# NAS recommendations



## dmspen (Dec 1, 2006)

I have decided we need a NAS at home. My wife, an amateur photographer has a gazillion pictures on about 3 different computers and several external drives.

What has worked for you fine peeps?


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

I've had good luck with Synology.

I recommend a matched pair located as far apart as possible so that you can implement a good automatic backup plan. RAID 1 (mirroring) offers some security but if you don't check on your NAS (or set up e-mail alerts) fairly frequently, it may not offer the protection you think.

Linux-based NAS appliances arguably offer many more backup options and are perhaps less susceptible to malware from other devices on your LAN. NAS devices that come with proprietary backup solutions will always have you over a barrel.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Meet Vaultron....








Vaultron was assembled in mid-2016 utilizing off-the-shelf server-level components (Supermicro motherboard, Intel Xeon processor, 64 GB of ECC memroy) and runs the FreeNAS software. With the exception of a two-week downtime when it was moved from my room in California to a closet in Texas, this has been operating almost continuously since mid-2016, with only one "crash" and reboots due to software upgrades. In fact, at the moment...









My system is configured with eight 5 TB drives configured in a RAIDZ2 configuration, giving me effectively 27TB of storage. Fault tolerance means that two of the eight drives can fail without losing anything, although the system will run in a degraded state. Having said that, I still have backups made from the FreeNAS server to several external drives.

The primary reason I built Vaultron was to have a file server so that my computers in my home can automatically back themselves up overnight while I'm sleeping. The secondary reason is that it is serving as a Plex media server which includes, among other things, a Photo Gallery. This will allow up to upload the photos and then share them among multiple devices.

Here's the nice part.... because it's "free", you can find an old computer, repurpose it as a FreeNAS server, and spend a month or two playing around with it, including several network shares. That's what I did with an old office computer that I rescued from the junk bin (it has no memory or hard drive). While it was limited to 8 GB of memory, with a 1 TB drive, I was able to get some practical experience so that when I assembled my production system, I had some idea of what I was doing. (The YouTube videos helped!) Did my server cost me a pretty penny? Oh yes, but so worth it. Some of the consumer-level NAS systems are a bit underpowered in terms of processor performance.

Piece of advice... avoid the SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) NAS drive like the plague... especially for a system that utilizes the ZFS file system (like FreeNAS). See Buyer beware-that 2TB-6TB "NAS" drive you've been eyeing might be SMR. Also, make sure you have UPS attached and configured to your NAS server.


----------



## dmspen (Dec 1, 2006)

I was going to look up the difference between SMR and CMR. Good info, thanks a bunch.



Mark Holtz said:


> Meet Vaultron....
> View attachment 30750
> 
> 
> Piece of advice... avoid the SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) NAS drive like the plague... especially for a system that utilizes the ZFS file system (like FreeNAS). See Buyer beware-that 2TB-6TB "NAS" drive you've been eyeing might be SMR. Also, make sure you have UPS attached and configured to your NAS server.


----------



## dmspen (Dec 1, 2006)

Got my Synology DS420+ NAS up and running, on UPS, and all set up. Auto pic uploading from family's phones, backups, etc. I love that it's quiet and unobtrusive. Very responsive on my network. I even stream music from the NAS to my phone to my car. Nifty!


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

FWIW.... From Ars Technica:

*Western Digital releases new, larger Red Pro and Purple drives
It feels like yesterday when 8TB drives were "really big."*


> Earlier this month, Seagate announced an 18TB entry in its Ironwolf Pro lineup. Western Digital answered Wednesday morning with 18TB versions of its Red Pro and Purple consumer-targeted lines. The new 18TB Red Pro and Purple drives follow the company's first 18TB CMR drive, a Gold released in mid-July.
> 
> Both NAS (Network Attached Storage) drives-Seagate's Ironwolf Pro and Western Digital's Red Pro-are CMR drives and not the more performance-problematic SMR technology. Western Digital's announcement of the 18TB Purple did not mention either SMR or CMR at all, which we must assume means it is an SMR drive.


