Spec me a NAS (or something)

[Armageus]

Just received some unexpected money (~£500), so looking to streamline my data storage / backup options, but unsure exactly what to do.

Currently I have ~1TB of irreplaceable data (photos, videos etc). I'd also just recently started using Emby (although may switch to Plex), to store some of our DVD box sets (to make it easier to remember where we got to), and share our CD collection around the house etc.

Currently have:
2x2TB Hard drives in my old PC (this contains 2 copies of the irreplaceable data - manually synced) - hard drives are fairly old and I would like to replace anyway.
1TB 2.5" USB drive as off-site backup of data
Microserver N36L - currently unused
Emby server (Silverstone HTPC Case, Haswell I3, 4TB non-NAS hard drive)
Lenovo Tiny M900 (Skylake pentium, NVME and SSD drives) - currently running ESXi and hosting PiHole/Lancache

I was thinking of getting a Synology (e.g. the DS920+), to become my main storage device
(e.g. with 4x 3TB or 4TB drives in RAID5)

Despite the "don't use RAID5" mantra - for my use case I think this is still the best option, it maximises space whilst still protecting against a single drive failure.

I would re-use the existing 4TB drive I have in a USB caddy to use as an offsite backup, and the 2x2TB drives I have could be reused for backups of the DVD/Music data

A DS920+ should be supported for a long time, and would also allow me to move PiHole/Lancache VM's off the M900, and run them via Docker.

My only concern with the DS920+ is that despite being relatively expensive, it has no option for 10Gb (or even 2.5Gb), so although unlikely a problem now, is annoyingly limited going forward.
Additionally despite it having NVMe M2 slots - they can only be used for caching, you can't use them as a separate array, or specifically to accelerate e.g. VM's or Docker images. (I'd like Emby/Plex to have access to an SSD to ensure metadata etc responds quickly etc.)

I could run Emby/Plex on the M900, so benefiting from NVMe/SSD (and also has hardware encoding), as long as I can move PiHole/Lancache onto whatever I buy - the NAS could potentially then be less powerful CPU wise?

I've looked at a couple of QNAPs, as I think there was one at a similar price range that either has onboard 2.5G/10G, or could at least be expanded with a PCI-E card. Not 100% convinced with QNAP's os as it sounds like it's more Beta quality, whereas I've used Synology for years at work with no issues.

I'm not against building something, but I ideally want it to be low maintenance, quiet and low power consumption.

EDIT:
DS1520+ was another option I was looking at, as at least I could add a SATA SSD specifically for Docker storage if needed


TL;DR
- 1 Box to store both irreplaceable data, replaceable media, and ideal run a couple of light VM's/Docker containers
- 4 Drive RAID5 ok to maximise space, providing I have another backup anyway?
- DS920+ worth it over the DS420 (or something else)?
- £500-£700 budget for device, not including Drives

 

[BongoHunter]

With 4 drives of equal size I would be looking at RAID10 I think

With only pair of drives I'd only consider mirrors unless going for something like unraid

Thought about building your own box? Getting a small mobo with enough sata and some 2.5g+ ethernet isn't going to cost the earth - and you'll only need a cheap CPU. If you only need 4-8 drives there's quite a few nice NAS cases on market now

 

[BongoHunter]

Just adding to the above, this was my DIY NAS build thread: https://www.overclockers.co.uk/forums/threads/diy-nas-build.18816486/

Since that I've swapped to Ryzen 2600 and added a proper HBA and 10GBE

Hope to add another 8TB of storage to it soon and an NVME drive for VMs (am moving from freenas to proxmox atm)

 

[Armageus]

Thanks for the reply and the link to your build.

I've not completely ruled out a self build, but not sold on it either for the following reasons:
- Lack of choice in Motherboards - would prefer MATX, 6+ Sata, and ECC memory. What happens if it fails? Difficulty in obtaining replacement?
- To relax the above requirement slightly, a HBA is an option, but then it's another expense / something to fail / additional power draw
- Not sold on the OS options:
- Not a fan of FreeNAS/TrueNAS due to their general attitude (e.g. ZFS is the best, despite actually having some shortcomings)
- Whilst Unraid sounds ideal for replaceable data such as plex media etc, rightly or wrongly I'm not sure I would trust it with my irreplaceable data

The only other idea was to do something that I am eminently familiar with at work - to use a HP Smartarray card, and actually do a hardware RAID array (e.g. raid 10), but equally the pitfalls are lack of support for HP Smartarray cards is "normal" motherboards, which then leads to e.g. a entry level HP Server (e.g. something like a ML310e V2 or ML30, but then it's back to the size/noise/power consumption trade off.

