Help choosing NAS

[Crow-]

Hi.

My external HDD died and I've lost everything, so I've decided to spend some money to prevent future loss of my critical files.

I want to buy a NAS with 4 or 5 bays, with 2 disk redundancy. I already chose the disks, the famous WD RED 3TB.
The main use will be as my home central storage (for my PC/tablet and my girlfiend laptop), and as repository of all my movies.
My questions are:
1. Can the media center, accessing directly to the NAS shares cause any integrity problem? I want to use the NAS as a XBMC repository.
2. If I buy a 5 ay NAS, can I use 4 disks with RAID 6 for storage and 1 disk individually to run some services, like web server, ftp, ...? Would it be a good idea?

After some googling I narrowed my choices to QNAP and Synology.

QNAP
TS-469L (445€)
TS-469 Pro (690€)

Synology
DS413 (398€)
DS412+ (438€)


Between QNAP the differences are minimum. The Pro supports SATA 6GB/s and has a LCD, and the L only supports SATA 3GB/s and does not have LCD. I don't care about the LCD, but does the SATA interface make any difference that justifies the 150€ difference between this 2 models? I've read somewhere that SATA 6Gb/s on a NAS has no big impact.

Between Synology the principal difference is the CPU. The DS413 has the Freescale and the DS412+ has the Intel Atom, having the first a lower power consumption. But how about performance? What's the best choice between the 2?

And in general, between this QNAP and Synology choices, what would be the best option?

PS: I also read that QNAP will launch new models soon, with Intel Core i3, 2GB RAM and XMBC v12 (TS-470 Pro), and maybe will also be a good choice..

Thanks in advance

 

[KentState]

I have had lot of good luck with both a Synology 1511+ and 212j. IMO, SATA 3GB/s is all that you need, especially when using HDD fed over a 1Gb LAN. I have no problem maxing out the network on mine in a RAID 5 configuration. For processor, go for DS412+ as the CPU handles everything from RAID to indexing and so on. The smaller Synology I have comes to a crawl when doing a backup or any CPU intensive task.

 

[Cerb]

1. Can the media center, accessing directly to the NAS shares cause any integrity problem? I want to use the NAS as a XBMC repository.

Maybe.
Less so if you know atime will be disabled.
Less so with a UPS (can it be set up remotely shut off the NAS?).
Much less so with backups.

Are critical files on the NAS also going to exist somewhere else? Do you have a means to verify their integrity? Your first sentence is directly related to having backups, not a NAS.

 

[Crow-]

Are critical files on the NAS also going to exist somewhere else? Do you have a means to verify their integrity? Your first sentence is directly related to having backups, not a NAS.

I want a network share where my girlfriend and I can store all our multimedia files (photos, movies, songs, etc) and some documents.
Until now we used simply an external HDD from WD that died, so with the NAS, although is not a backup solution at least has redundancy and can save some of the problems that might occur.
I will have an external HDD to make weekly backups of all our photos the most important files).


At this point I'm between the QNAP TS-469L and the Synology DS412+. What would you choose?

 

[Cerb]

The cheaper Synology will probably do everything you need and more, and will be easy to manage. The features that make them much different I doubt you'll ever make use of (remote replication, iSCSI, and a supported Asterisk package, FI, can allow the speedier QNAP boxes to be relatively complete small business servers).

 

[adreamer]

I myself use a Netgear Readynas 4 bay system for backups and media streaming. Synology was on my list of good options though and between the two you picked out I would go with Synology. I know you have picked your HDs. just make sure whatever drives you pick are listed on the particular NAS compatibility list. True that many drives will work if they are not listed on their list of recommended drives, but you will have much less pain if you stick to drives the manufacturer recommends.

 

[Crow-]

Right now my first choice is the Synology DS412+.

Anyone knows if Synology will launch new models soon, since the DS412+ was released dome time ago?

 

[Eug]

I have the DS413 and it's great, but the DS412+ is faster. It has a much faster CPU than the DS413 and dual Gigabit LAN ports for link aggregation if that matters to you.

The only real plusses of the DS413 vs the DS412+ is that it is cheaper and it uses a bit less power. The DS413 is spec'd at 13 W when the drives are hibernating, and 36 W with access. The DS412+ is spec'd at 15 and 44 W respectively. Oh and the DS413 is faster for encrypted writes.

QNAP now has a true GUI based OS, but it's brand new, so I'm not sure how it compares to Synology. However, I've heard it's not as slick as Synology's implementation. Then again you could use the older QNAP OS which can be more configurable in some ways.

