Help, I think I want a NAS

Forums › LAN (ethernet/Wifi/routers/Bluetooth) › Help, I think I want a NAS

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
79285 posts

Uber Geek

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#663012 27-Jul-2012 16:22

The port 80/443 combination is for the administration. You can then specify the ports for other access types - I only have a third port open for its web-based File Explorer. Could possibly open a WebDAV port to allow for some mobile apps access to the files but rather not.

Skolink

1081 posts

Uber Geek

#784317 20-Mar-2013 11:12

LookingUp:
Skolink:
billgates: The NAS that freitasm has mentioned, is USD$190 (DS212J + USD$35 shipping) from Amazon. I ordered it last week and now awaiting delivery.

I just had a test at ordering the DS112j but for some reason it won't ship to my address, even though the DS212j (link you provided) will ship. Both are sold by "Amazon.com". If you read the "learn more" information, it basically says that almost everything (other than books) will not be shipped internationally, which obviously isn't true.

I had the same problem with Amazon, so ended up ordering from RC711 in Hong Kong. Might seem like an odd place to buy from, but the service was great and it even came with a free gift!

http://www.rc711.com/shop/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=synology&x=0&y=0

They also sell QNAP.

Thanks for the recommendation. I bought a DS112J from RC711 last year and I love it.

I first tried persisting with Amazon, and questioned them three times on why the DS212J ships internationally but not the DS112J. The third response was actually an intelligent one; 'That is strange, I'll get the technical department to look into it'. After a week I gave up and ordered from RC711. That was November 2012.

Today, four months later I got a response to say that they had looked into it and the shipping restriction on the DS112J has been removed. So the DS112J can now be ordered from Amazon (directly).

Gilco2

1556 posts

Uber Geek

#789531 30-Mar-2013 09:38

sorry to butt in. I have found the benefits of a NAS and rather than have a heap of external drives with backups on, I think having them all on a NAS would be better. So all my music,photos,videos and documents. Obviously I would want raid 1 I think it is where it mirrors 1 drive to the other. Therefore I was thinking of a 4 bay unit. How does it work. Does it use the first pair then switch to next pair as the first ones fill up. I dont want it all as one big drive as I want the protection of a mirrored drive if one fails.
Sorry if it has been asked but I couldnt find it in the search. Although using and building computers for years I have never done servers or networking so new to this side.
Thanks

HTPC Intel Pentium G3258 cpu, Gigabyte H97n-wifi motherboard, , 8GB DDR3 ram, onboard graphics. Hauppuage HVR 5500 tuner, Silverstone LC16M case, Windows 10 pro 64 bit using Nextpvr and Kodi

Mark

1653 posts

Uber Geek

#789750 30-Mar-2013 21:12

Gilco2: .... Obviously I would want raid 1 I think it is where it mirrors 1 drive to the other. Therefore I was thinking of a 4 bay unit. How does it work. Does it use the first pair then switch to next pair as the first ones fill up. I dont want it all as one big drive as I want the protection of a mirrored drive if one fails ....
Thanks

No it won't work that way .. but there is nothing stopping you having two RAID-1 sets running (so long as the NAS is semi decent and supports it), you will have 2 filesystems though. Or you can go RAID-10 which will take all 4 and give you 2 drives worth of capacity.

If you have a 4 drive unit the most economical configuration is to go RAID-5, it will give you 3 drives worth of capacity (1 drives worth of capacity gets used for parity) and be able to withstand the failure of any 1 of the 4 drives and keep on working (although a bit slower as it does the XOR calculations on the fly) ... as soon as you replace the dead drive it will rebuild the data onto the new one and be all healthy again. If however a second drive fails before it has rebuilt you will lose the lot.

With drives getting rather large, the rebuild times can be quite long so using RAID-6 or RAID-10 is more preferable, but you need units with 6 drive bays to make that economical (RAID-6 takes 2 drives for parity information, and RAID-10 will take half of your drives for protection).