(I did try a P222 raid card in my Microserver, but the amount of heat it produces is simply too much to deal with in the older G7 chassis)

 

[ecksmen]

I'd suggest considering a hybrid approach - a hardware raid configuration to give you the I/O profile and disk resilency you desire, but combine it with snapshotting the volume using snapraid to an external drive, and/or sync to the cloud.

 

[Armageus]

Rightly or wrongly but a £40 discount swayed me in to picking up a 5 bay Synology DS1520+.

The price difference between a ds420+ and 920+ was too small to consider the lesser model, and it didn't seem like too much of a stretch to get an additional drive bay for raid6, an extra 4gb ram, as well as another esata and 2 more gigabit LAN ports, so went for the 1520+.

Should hopefully be here tomorrow

 

[BongoHunter]

Thanks for the reply and the link to your build.

I've not completely ruled out a self build, but not sold on it either for the following reasons:
- Lack of choice in Motherboards - would prefer MATX, 6+ Sata, and ECC memory. What happens if it fails? Difficulty in obtaining replacement?
- To relax the above requirement slightly, a HBA is an option, but then it's another expense / something to fail / additional power draw
- Not sold on the OS options:
- Not a fan of FreeNAS/TrueNAS due to their general attitude (e.g. ZFS is the best, despite actually having some shortcomings)
- Whilst Unraid sounds ideal for replaceable data such as plex media etc, rightly or wrongly I'm not sure I would trust it with my irreplaceable data

The only other idea was to do something that I am eminently familiar with at work - to use a HP Smartarray card, and actually do a hardware RAID array (e.g. raid 10), but equally the pitfalls are lack of support for HP Smartarray cards is "normal" motherboards, which then leads to e.g. a entry level HP Server (e.g. something like a ML310e V2 or ML30, but then it's back to the size/noise/power consumption trade off.

(I did try a P222 raid card in my Microserver, but the amount of heat it produces is simply too much to deal with in the older G7 chassis)

The Asrock B550m Pro4 should support ECC, its about £100 and MATX with 6 sata ports and m2

The B550 Steel Legend is pretty much same board but with 2.5GbE for an extra £20-30

If you do look at Ryzen then don't get an APU unless it's one of the pro models if you want to use ECC (non pros don't support it)

Also if you use APU you half the number of lanes to first PCIE slot - I went for normal Ryzen and use a PCIEx1 graphics card (old Nvidia NVS290 are less than a tenner) or the new Asus card: https://www.asus.com/Graphics-Cards/GT710-4H-SL-2GD5/ (zotac also do one) to leave lanes free for more interesting things - but you probably don't need to worry about that if looking for something with 6 or less sata drives.

Hardware raid is probably overkill - freenas as a product is solid - but only with hardware it explicitly supports in my experiance with it. Personally if I was sticking with freenas I probably would have stayed Intel (and also not been able to use cheap Aquanta 10Gb NICs! ) - Proxmox is pretty solid and they do have enterprise customers, you get a lot of storage choices with it too: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve/features

A Synology or Qnap is probably the most convenient solution - but you do pay through the nose for the spec you get.

Edit: Looking at the Synology range I'd need to spend about £1500 to get close to the spec of my DIY build (currently £600 with no drives)

 

[Armageus]

A Synology or Qnap is probably the most convenient solution - but you do pay through the nose for the spec you get.

I know and had been thinking about it all day.

I wasn't expecting to have the money, but it was a gift from my dad, so wanted to spend it wisely. Putting it towards a prebuilt Nas rather than a collection of pc parts seems somehow more appropriate.

 

[BongoHunter]

I know and had been thinking about it all day.

I wasn't expecting to have the money, but it was a gift from my dad, so wanted to spend it wisely. Putting it towards a prebuilt Nas rather than a collection of pc parts seems somehow more appropriate.

Completely sane choice - I would not describe my experiance as plug and play at all, it was weeks of faffing about and testing to get it to the point I completely trusted it with my data.