FULL ARTICLE HERE


----------



## dmspen (Dec 1, 2006)

You could store the world digitally on these things!


----------



## billsharpe (Jan 25, 2007)

Just got a 2 TB Seagate external drive that is now only 10% full and will probably remain near that amount for some time. I'm keeping my Acronis backups and Windows File History files on it as well as a lot of music and picture files. My first computer, a VIC-20, kept files on cassette tapes.


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

dmspen said:


> You could store the world digitally on these things!


That used to be the case, but that was before phone pictures started running >4MB each and software packages were too large to fit on DVDs.

I was going through some old software boxes today and most of the applications fit on a few floppy discs. Windows XP fit easily on a CD (<700MB) and Windows 7 fit on a DVD (<4.3GB) but Windows 10 is just short of 8GB.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

More functionality = more code = bigger file sizes.

Also, the higher the resolution, the more pixels you have.


----------



## James Long (Apr 17, 2003)

billsharpe said:


> Just got a 2 TB Seagate external drive that is now only 10% full and will probably remain near that amount for some time. I'm keeping my Acronis backups and Windows File History files on it as well as a lot of music and picture files. My first computer, a VIC-20, kept files on cassette tapes.


I did a lot on a computer with 16k of memory - then upgraded it to 256k and added a floppy drive for storage (when one came available). Now I can't write a two line document without it consuming 4k of hard drive space.


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Mark Holtz said:


> More functionality = more code = bigger file sizes.
> 
> 
> > The issue really isn't more code but rather the same old code that is compiled for "virtual machines" like .net rather than the native instruction set of the computer.
> ...


How much beyond 4MP is really necessary for the typical consumer?

You are getting my point though. What used to be relatively efficient and quick to get the job done is now bloated in ways that don't stubtantially improve the user experience. Then there's the downside of all of the monetization and monitoring tools that have been baked in.


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

James Long said:


> Now I can't write a two line document without it consuming 4k of hard drive space.


Part of this stems from the fact that a very large majority of the population has been convinced that the tools they need to use are the ones that are designed for professionals because that's what the people at work use.

The other part comes from Microsoft's cop-out on UTF where they decided to go with UTF-16 with its minimum two-byte representation (four bytes if necessary) of every character when the rest of the Free World was using UTF 8 which can use from one to four bytes per character as needed. Microsoft also chose to use the BMP format for bitmapped pictures which which, while lossless, embeds an uncompressed version of the image matrix.

On the Mac side with the default "word processing" application is perhaps Pages and if you look at a Pages document, you'll find that it holds a PDF of the document within the file (presumably for quick preview) among a lot of other metadata.

Seeing the horror of what they had done, both Word and Pages documents are zip compressed.

The fascination with XML (and to a lesser extent, JSON) hasn't helped either. They've turned simple data files into a database of human-readable code. And we thought that TeX was incomprehensible:

TeX - Wikipedia


----------



## James Long (Apr 17, 2003)

It was a statement, not a question - but the real answer has more to do with how space is allocated on a hard drive than how the text is formatted in a file.


----------



## billsharpe (Jan 25, 2007)

James Long said:


> Now I can't write a two line document without it consuming 4k of hard drive space.


Not to nit-pick, but I just created a 2-line file in Notepad that takes up 80 bytes. But you're right if you are talking about Word documents. The same file takes 12 kb when saved as a .docx file.


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

James Long said:


> It was a statement, not a question - but the real answer has more to do with how space is allocated on a hard drive than how the text is formatted in a file.


In the case of a two line text document, the file format used will almost certainly determine the space allocated.

If the file is small enough (as in your example), the contents will be fit into the metadata of the Master File Table entry. Windows will still report that 4KB of storage space have been used, but it may be considerably less (perhaps even zero). The size of an MFT entry is 1KB and how much space that requires depends on whether a new cluster had to be added to the MFT.