Regards!

Gilco2

1556 posts

Uber Geek

#789757 30-Mar-2013 21:21

Mark:
Gilco2: .... Obviously I would want raid 1 I think it is where it mirrors 1 drive to the other. Therefore I was thinking of a 4 bay unit. How does it work. Does it use the first pair then switch to next pair as the first ones fill up. I dont want it all as one big drive as I want the protection of a mirrored drive if one fails ....
Thanks

No it won't work that way .. but there is nothing stopping you having two RAID-1 sets running (so long as the NAS is semi decent and supports it), you will have 2 filesystems though. Or you can go RAID-10 which will take all 4 and give you 2 drives worth of capacity.

If you have a 4 drive unit the most economical configuration is to go RAID-5, it will give you 3 drives worth of capacity (1 drives worth of capacity gets used for parity) and be able to withstand the failure of any 1 of the 4 drives and keep on working (although a bit slower as it does the XOR calculations on the fly) ... as soon as you replace the dead drive it will rebuild the data onto the new one and be all healthy again. If however a second drive fails before it has rebuilt you will lose the lot.

With drives getting rather large, the rebuild times can be quite long so using RAID-6 or RAID-10 is more preferable, but you need units with 6 drive bays to make that economical (RAID-6 takes 2 drives for parity information, and RAID-10 will take half of your drives for protection).

Regards!

okay thanks, I will go raid 5 then. All new to me. I just found the benefits of have a centralised system. At present I will still have the present external drives as backups as cant rely entirely on a NAS. Once I have sorted this part and get to grips with it then later I can go down the road of more drives and RAID-10. Thanks for the help

HTPC Intel Pentium G3258 cpu, Gigabyte H97n-wifi motherboard, , 8GB DDR3 ram, onboard graphics. Hauppuage HVR 5500 tuner, Silverstone LC16M case, Windows 10 pro 64 bit using Nextpvr and Kodi

Mark

1653 posts

Uber Geek

#789764 30-Mar-2013 21:36

Gilco2: At present I will still have the present external drives as backups as cant rely entirely on a NAS. Once I have sorted this part and get to grips with it then later I can go down the road of more drives and RAID-10. Thanks for the help

Yup, just remember RAID is not a backup .. it's just redundancy, so having a good backup regime in place is good practice :-) So backing up your NAS to external drives is good, then take those drives off site (in case something bad happens to your house/office), and it never hurts to have your really important stuff backed up to one of the cloud backup services (I use Mozy, but there are loads of others)

ekul

89 posts

Master Geek

#793165 4-Apr-2013 13:34

I'm usinga Synology DS413(4bay) with all green drives in a SHR(synolgoy hybrid raid?). It is excellent, good for streaming, I can stream to my PC, two tv's and a raspberry pi all at the same time without issues.

I'm curious as to why green drives aren't recommended, i've had one drive fail(a green) and put in a new one, away it went and rebuilt array with out issues

Sharesies

Trade NZ and US shares and funds with Sharesies (affiliate link).

Mark

1653 posts

Uber Geek

#793232 4-Apr-2013 14:31

I believe it is around how the drives handle media errors, and how they respond back to the drive controller/host when they are dealing with an error.
I remember reading that the green drives spend more time re-reading a bad area of disk before declaring it "dead" than a RAID controller (be it hardware or software) is prepared to wait for ... so a green drive might spend 5 seconds (made up number) faffing about trying to work out if an area of disk is dead or not, in that 5 second the RAID controller will panic and think the drive is no longer talking and declare the whole drive dead ... where as a drive setup for a RAID environment might only spend 1 second working out if an area of disk is dead (and probably reports back to the RAID controller to say it is actually doing that so the controller knows to wait itself)

Or something along those lines :-)

I run 4 * 2TB WD EARS "green" drives in my Thecus .. I think it's a case of "your mileage may vary" :-)

1 | 2 | 3 | 4