Setting Up a Home NAS (Synology)

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Dingbatt

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#242310 21-Oct-2018 09:57

I have been wanting to set up a NAS for a while, and (possibly in a moment of madness) picked up a 4 bay Synology DS418play and two Ironwolf HDDs (6TB) in the Labour Weekend sales.
It is for home use and I envision using it to backup the PCs in the house and store media (photos, video, music and recorded tv) for playback. With the exception of the recorded tv all of the other media will still be resident on another storage device or in cloud storage.
After looking at the instructions (rookie move I know) I am looking at setting the NAS up in Synology's Hybrid RAID configuration. From what I understand that will give me 6TB of storage with one disk redundancy. Can I specify what is mirrored to both drives, or will everything be? The reason being, I don't really care if the TV programs are lost by a single disk failure, but everything else is more important. The tv currently takes up about 4TB on my HTPC.
In addition there seem to be a huge number of additional utilities that can be installed on the NAS for management, security, backup, etc. What of these do people suggest as good to install.
I would like to backup our mobile devices as well (mainly Android). Is that possible?

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. Carl Sagan 1996

chevrolux

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#2111778 21-Oct-2018 10:07

Once you create the raid volume think of it like one big harddrive. So no, you can't choose what is mirrored.

If it was me, I would have gone for 4 smaller capacity drives as that way you have far more fault tolerance. 4 disks can be put in a raid 10 and then two disks can drop out of the array without consequence.

There are heaps of really good plugins for Synology. There is no reason to install any if you dont need the functionality. It all depends what you want to play with!

cyril7

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#2111782 21-Oct-2018 10:27

Hi the as Sam mentioned you would have been better with more drives in the raid, with raid 5 or 10 or DSM hybrid which is infact a mod on raid 5 you get greater fail protection and get to keep more of the drives for use.

But as you are at this point now, you could just add another single drive for your TV stuff, either internally fitted or as a external USB.

Cyril

Dingbatt

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#2111817 21-Oct-2018 12:12

Thanks. Am setting up now.
The aim is to add two more 6TBs as the budget allows. Probably overkill, but with 4K media I imagine I will chew through storage so wanted to expand rather than swap out at a later date.

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. Carl Sagan 1996

raytaylor

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#2111839 21-Oct-2018 13:09

I am not sure if the Synology allows you to expand a raid partition by adding more drives.

But you are in a good situation where you could either

1) Add 1x more drive
Keep it as a separate volume for media that doesnt need to be backed up like tv programmes as you suggest.

This will free up space on your dual drive RAID array

6TB Duplicated
6TB Alone
======
12TB Total

2) Add 2x more drives Raid 5
They must be the same size as other two.
Set up drive 4 as a separate volume, copy all data to it.
Set up drive 1,2,3 as a raid 5 array, copy the important data back across

This will double your storage space on the RAID array and give you an extra 6tb for media that doesnt need backing up
One drive of 1/2/3 may fail

12TB Duplicated
6TB Alone
========
18TB Total

3) Add 2x more drives Raid 10
They must be the same size as other two.
Requires an external USB temporary drive of 6tb to migrate data
Set up USB drive as a seperate volume, copy all data to it
Set up drive 1,2,3,4 as a raid 10 array, copy all data back across

This will double your storage on the RAID array and all data will be backed up.
Two drives may fail.

12TB Duplicated

The important thing to realize with mirrored raid and two drives is that if a power cut occurs during a write to a file, the file will still be damaged. If there is a power surge it could get through to the drives and kill them all.

So you are always best to use an external hard drive and back everything up weekly and then store that drive in a separate building such as a detached garage in case of fire. Only bring it in to resync / backup the data, then get it back out of the building as quickly as possible. Alternatively, have a ethernet cable going to a seperate building and permanantly store the NAS in that building if local copies of important files are still kept on computers within your main home.

Ray Taylor

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