I did an experiment saving a two line text document in both .txt and .docx formats and the file size was larger for the .docx file by 4,114 bytes (after compression). There were four folders and nine XML files embedded. The .txt file was stored in the MFT while the .docx file required an additional two clusters (in addition to the MFT entry).

It should also be noted that if the volume size is >16TB, the NTFS cluster size jumps to 8KB.


----------



## scooper (Apr 22, 2002)

Hm, I like the idea of using 8KB clusters on SD (or Micro SD) cards used for GPS data (FAT32). For USB flash drives - whatever is default for the size of the media - or partition.


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

scooper said:


> Hm, I like the idea of using 8KB clusters on SD (or Micro SD) cards used for GPS data (FAT32).


FAT32 jumps to an 8KB cluster size at 8GB, a 16KB cluster size at 16GB and a 32KB cluster size at 32GB.

exFAT uses 32KB clusters for popular SD card displacements (256MB to 32GB) so maybe you'll like it even better. Over 32GB it goes to 128KB clusters... nirvana!


----------



## scooper (Apr 22, 2002)

harsh said:


> FAT32 jumps to an 8KB cluster size at 8GB, a 16KB cluster size at 16GB and a 32KB cluster size at 32GB.
> 
> exFAT uses 32KB clusters for popular SD card displacements (256MB to 32GB) so maybe you'll like it even better. Over 32GB it goes to 128KB clusters... nirvana!


I've noticed (on a Win10 machine) that IF you manually change it, you can use whatever cluster size you want on any size drive. exFAT doesn't work for GPS use.


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

scooper said:


> I've noticed (on a Win10 machine) that IF you manually change it, you can use whatever cluster size you want on any size drive.


The numbers I offered were Microsoft's default/recommended cluster sizes.


> exFAT doesn't work for GPS use.


That's an extraordinary criterion indeed.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Heh... I was reading the comments from the article "I'm totally screwed." WD My Book Live users wake up to find their data deleted, and it had me re-reviewing my backup strategy with my TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) server. Mainly, it reminds us that we should have a secondary copy of the extremely important files on a off-site server. As it turns out, TrueNAS has a CloudSync solution that can interface with Backblaze which is a very cheap yet well-recommended cloud storage provider. I'm setting up automated backups of four critical folders, including the system backups from my mother's and my computer, plus the document folders. It was much easier than expected! Thank goodness I have good upload speeds of almost a gigabit.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Ok, gotta love this...... I'm using two cloud drive services.... OneDrive for Documents, Google Drive for Calendar appointments. I just set up my TrueNAS server to pull a copy of those files, then turn around and upload them to Backblaze as a secondary backup.


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Mark Holtz said:


> Ok, gotta love this...... I'm using two cloud drive services.... OneDrive for Documents, Google Drive for Calendar appointments. I just set up my TrueNAS server to pull a copy of those files, then turn around and upload them to Backblaze as a secondary backup.


If your basic backup services cost more than $5-7/month, consider setting up your own VPS and back up to that. I'm running Nextcloud on a VPS with full encryption and it is pretty sweet.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

I'm utilizing the Backblaze B2 Service. According to their pricing chart, it's $0.005 per Gigabyte per month beyond the initial 10GB. I have six buckets of data set up, and counting only those buckets that exceed 1GB, I have a total of 635.6 GB of data backed up, thus my estimated monthly bill is $3.18. The actual cost will vary as they base it on a month-long average. They will charge $0.01 per GB downloaded after the first GB, but assuming that I download my computer's backup files (both full and incremental), that's about 127GB, or $1.27. That's still cheaper than trying to recreate multiple years of items or losing precious photos.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Just as an update... I'm now running at a total capacity of 1,127 GB (estimated monthly cost of $5.64) and a average capacity of 922.5 GB (estimated monthly cost of $4.61). A good chunk of this is simply the daily backups (usually incremental) which get created around midnight each night from two computers, then uploaded at 2 AM to Backblaze. In turn, the bucket at BackBlaze is set with a lifecycle rule of 14 days, meaning that deleted files and previous versions are retained for 14 days.

