NAS suggestions

notarat

2[H]4U
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Mar 28, 2010
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Hi all.

I had some S.M.A.R.T. errors pop up on one of the drives in my game box so I backed up what I needed and replaced the drive.

This got me to thinking about getting a NAS to perform regular backups in case one of my mechanical drives goes kaput in the future.

I went to Amazon and read up on the Synology, Thecus, and the Drobo units, but have not seen very good reviews of the support you receive from these companies when the crap hits the fan with their hardware...

I would prefer a dedicated NAS unit over a re-purposed windows/linux box just from the standpoint of better integration of parts, smaller footprint/power requirements, and ease of maintenance so I'm wondering what the consensus is for finding something decent in the $500-$600 range with 4 bays and 10/100/1000 NIC

I would most likely be filling it with 3-4TB drives and using RAID 5 so as to have 6-8TB of backup space with some redundancy in case a drive fails.

Thoughts?
 
As a real world data point, in the fall of 2011, I purchased a Dlink DNS-325 2 bay unit($190 sale price) and a pair of Hitachi 2TB drives($80 each - pre flood). Have them in a Raid 1. File copies from the unit run about 50MB/sec(est 450-500Mb/sec) via the gigabit port. Unit so far is trouble free. Drives spend much of the time spun down. Unit's spun down power draw is single digit watts. Spin up time runs between 5 and 10 seconds before the files show up in Windows file explorer. A Linux machine has no problem seeing the files.

Since setting it up, it has served as the target of automated weekly backups from my primary PC as well as a storage area for game downloads and such.

Dlink has a 4 bay unit in the same family since you specified interest in a 4 bay unit.
 
As a real world data point, in the fall of 2011, I purchased a Dlink DNS-325 2 bay unit($190 sale price) and a pair of Hitachi 2TB drives($80 each - pre flood). Have them in a Raid 1. File copies from the unit run about 50MB/sec(est 450-500Mb/sec) via the gigabit port. Unit so far is trouble free. Drives spend much of the time spun down. Unit's spun down power draw is single digit watts. Spin up time runs between 5 and 10 seconds before the files show up in Windows file explorer. A Linux machine has no problem seeing the files.

Since setting it up, it has served as the target of automated weekly backups from my primary PC as well as a storage area for game downloads and such.

Dlink has a 4 bay unit in the same family since you specified interest in a 4 bay unit.

Thanks for the response! Will check out the D Link 2 and 4 bay units this week :)
 
I have a few friends who swear by Synology.
I went the route of a dedicated windows box with disk pooling and file replication over raid. I don't need the read/write speed of raid since it's mainly network storage. The benefit I get is that my data isn't held hostage in case the controller card fails and that I can grow my storage at any time without rebuilding the raid. I can also pull the hard drives and view any file on them since they're formatted with an NTFS file system. I have redundancy because all data is replicated. The downside is that I have half my storage space being taken up by redundancy instead of just a fraction of that with the parity of raid 5. But storage is cheap so I'm okay with that. Sorry for the non-appliance recommendation.

I know you were looking for a dedicated box so I wanted to point out that you can grow the storage on a Drobo without rebuilding unlike the typical raid that you see in most NAS systems.
 
I have five NAS's and have tried Dlink, they are at the bottom end along with Netgear, their NAS's are slow on the network and generally not worth your money. As suggested, look at Synology or Qnap. I had an issue with my Qnap the other day, it lost its RAID config after I powered it down, when it came up, no RAID. Even though its a 2009 model and way out of warranty, Qnap support did a remote session, ran some commands to get rid of file system corruption and I was back in business, pretty impressive.
 
Well for Synology if the hardware fails you can put the drives in any Linux machine and mount the volume since it uses standard Linux kernel RAID.
 
Synology or QNAP are probably the only brands I'd consider for this. Many of these machines technically use RAID but use such terrible implementations of it that you might as well pretend it's not RAID.

I don't follow NAS units that closely so I typically recommend people check out the best site on the subject that I am aware of, http://www.smallnetbuilder.com
 
I run 2 Synology's. One is a 2 disc that we started using pretty early on once our business was about 15 people. Now we have a 5 disc 10TB setup the 1512+ I believe and it works great. We have macs, linux computers for programmers, and a majority of windows users.

Works pretty well, one hard drive went bad so I went to Best Buy and bought another NAS 3TB drive for the system and put it right in and within 12 hours it was back to full health. The NAS also backs up to that smaller NAS offsite (my house).

Synology's are very easy to use and can do a lot. I haven't even tested out everything they can do yet but for home use and personal backup I bet they are perfect. They can be nice media servers too I believe.
 
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