I will be happy to never have to stare at a file transfer session with time remaining measured in weeks ever again too!

 

[HungryHippos]

Good choice on the Synology, I love mine. I have the DS1815+ so 8 bays but I'm only using 4 of them right now.

One day I'll probably need to update the NAS unit itself as it's an older model now, so I condensed mine down to 4 disks (4 x 10TB R5). I can then buy a 4 or 5 bay down the line and migrate disks over as is.

For new disks I'd recommend going as big as you can on disk sizes, the cheapest way of getting them is to shuck them out of the external storage units. For my disks I purchased 2 of the WD My Book Duo 20TB units on sale for £330 each. These contained 2 x 10TB Red retail drives so I managed to get a 10TB drive for effectively £165 each. There are deals for these kinds of disks popping up on HUKD sometimes.

If you use SHR-2 mode I think it acts like a R6 but you need a minimum of 4 disks to make that work initially. Although you can add the 5th disk later.

SHR mode acts like R5 but is extendable, so you can start with 2 disks and extend until you reach 5.

 

[BigT]

I've not completely ruled out a self build, but not sold on it either for the following reasons:
- Lack of choice in Motherboards - would prefer MATX, 6+ Sata, and ECC memory. What happens if it fails? Difficulty in obtaining replacement?
- To relax the above requirement slightly, a HBA is an option, but then it's another expense / something to fail / additional power draw
- Not sold on the OS options:
- Not a fan of FreeNAS/TrueNAS due to their general attitude (e.g. ZFS is the best, despite actually having some shortcomings)
- Whilst Unraid sounds ideal for replaceable data such as plex media etc, rightly or wrongly I'm not sure I would trust it with my irreplaceable data

Fair play if you go down the Synology route - great bits of kit. But if it helps with your decision making I can set your mind at ease with a couple of concerns there wrt Unraid. Failing kit isn’t a problem if you don’t replace like-for-like. The only thing that the OS cares about is the disks. You can literally change everything else if it fails, hook the disks up in a different order on a different motherboard and it’ll still boot up and work provided the same disks are in. I recently moved one of my Unraid boxes from a NUC clone to an old HP micro server with some additional disks. System booted up just fine and then I added the new disks into my array without hassle or drama.

Not sure why you’d not trust your data more or less with it. It can withstand one or two disk failures depending in the level of parity you use and has the bonus, since it’s not RAID, of being able to read data off the drives in another machine if required.

I’d add it’s App Store and docker configuration UI make setting stuff up like Plex and Emby really very straightforward.

Also For your very critical data remember whatever you do a NAS isn’t a complete backup solution. I’d strongly recommend syncing it to a cloud service as a minimum. Again Unraid is great for this as I can use rclone to periodically backup to an encrypted volume on all the major cloud providers. I think synology have a good app for this also.

 

[Armageus]

Also For your very critical data remember whatever you do a NAS isn’t a complete backup solution. I’d strongly recommend syncing it to a cloud service as a minimum. Again Unraid is great for this as I can use rclone to periodically backup to an encrypted volume on all the major cloud providers. I think synology have a good app for this also.

I did go down the Synology route and got a DS1520+.

My plan so far is:
- Synology will be my main data storage - initially have 3x3TB Drives in SHR (RAID5 equivalent) (this leaves space to add an additional 2 disks and move to SHR-2 RAID6 equivalent)
- 4TB Drive from my current media server to be fitted into a USB enclosure and used to backup all important data on regular basis (weekly?) - this can be kept offsite
- Will be using the Synology Apps to sync important data to my current cloud accounts (e.g. Google Drive), may also consider dedicated cloud storage e.g. Backblaze or Amazon
- Current 2TB Data drives in my PC, will host another copy of anything important, but on a less frequent schedule (monthly?)

 

[batfink]

Good choice on the Synology, I love mine. I have the DS1815+ so 8 bays but I'm only using 4 of them right now.

One day I'll probably need to update the NAS unit itself as it's an older model now,

Older model? I'm still running a DS209 which has worked pretty much flawlessly for 10 years now. I haven't even replaced any of the hard drives in that time. An 1815+ is still a baby!

It's time to upgrade now, I think. DSM offers a lot of new features that I can't take advantage of at the moment plus it's time to replace the drives before they start to fail (yes, I do have an external back up in place - that has also been running flawlessly for 10 years).