Thinking About A Nas

[rmgill]

M.2 is a form factor.

 

 

The cache function is to act as a buffer for reads or writes by the appliance. In the case of drives, the SSD M.2 cards is to act as added storage space that's entirely flash based and super fast. In the enterprise world we're starting to get really nice hybrid or all SSD based systems that don't have any delay in reads or writes.

 

 

How the Synologies handle the data across the SSD and spinning disks is a question for the Synology techie folks.

[DB]

I can thoroughly recommend raid 10, having had a drive fail followed by som idiot pulling the drive next to it out of the rack when trying to hot swap the broken one.

 

No idea who that idiot was...

[Ssnake]

A few general remarks.

1. The fewer drives, the better. Mirroring two big drives is less likely to produce failures than many small ones, assuming otherwise equal failure rates (which is of course not a valid assumption, see table above)
2. RAIDs with redundancy are no substitute for backups. If one drive goes, chances are that the mirror drive will fail soon, too. They have, after all, the same operating hours.
3. For video streaming purposes, M2 SSDs are a costly and superfluous luxury. All you need is continuous delivery of data streams at LAN bandwidths; even slow drives can easily deliver that. SSDs are great to reduce latencies, especially when handling many and small files. Video streaming by definition is the handling of very few, rather big ones. It's about the simplest task possible for conventional HDDs
4. Storage space; 200 DVDs x 4.5 GByte = 0.9 Terabyte --- 200 BluRays x 25 GByte = 5 Terabyte. Your base load isn't very high. If you would take two 10 TByte drives in a RAID 10 you'd have between two and ten times as much storage space available than your specified purpose dictates. Anything beyond that is, IMO, crazy and expensively overdimensioned. Should you one day make the transition to 4K and replace your entire video collection it may be time to reconsider. But by then bigger drives will be cheaper, so why buy five times as much as you need when all that you will accomplish is having to deal with the replacement of failed drives that are only 20% full over the expected life expectancy of the NAS (your kids will grow up and eventually leave home, I take it, probably in the next five to ten years, so don't build your IT infrastructure to last all eternity).

Question time: How do you plan to rip the BluRay disks for your in-house streaming?

Edited December 10, 2018 by Ssnake

[Murph]

I have decided on the Synology DS918+ with Western Digital RED drives (either 8 or 10 tb). I should have the money saved to get it around mid summer.

[sunday]

I have decided on the Synology DS918+ with Western Digital RED drives (either 8 or 10 tb). I should have the money saved to get it around mid summer.

 

If you are fitting it with an even number of drives, remember to buy them in different retailers. Different brands would be nice, too.

[Ivanhoe]

https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/07/08/wd-gold-16tb-and-18tb-hard-drives/

 

WD will be selling 16 and 18 TB Gold drives that use CMR, 20 TB coming soon.

[Murph]

Oh my....

[TTK Ciar]

Cool, maybe that will depress the prices of the 4TB drives I use in my RAID6 arrays!

[Ivanhoe]

I'm gonna buy up a whole bunch of spinning rust drives and then start spreading a rumor that iron oxide cures COVID-19. Profit!

[Ivanhoe]

Backblaze just published their drive stats for 2020 Q2;

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q2-2020/

 

HGST comes out looking totally primo.

 

Seagate recovering from their recent troubles.

 

Toshiba still looking good.

 

Keep in mind that these are enterprise-class 7200 rpm SATA drives.

[GregShaw]

Ordered a Dell 510 refurb to become my new NAS, 2.6 gHz x 12 cores, 64 mB DDR3, 8x 3 tB SaS, $510 through Amazon.

 

The 12 cores is really overkill for a NAS, i may do VMWARE with Open Media Vault in a VM as my NAS, rather than original plan for FreeNas. That way I can run Windows 2016 and several Linux distributions in VM with their own cores.

 

I have the parts to make a NAS sitting in guestroom (Ryzen 5 1600, 64 mB ddr4, 6x 4 tb SATA), by the time all the parts arrived I had changed shifts so it fell on the backburner. With fall/winter arriving I will probably complete it as FreeNAS eventually. Will give me 41 tB of NAS space between them.

[Ivanhoe]

Now I don't feel so bad about my digital cluttertopia.

[GregShaw]

Dell 510 arrived Sunday, sitting in kitchen, to large/heavy for me to solo move it upstairs to guest room. Researching the Perc controller it won't do FreeNAS or Unraid, so for now I'll do ESXI with OMV.

[Ivanhoe]

If you load it up with lightweight headless Linux distros, maybe it'll become light enough to hump up the stairs.

 

[Ivanhoe]

So I'll be buying another 8TB drive to use as temp storage to consolidate data spread across numerous 1-4TB drives. Knowing a tiny bit about the problems with SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording), I want to buy an old school CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) drive. Mostly as a feel-good, but also as a thumb to the eye of the disk makers who haven't been totally honest about SMR use. A resource I stumbled across is the following price-finding site;

https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hde7s&xf=1080_SATA+6Gb%2Fs~13745_8000~1541_8000~18845_7200~8457_Conventional+Magnetic+Recording+(CMR)~958_8000&asuch=&bpmin=&bpmax=&v=e&hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=pl&hloc=uk&hloc=eu&plz=&dist=&mail=&sort=p&bl1_id=100#productlist

I was able to do a search for 8TB, 7200 rpm CMR drives. Pretty handy, if the data are correct.