With this change, I've temporarily disabled the snapshot service on those keep directories and become stingy on which backups I retain. It's not something that I _really _want to do, but it has allowed me to reduce the disk space used on my TrueNAS server from 80% capacity to 67% capacity. It's a necessary evil, as there is a price spike for the 10-12TB hard drives that I've been saving up on. Right now, I'm running 8×5TB hard drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration which gives me effectively 27TB of storage. When I first started saving back in February, 10TB drives were regularly on sale for ~$260. However, the price spiked to ~$405 before currently settling down to around ~$330, but that price spike effective increased the price of the drive by $560. My fingers are crossed for the end of the year Black Friday sales.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

And the first bill....









Next one will probably be slightly higher.


----------



## SledgeHammer (Dec 28, 2007)

Mark Holtz said:


> Just as an update... I'm now running at a total capacity of 1,127 GB (estimated monthly cost of $5.64) and a average capacity of 922.5 GB (estimated monthly cost of $4.61). A good chunk of this is simply the daily backups (usually incremental) which get created around midnight each night from two computers, then uploaded at 2 AM to Backblaze. In turn, the bucket at BackBlaze is set with a lifecycle rule of 14 days, meaning that deleted files and previous versions are retained for 14 days.
> 
> With this change, I've temporarily disabled the snapshot service on those keep directories and become stingy on which backups I retain. It's not something that I _really _want to do, but it has allowed me to reduce the disk space used on my TrueNAS server from 80% capacity to 67% capacity. It's a necessary evil, as there is a price spike for the 10-12TB hard drives that I've been saving up on. Right now, I'm running 8×5TB hard drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration which gives me effectively 27TB of storage. When I first started saving back in February, 10TB drives were regularly on sale for ~$260. However, the price spiked to ~$405 before currently settling down to around ~$330, but that price spike effective increased the price of the drive by $560. My fingers are crossed for the end of the year Black Friday sales.


Lol. What do you do with 27TB? Video editing?


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

SledgeHammer said:


> Lol. What do you do with 27TB? Video editing?


It's for backups of my systems at home, plus it's my Plex server. I do want to do some home video editing in the future.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

And, I got an error message informing me that one of the drives in my TrueNAS server went offline. A reboot brought it back online, but alas, that's also a signal that I need to initiate the hard drive replacement project. 

Unfortunately, 10/12 TB drives are not only unaffordable, they aren't even in stock. So, I'm having to go with 8 TB drives. 

Unfortunately, Amazon will only sell me five of the required eight drives at the moment. At $200 a drive. 

Yay 2020+1.


----------



## billsharpe (Jan 25, 2007)

My 2 TB external HD, used mainly for backup and storing some music and picture files, is only 20% full. Of course I don't do any video editing.


----------



## b4pjoe (Nov 20, 2010)

Mark Holtz said:


> And, I got an error message informing me that one of the drives in my TrueNAS server went offline. A reboot brought it back online, but alas, that's also a signal that I need to initiate the hard drive replacement project.
> 
> Unfortunately, 10/12 TB drives are not only unaffordable, they aren't even in stock. So, I'm having to go with 8 TB drives.
> 
> ...


