Pulled the trigger on a new NAS

Zangmonkey

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For the last few weeks I've been playing games trying to upgrade the drives in my aging QNAP ts-451+ from 8TB reds to 16TB gold's (they're popular this year :)

After about a month of copying, factory resetting, swapping, rebuilding, sectors scanning, x 4 and then secure wiping the reds I decided to say screw it and I pulled the trigger on a Synology DS1821+

Got two WD red Sn700 2TB nvme for sad cache, 32 GB of ecc RAM, two more WD gold's (6 total) and two WD red sata ssds.

My plan is raid6 the gold's, raid1 the data ssds for high-perf tier.

I didn't spring for a 10gbe nic for it (yet) because I don't have a switch to support that (yet) but I'm glad to know it's there.

Here's hoping the appliance will last me a while!
 
You can always do 10gb from just your pc to the nas :p

I don't have a 10gb switch but I have 4 computers daisy chained through x540-t2 nics for personal fast transfers as no one else in the house needs 10gb, just me, my nas, and my servers :)
 
You can always do 10gb from just your pc to the nas :p

I don't have a 10gb switch but I have 4 computers daisy chained through x540-t2 nics for personal fast transfers as no one else in the house needs 10gb, just me, my nas, and my servers :)
Nah. My network is all omada and they're adding some new 10G gear this year so I'll add a switch. Plus my WAPs will need ports anyhow.
 
Soooo many times I considered getting a NAS.
I helped friends set up their own but could never pull the trigger.
Instead I use a silent old 6700K+1080ti PC hidden in the living room thats also the web browser, video player + moderate gaming machine etc.
A PC is so capable.

6700K has a TRUE120 cooler with 2 silent fans, 1080ti has an Arctic Cooling - Accelero Extreme III cooler, quiet reliable and cheap!
1TB Sabrent PCIE 3.0 NVME boot drive.
Measured at wall: 60W idle, 74W with 4 large HGST/WD drives powered up is ok (can take 8 SATA drives). Mine isnt the best 6700K ever so you may do better.
Not tried lowering the power use apart from setting drives to power down after 5 mins.
The 18TB drive averages around 200MB/s without RAID, wonderful drive.

My situ is not everyones. I like reading everyones setups and the benefits.
Just felt like adding something to the pool and perhaps an option to consider :)
 
My media server is a Supermicro SC 825 chassis with 6 6TB SAS 12GB drives running under FreeNAS (Yea, I know I should upgrade to TrueNAS but I'm a if it ain't broke don't fix it kinda guy). It's a bit of a power hog but it's only fired up when needed.
 
With power costs going up the way they are, I only want something pulling 15-25W for 24/365 usage.

The days of mum and dad paying was nearly 30 years ago.

I hear ya. Some day I'll move to a Xeon D bassed system with all solid state storage but till then it's run only when needed. I also have a couple of switched PDU's so I keep all my servers in cold shutdown when not needed. One of them is an APC with scheduling. I use it on my main desk and it powers off 2 computer, a scanner, a switch and an auxiliary power strip and everything plugged into it between 12 midnight a 7am.
 
I hear ya. Some day I'll move to a Xeon D bassed system with all solid state storage but till then it's run only when needed. I also have a couple of switched PDU's so I keep all my servers in cold shutdown when not needed. One of them is an APC with scheduling. I use it on my main desk and it powers off 2 computer, a scanner, a switch and an auxiliary power strip and everything plugged into it between 12 midnight a 7am.
I love epdus. I got some last year and have wondered how I've gotten along before them. :D
 
With power costs going up the way they are, I only want something pulling 15-25W for 24/365 usage.

The days of mum and dad paying was nearly 30 years ago.
I tried to achieve that with my synology 420+/3x 10tb WD red plus setup. I got close. 33.5W with drives spinning at idle. Only way I could get less is if I only went 2 drives or ssd. Helium drives could have saved me maybe 1w each. With drives not spinning it is circa 7w, but spin up time and thermal cycling may cause problems.

My original plan was to go for two 18tb drives in a two bay system, but that seemed poor economically as there was no room for expansion and being raid 1, I would have lost a lot of space.
 
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For power savings, you can't really beat just having a single drive in the nas and some externals you plug in when you want to sync them. That way you're only using power when you're using the drives except for the one in the nas. (y)
 
For power savings, you can't really beat just having a single drive in the nas and some externals you plug in when you want to sync them. That way you're only using power when you're using the drives except for the one in the nas. (y)
I mean, my pc/monitor uses 27W in standby mode… if I turned that off on days I am not home/not using it, I would be better off.
 
