use it for TimeMachine backups, and we store all kinds of other stuff on there. I will probably upgrade to the latest FS model in the next year or two.
 
wsuffa said:
At $150+ for the enterprise drive (server), I wasn't going to eat that. A $50 drive I probably would have eaten rather than RMA. Microcenter is local, but they carry only a limited selection of drives - slightly higher than Newegg, but less risk of damage and no shipping fee to return.

There are two things I hate about Microcenter: 1) the argument EVERY time I check-out when they insist on having my name and address to add me to their junk-mail list, and 2) the sales people (who want to slap their sticker on every item you pick up so that can get commission).

Sometimes I wish we had Fry's. Mostly I don't.
Click to expand...

I personally love Microcenter and will gladly drive ~ 3 hours to shop there rather than anywhere else when I need something geeky.

Quite a few years ago, my company was one of the largest single customers of my then-local Microcenter. Well, more accurately, my company's clients combined made us a big customer, because only a tiny fraction of the stuff I bought was for my own use or my company's. Rarely was I unable to find what I needed.

As for the stickers, I used to just fill my cart with whatever I needed, then find whichever salesman had kissed my butt the most had been most helpful that day, and stuck his stickers all over everything I'd purchased. (It does seem like a primitive system, though.)

As for NewEgg, they won't sell to me. That's because where I live, there is no carrier route mail service. Everyone has a PO Box. Even UPS and FedEx deliver all except very large, bulky items to the Post Office, rather than to our homes. They have a database of the 911 addresses and know which PO boxes the addresses correspond to; and if they don't know, Bob the Postmaster does and will sort it out for them (literally).

Letter mail that is sent to the 911 address, however, will be returned to the sender. They'll put the packages through if they have the physical address, but not letters. They get sent back. So all of my credit and debit cards, my driver's license, and even my FAA certificates have the PO box on them. That is my legal mailing address.

The problem with NewEgg is that when I try to put an order through, it will accept the 911 address as the shipping address, but it rejects any credit card I try to use. The error message will always be that they need a credit card for which the associated address is not a PO box.

I have called them over and over about this, and have spoken to supervisors two levels up the ladder from the people who answer the phones. The answer is always the same: They can't do anything about it. They can't override it, and they can't complete the order over the phone. One guy got so far as to get the system to accept the PO box as the billing address, but the orders would still hang at checkout because the address associated with all my cards is the PO box.

I've had similar problems with other vendors, too, but everyone except NewEgg has been able to quickly fix the problem with an override. NewEgg can't. They just don't get that the reason all my credit cards are associated with my PO box is because that is my legal mailing address.

But you know, I really don't care any more. If they don't want my money, that's okay by me. It's a really pleasant drive to Microcenter, anyway, and I don't have to worry about shipping damage or RMAs.

-Rich
 
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RJM62 said:
...and he's sending the encrypted files to some security outfit in Russia that claims to be able to decrypt them.
Click to expand...

Oh, nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan. ;)

(Snipped Rich's concerns for brevity...)

Backup plans are always supposed to include offline backups, taken, confirmed, and removed from the network. Preferably the building. Better yet, the State.

To be retrieved and utilized in exactly your customer's scenario.
 
denverpilot said:
Oh, nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan. ;)

(Snipped Rich's concerns for brevity...)

Backup plans are always supposed to include offline backups, taken, confirmed, and removed from the network. Preferably the building. Better yet, the State.

To be retrieved and utilized in exactly your customer's scenario.
Click to expand...

Right. And when I was there, I had the most computer-savvy guy in their office doing that on a weekly basis, originally using CDs, although he later switched to flash drives. He had four of them, and he alternated them by week, so he always had four weeks of backups. After copying the database backup to the flash drive, he would bring it home with him. (He lives about 40 miles away, is the owner's brother, and is the one who actually uses the data on a daily basis; so he's about as trusted as trusted gets.)

That was in addition to the image, the local data backups, and the online backups.

The fellow they hired after I moved decided that was "primitive" and that everything could be automated. Unfortunately, I didn't know that until this problem happened.

-Rich
 
RJM62 said:
The fellow they hired after I moved decided that was "primitive" and that everything could be automated. Unfortunately, I didn't know that until this problem happened.
Click to expand...

LOL. That's awesome. Kinda like someone randomly deciding annual inspections are so 1960s in aircraft and just not doing them. Heh.
 
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