Here is a 12 TB for $324.99. Plenty in stock at newegg.com

WD Red Plus 12TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM, 3.5" - Newegg.com


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Slight problem. At around February, I started saving up my Amazon gift cards for this purchase, whether it been through employee recognition, credit card rewards, and such. So, it's hard to spend Amazon credits at Newegg. When I began, these were the Amazon prices per CamelCamelCamel:

8 TB - WD $197, Seagate $199 with one drop in April to $184 ($200 is $25 per TB)
10 TB - WD $319 with some drops to $290, Seagate $279 with drops to $249 ($250 is $25 per TB)
12 TB - Seagate best price was around $299 at one point in the past year ($300 is $25 per TB)
After a summer of highly-inflated prices and lack of stock (some of it due to the Chia farmers before that cyber-currency crashed), we are seeing the prices drop again. I was actually anticipating the prices dropping and utilizing the Black Friday sales. On Wednesday, however, I received an error on one of the eight 5TB drives in my system. I just checked, and the original purchase date was July 23rd, 2016 at $199 per pop, making it $40 per TB.... and that was a sale price. Since my TrueNAS system has been running continuously since 2016 (minus power outages and a move from California to Texas which took the system offline for two weeks), I'm definitely outside the warranty period, and a single drive failure at this point is a signal to me to replace all the drives in the array immediately. While I have my server configured as a RAIDZ2 configuration allowing for up to two hard drive failures, any drive replacement has to be done one at a time as you take the drive offline, replace it, bring it back online, and rebuild ("resilver") the array. Each "resilver" can take hours, and I have to do it eight times. In addition, it's a one-direction upgrade. Once I complete the process to go to the larger drives, I cannot turn around and use smaller drives.

All this so that I have a system that is used for:

Automated backups for both my mothers and my personal computers, plus occasional backups for a personal laptop. And, this has an off-site backup.
Automated backups of my Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive folders which, in turn, are backed up to a secondary off-line backup.
Plex media server for my movies, television shows, music, and photographs. I'm in process of digitizing decades of old family photographs. The photos also have an off-site backup. I can then watch movies/TV shows from my bedroom or while traveling to my phone or tablet. 
ShareX screenshot and MP4 recording storage.
Game saves storage (thank you _The Witcher_ enhanced edition and your 9-15 MB uncompressed save files). Most of the game saves are quite small.
Video editing (future)
While it would be nice to utilize SSDs, at the moment, the best price is $700 for a 8TB SSD. At $87.50 per TB, this makes those old spinning platters of rust very cost effective for large-scale storage.


----------



## b4pjoe (Nov 20, 2010)

Maybe I'm confused but if you put a larger drive into the array, 8TB into an array with all disks 5 TB, it will only use 5 TB of the available 8 TB. Won't doing this one at a time meaning when you are done you will have eight 8 TB drives each only using 5 TB of their space? Maybe RAIDZ2 doesn't do that or it allows you to recover the unused space non-destructively? I am used to just using RAID 5.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

So, to clarify...

RAID5 / RAIDZ allows you to lose one physical drive without losing data.
RAID6 / RAIDZ2 allows you to lose two physical drives without losing data.
RAID7 / RAIDZ3 allows you to lose three physical drives without losing data.
By design, RAID uses the maximum capacity of the smallest drive across the entire RAID pool. Thus, replacing just one of the 5 TB drives with a 8 TB drive will not expand my storage. However, once I complete the resilver of the eighth drive, TrueNAS will expand the stoage of that pool, I will get about 16TB of additional storage.

Why 16TB and not 24TB? Remember, two of the eight drives are used for redundancy, so we drop from 24TB to 18TB. About 10% of the storage is used for ZFS overhead, thus 1.8TB is gone.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Faulty drive replacement completed, on drive two now, only six left to go.










Yeah, this is going to take a while as I have to take the drive offline in TrueNAS, shutdown the system, physically remove the old drive and put in the new drive, then perform the "replace" operation which initiates the resilver process.


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Have you contemplated using M-Disk BDRs for archiving or at least backup?


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

harsh said:


> Have you contemplated using M-Disk BDRs for archiving or at least backup?