I mean, my pc/monitor uses 27W in standby mode… if I turned that off on days I am not home/not using it, I would be better off.
Yeah, to me sometimes this power savings stuff just goes too far. 27w over the course of a year is like what, $30? Might be easier to save $30 somewhere else, lol.
 
I mean, my pc/monitor uses 27W in standby mode… if I turned that off on days I am not home/not using it, I would be better off.
In the UK @ £0.28 / KWh inc 5% VAT, 10W left on permanently is approx £2 per month.
27W would be closing on £5 a month. It would see proper use some of that time say 20% (4.8hrs/day), so make that £4/month, £48/year wasted.
Worth switching off imo.

We are looking at a 50% hike in that price this Autumn as well, not good times.
And NVidia are supposedly releasing 800W cards, lol.
 
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And NVidia are supposedly releasing 800W cards, lol.
Yeah, it's always funny to me how people tout newer servers/systems as being more efficient and yet the newer power supplies keep growing in capacity, lol.
 
In the UK @ £0.28 / KWh inc 5% VAT, 10W left on permanently is approx £2 per month.
27W would be closing on £5 a month. It would see proper use some of that time say 20% (4.8hrs/day), so make that £4/month, £48/year wasted.
Worth switching off imo.

We are looking at a 50% hike in that price this Autumn as well, not good times.
And NVidia are supposedly releasing 800W cards, lol.
To be fair, I work from home 3 days a week, so those days I spend 7-9 hours on it, but otherwise…
 
I've gone drastic by even down clocking both our main PCs that are on from 9pm till 6pm. My X99 rig was running at 4GHz and is now at 2.5GHz. I think the GF's web machine is a AMD FX8350 that's now running at 2GHz. She hasn't noticed.
 
I've gone drastic by even down clocking both our main PCs that are on from 9pm till 6pm. My X99 rig was running at 4GHz and is now at 2.5GHz. I think the GF's web machine is a AMD FX8350 that's now running at 2GHz. She hasn't noticed.
I have gone to extreme lengths to save power.. most of the time when in use the 9900k uses 45w with monitor…
 
I think the GF's web machine is a AMD FX8350 that's now running at 2GHz. She hasn't noticed.
Lol, might be able to replace that with some newer low-powered cpu and she won't notice that either.
 
Lol, might be able to replace that with some newer low-powered cpu and she won't notice that either.

Very true. Though if I do go to a newer platform I have to get a new CPU/Motherboard and ram. Someone told me to upgrade her to a 3600 rig. Spend XXX to save XX!

The world sucks right now! :cry:
;)
 
Be careful on the SSD cache. Heard of read only caches crashing live volumes on the synology.
 
Be careful on the SSD cache. Heard of read only caches crashing live volumes on the synology.
synology and Qnap Read only cache should be fine they just fall back to the volume directly (doesn't even need to re-mount the volume), but qnap can't detect corruption in volume or ssd cache if using QTS OS

synology can leverage btrfs and checksum if enabled on all share folders, so any read errors on caching device will be detected and corrected at volume level first and then the raid level if both ssd cache and volume is damaged (very unlikely)

i have only seen one post where a crashed read only SSD cache has supposedly taken out a Qnap Volume but i believe what was more likely is the volume itself was corrupted, but at least it dropped to read only mode,, that Qnap was QTS so it was using ext4 so no checksumming for any part of the file system including metadata (unless qnap has enabled the optional checksum for metadata on ext4) QuTs hero uses ZFS so all checksum all the way

but read/write SSD cache (any nas or enterprise server) you can run into situations where both SSDs fail and becues the last 600-1000 seconds of metadata may be still uncommitted to the Volume yet it will totally destroy your volume and you will have to restore from backup, only use enterprise grade SSDs with full power loss protection to minimise the risk and a UPS (problem is getting full power loss protection ones that are 80mm not 120mm as most nass don't support the longer type nvme ssds)

consumer level nas's should be have a significantly bigger warning when using RW cache as you should have a second nas without a cache for backup with more often run backup cycle (yes synology warns you every time you shutdown your nas with R/W cache enabled if you take out your SSDs and boot up without them you will destroy your volume)
 
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