[Murph]

I am FINALLY doing the research before getting the NAS, I think I have settled on a Synology 1621+ as the base unit. I am also thinking of 4tb SSD for the drives, or 8tb WD Red. I am back and forth on the drives. I should have enough money saved up by October/November. My brother in law and nephew have offered to help get it set up.  But here are the issues:

1) Storage- my goal is to burn/rip all the DVDs and Blue Ray disks I own onto the NAS to make it available via WiFi to all the devices in the house. So for approximately 200-220 DVDs I am questimating 25gb per disk (my wife loves the making of and bloopers), plus roughly 200 CD's of music. So the question is using RAID 5/6 how much storage would I need at a minimum? I have never done this before.

2) Making it available via WiFi at the house: I have one, repeat ONE ethernet connection running into the house. It goes to the WiFi router. I think I am going to need a computer attached to the NAS with 100% up time in order to stream via network to the various TV's, computers, tablets, etc. This is the part that I am really unsure about, and is causing me a lot of worry, I do not want to keep my desktop up and running all the time since it is old, and I do not want to have it fail. So I am thinking of getting another Intel NUC with the i3 processor, 16gb of ram, and a 500gb NVMe drive as the computer. They cost $499 on Amazon and come with Windows 10 Pro installed. I am also unsure if I should have it as a Windows box, or a Linux box to run the NAS.  Running Ethernet cables is a non starter due to the design of the house and the damage it would cause.

3) Linux or Windows for the NUC?  IF Linux then desktop or Server Linux? If Windows it will be Windows 10 Pro, NOT Windows 11.  System 76 sells this, but it is much more expensive than the Amazon NUC.  https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat  I have NO experience on Server Linux, so I am not sure if I should go Ubuntu Server, Debian, Fedora/Red Hat, or just stick with Mint Linux.

4) Burning/Ripping software: I have heard that Make MKV is pretty good, my nephew who is going to help, wants to make it a Plex server system. He and my brother in law who both have a lot of experience with this stuff have offered to help.

5) Free NAS vs something else? Again I am a complete newbie at this.

6) The device will have to stream to at least five television sets (two are connected via PS/4 units, 2 have Intel NUC units, and one is just there), one to two laptops (at a time), and at least a Samsung Galaxy tablet. I think I have enough bandwidth, but I am not sure since Spectrum Cable keeps some stuff hidden from us. Also they have slow down times and the network in my neighborhood is old, and has not been updated in years.

7) UPS system to attach it to.  

This is one of the drives I am looking at: https://www.newegg.com/crucial-4tb-m...82E16820156282  because I am not sure how much actual space I am going to need.

[Ivanhoe]

NAS type activity is pretty low stress on the CPU and RAM.

I recommend separating streaming media traffic from conventional traffic. One 802.11ac/ax router for just streaming, one 802.11ac/ax router for secure computing/web traffic, and use the 2.4 GHz radios on one of the routers for insecure traffic (i.e. phones, visitors, kids, grandkids*).

I don't recommend RAID 5/6. If you need redundancy, RAID 0. If you need redundancy and speed, RAID 10. Hard disk storage is cheap.

* Any password given to a minor is a compromised password, period.

 

[sunday]

1 hour ago, Murph said:

Synology 1621+

That thing has a 4-core Ryzen CPU running at 2.2GHz, and 4GB RAM, expandable to 32GB. Seems a NUC for streaming will not be needed.

The bottleneck could be at the WiFi router, so perhaps some repeaters, one in each floor, and linked by CAT6/CAT6A cable, would be useful. Also, 802.11ax could be short ranged.

8TB HDDs could be the sweet spot, because larger disks could need 24 hour to rebuild after a hot swap. One should be careful with RAID, balancing the number of spares with the time needed to rebuild a failed array, and considering that the process of array rebuild could trigger the failure of another disk. There is good info here.

I think a ripped DVD needs 4GB of disk space. See here.

Also here on Blu-Rays

[Murph]

3 hours ago, Ivanhoe said:

NAS type activity is pretty low stress on the CPU and RAM.

I recommend separating streaming media traffic from conventional traffic. One 802.11ac/ax router for just streaming, one 802.11ac/ax router for secure computing/web traffic, and use the 2.4 GHz radios on one of the routers for insecure traffic (i.e. phones, visitors, kids, grandkids*).

I don't recommend RAID 5/6. If you need redundancy, RAID 0. If you need redundancy and speed, RAID 10. Hard disk storage is cheap.

* Any password given to a minor is a compromised password, period.

 

Great point on Raid 10, I have never used RAID so I am out to sea in regards to what I actually need.  

[Murph]

3 hours ago, sunday said:

That thing has a 4-core Ryzen CPU running at 2.2GHz, and 4GB RAM, expandable to 32GB. Seems a NUC for streaming will not be needed.

The bottleneck could be at the WiFi router, so perhaps some repeaters, one in each floor, and linked by CAT6/CAT6A cable, would be useful. Also, 802.11ax could be short ranged.

8TB HDDs could be the sweet spot, because larger disks could need 24 hour to rebuild after a hot swap. One should be careful with RAID, balancing the number of spares with the time needed to rebuild a failed array, and considering that the process of array rebuild could trigger the failure of another disk. There is good info here.

I think a ripped DVD needs 4GB of disk space. See here.

Also here on Blu-Rays

Ok, good point, like I said I am not just jumping into this thing, I ran into some tech/money issues when I first started looking at a NAS, and most of those have been resolved at this point.