Nope. I'm actually utilizing 3 external hard drives to backup up the data that is non-critical. However, TrueNAS has a feature called Cloud Sync Tasks that integrates with several services. Not only can I pull down a backup copy of the content stored on Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive, but it also interacts with some online storage providers such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and BackBlaze. BackBlaze is the cheapest, and only costs me around $4-$5 per month for the 450 GB that I store online and hope that I don't need to turn around and download. Thank goodness I have near-gigabit upload speeds.

Meanwhile, the other half of drive replacement... wiping the drive prior to disposal. This might take a while...


----------



## b4pjoe (Nov 20, 2010)

Mark Holtz said:


> Meanwhile, the other half of drive replacement... wiping the drive prior to disposal. This might take a while...
> View attachment 31705


Pounding on it with a hammer is much faster.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Probably. Except that I know some folks who would love a 5 TB hard drive.... well-worn or not!


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Mark Holtz said:


> Nope. I'm actually utilizing 3 external hard drives to backup up the data that is non-critical.


Where I'm going with this is that it doesn't pay to pay monthly to maintain data that could be stored in a safe. Even at five or six dollars a month, it adds up. There's no reason to stumble over data that you're not likely to use.

M-Disk is rated for dozens of years and is probably safer than any rewritable media (including hard drives).


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

harsh said:


> Where I'm going with this is that it doesn't pay to pay monthly to maintain data that could be stored in a safe. Even at five or six dollars a month, it adds up. There's no reason to stumble over data that you're not likely to use.


I understand your point. However, I'm a big believer in that the best backup system is something that you can automate and forget about (mostly). Most of my stuff on my TrueNAS server would be satisfied with having a backup on a portable hard drive and stored in a in-home safe. But, I've identified several directories that can change potentially change on a daily basis AND would hurt if there was data loss. Decades of family photos, for instance, is practically irreplaceable, and is backed up on both a portable hard drive AND offsite backup.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Today's category: Things you do NOT want to see during a hard drive replacement session:










It should be noted that everything was fine after replacement of four drives, so I elected to proceed with drive five replacement. I'm running on RAIDZ2, so the drive array is tolerant of two drive failures, and I'll just replace drive seven with one of the 5TBs that I removed earlier. Unfortunately, I won't get the remaining three 8 TB drives until Wednesday evening.


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Mark Holtz said:


> Decades of family photos, for instance, is practically irreplaceable, and is backed up on both a portable hard drive AND offsite backup.


For stuff like that, you distribute some form of media to all family members and if anybody loses theirs, someone can make them a copy. Most heirloom photos don't need to be "live".

Using a live service for just the active content makes a lot of sense and that's surely a much smaller chunk of data.


----------



## James Long (Apr 17, 2003)

Mark has made his choice - and I support it. Personally I'd trust a cloud storage more than I'd trust my family members to keep heirlooms safe. Your family may vary.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

harsh said:


> For stuff like that, you distribute some form of media to all family members and if anybody loses theirs, someone can make them a copy.


What family? For all practical purposes, it's just my mother and myself. I have two half-sisters on my father's side, and only one of those actually keeps in touch.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

OK, drive five replaced successfully without any data loss. Now replacing drive 7... oh dear....










Is it Wednesday yet?


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

I deleted a couple of backup sessions on a cheap NAS for Autodesk's Vault at my former workplace yesterday and it said that the deletion would take about one day. I noticed this about ten minutes into Windows stumbling to identify the files to be deleted. I stopped the delete task, logged into the NAS and deleted the whole mess in about 30 seconds. Each backup was about 380GB. It never ceases to amaze me how inefficient many Windows programs are at storing data.


----------



## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

Before I replaced the final drive in my TrueNAS server today:









After I completed "resilvering" the final drive in my TrueNAS server today:









Mission accomplished. Although, in the end, three of the original eight 5TB drives ended up having errors.


----------



## OneMarcilV (Jul 24, 2020)

I purchased this for my computer.

Western Digital RE WD4000FYYZ 4TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA Hard Drive

Has great reviews.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


----------