 

[fastman]

The Synology I have runs everything fine that I throw at it with no problems.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

If the only place you're storing the files on is the external drives, then all you have is a NAS, not a backup. You have redundancy, but redundancy isn't a backup. If you get data corruption (which neither the Snyology nor QNAP natively check for), you'll start losing data. (Just google for it on these devices). Since they are Linux based, you can manually run scrubs on RAID 5 arrays, but not anything without parity like RAID 1 arrays.

x86 based NAS units from Synology and QNAP can both be made to run Crashplan (QNAP installs a bit easier). If you're getting an external NAS, buy a Crashplan account while you're at it and actually give yourself a backup. That will take care of both of your problems

 

[brshoemak]

x86 based NAS units from Synology and QNAP can both be made to run Crashplan (QNAP installs a bit easier). If you're getting an external NAS, buy a Crashplan account while you're at it and actually give yourself a backup. That will take care of both of your problems

Do this - 100%. It's $60/yr for peace of mind. I also always recommend setting up a free (or paid) Dropbox account for your critical files (financial/legal/etc.) - the ones you would never ever want to lose. Those files would reside on your actual computer OR I think you can do Dropbox from the QNAP but I don't think Synology supports it.

 

[Crow-]

I was thinking about cloud backup, and CrashPlan prices seem very good. I might go for a cloud service like this instead of an external HDD.

So, going for a cloud backup, what RAID level should I set with the 4 HDD's on the NAS, RAID 10 or RAID 6?

 

[Cerb]

RAID 10 offers much faster writes, and 1 to 2/n drives-worth of redundancy (1 in each mirror can go down, but both going down in a single mirror and *poof*).

RAID 6 won't give you speedy writes, and for 4 drives, will give the same space as RAID 10, but it can handle up to any 2 drives failing (note, as well, that, "failing" does not only mean a complete disk failure, but as little as a single sector that is unreadable).

 

[thecoolnessrune]

RAID 10 for sure.

RAID 10 doesn't use parity, so rebuilds are far faster (just mirrored disks). Throughput would be speed of one disk * mirror sets. Since you'd have 2 mirror sets, you'd have the write throughput of 2 disks. You'd have theoretically the read speed of 4 disks, but it is unlikely that the Synology or QNAP devices have the resources to deliver on that. RAID 10 has slightly worse fault tolerance. RAID 10 theoretically survive half of its disks failing, but in reality, if you happen to lose 2 disks that are part of a mirror set, you've lost all the data. That's why hot spares are important in high end RAID 10 environments. RAID 6 on the other hand lets you survive any 2 disk failures. In your implementation, that means both RAID 10 and RAID 6 have the same theoretical failure rate, but RAID 10 is slightly worse in that you *might* lose both disks of a mirror set. In return however, you get much faster writes, and much faster rebuilds. A mirror drive can rebuild in maybe 5 hours (assuming a huge 4TB drive). A RAID 6 drive rebuild on a 4TB drive can take DAYS.

But ultimately, you have to weigh your worse case scenario, with your worst case scenario. If you look at Crashplan, with its 448 bit owner-defined Encryption (meaning Crashplan won't be snoppin' yer data), and Full Compression (to minimize upload time and syncing time, not to mention bandwidth use), you'll want to weigh your space, throughput needs, and patience, with the time it would take to do an Entire Restore.

I tested this on my own 10TB array. And it only took 6 days to completely restore my array, which is the time it could take to rebuild a single RAID 6 failure.

Judging by what you've told us, I would enjoy the extra space, and just do RAID 5 or one of the Hybrid RAIDs available on these devices. You don't appear to need high throughput, so just enjoy the extra space, and if the worst *does* happen (you lose more than one drive), it's just a matter of downloading your data back from Crashplan, which remember will be smaller if you're using their Dedup and Compression (resource hungry, but very effective).

If bandwidth is very expensive for you though, you may indeed want to do something like RAID 10 or RAID 6.

 

[Eug]

Considering he's looking at 4-drive NAS units with medium speed CPUs, I'm not sure RAID 6 makes a lot of sense.

In my case, since it's just my own stuff, and mostly not mission critical stuff, I just have multiple non-RAID drives, with my computer data stuff on a separate drive from my IP camera video stream storage and separate from my movie storage drive. It's not even JBOD, but just separate individual volumes. (Actually, I have moved the IP camera video stream 24/7 continuous storage to my backup NAS, as I don't need redundancy for this, and I don't want to suck bandwidth and CPU cycles from my primary NAS.)

I know this is sacrilege to some for multidrive NAS units, but in many ways it's a lot simpler. It's also significantly faster than RAID 5 and RAID 6 on NAS units without superfast CPUs. I know RAID 10 is supposed to be faster, but I'm not sure that's really the case on a lot of these SOHO NAS units, and it makes drive upgrades a lot more expensive. I had RAID 10 for a while on my other NAS, but in the end it didn't seem to provide much performance benefit so I just un-RAIDed it. Furthermore, losing two drives in RAID 10 in a 4-drive NAS can mean losing all of your data, whereas losing two drives in a non-RAIDed system means losing two drives, leaving the others intact.

For redundancy (not in the RAID sense I know) I just backup to a second NAS on the other side of the house via the network daily, and to an external attached eSATA drive daily. For my critical stuff, I also back up to DVD-R or BD-R periodically, and keep both old and new backup discs. I also have my most important work files locally on a USB flash drive.

 

[blastingcap]

Another vote for RAID 10