WTB: NAS for streaming Media

To post in this sub-forum you must have made 100 posts or have Trust status or have completed our ID Verification

Forums › Offers and Wanted › WTB: NAS for streaming Media

KrazyKid

1247 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 616

#214987 7-Jun-2017 13:08

I've been using a USB drive up to now but since the HDD has just died I should take the chance to upgrade to a proper NAS.

Probably want something with 1-2 drives bays.

It's main use will be media streaming (Transcoding not required) but I will probably play and put something else on it at some stage.

Let me know if you have something lying about you want to turn into cash.

I'm in Dunedin so will pay shipping if needed.

Cheers

1 | 2

357 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 143

#1795965 7-Jun-2017 13:29

Hey mate,

https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/NASQNP25118/QNAP-TS-251-8G-NAS-Server-2-Bay-SATA-6G-Celeron-20

Does this tickle your fancy?

I bought this unit plus the four bay version last year from PB Tech.

Have been using as a Plex Server and a Web Server but is absolutely surplus to requirements as I'm moving my storage to the cloud.

Cool features:

- Plex support / Qnap App Echo System

- Virtualisation / Docker Support

- HDMI port to use as a Linux Desktop Computer

- USB 3 and dual Gigabit ethernet

Have upgraded the memory to 16GB.

Would take $700 with the RAM upgrade if your budget allows.

Ge0rge

2114 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 2060

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1795968 7-Jun-2017 13:32

I have had one of these for a few years, running Alt-F firmware. Has an ftp client, DLNA server, ability to torrent direct from the box plus a whole lot of other things that I haven't really investigaed. I have it living out in the workshop with ethernet into the house to multiple TVs, plays stuff fine and as simple as browsing from the TV remote.

Not my auction btw, I just came across it the other day and though of it when I saw your post.

KrazyKid

1247 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 616

#1796515 8-Jun-2017 10:58

premiumtouring:

Would take $700 with the RAM upgrade if your budget allows.

@premiumtouring

Sounds very nice - but out of my Budget unless it includes HDDs.

Let me know if you want to stretch that far.

Cheers

gnfb

2685 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 197

ID Verified

#1798661 12-Jun-2017 17:33

I have a ReadyNAS NV+V2 PLUS 4 x 2tb drives

A Netgear ReadyNAS NV+V2 Unit

4 bays
Plus the drives

Western Digital WD Green WD20EZRX 2TB
Western Digital WD Green WD20EARS 2TB
Western Digital WD Green WD20EARX 2TB
Seagate Desktop HDD ST2000DM001 2TB

This unit was supplied by netgear 11/1/2016 as a replacement for a similiar unit.
Comes with original box and all that came in the box

$560 delivered NZ

Is an English Man living in New Zealand. Not a writer, an Observer he says. Graham is a seasoned 'traveler" with his sometimes arrogant, but honest opinion on life. He loves the Internet!.

I have two shops online allshop.nz patchpinflag.nz
Email Me

JimmyH

2898 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 1554

#1798754 12-Jun-2017 18:21

gnfb:

4 bays
Plus the drives

Western Digital WD Green WD20EZRX 2TB
Western Digital WD Green WD20EARS 2TB
Western Digital WD Green WD20EARX 2TB
Seagate Desktop HDD ST2000DM001 2TB

I hope you aren't running that unit as RAID5 or 6. Never, ever, run WD Greens in a striped array - the TLER will likely cause all sorts of problems.

gnfb

2685 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 197

ID Verified

#1798776 12-Jun-2017 18:44

JimmyH:

gnfb:

4 bays
Plus the drives

Western Digital WD Green WD20EZRX 2TB
Western Digital WD Green WD20EARS 2TB
Western Digital WD Green WD20EARX 2TB
Seagate Desktop HDD ST2000DM001 2TB

I hope you aren't running that unit as RAID5 or 6. Never, ever, run WD Greens in a striped array - the TLER will likely cause all sorts of problems.

Hmmmm The good or the bad news I dont have a clue what you are talking about fortunately the TLER?? does not seem to be causing any problems as the whole thing works wonderfully well as a storage bin for all my junk (media) and I can access it from any of the devices or mac or pcs that I have connected to it. Have been doing so for months!

Goodness imagine if what you said had been true LOL it would have completely screwed up any ability to sell the unit . Good job there are people like you around keeping us all honest well done!

Is an English Man living in New Zealand. Not a writer, an Observer he says. Graham is a seasoned 'traveler" with his sometimes arrogant, but honest opinion on life. He loves the Internet!.

I have two shops online allshop.nz patchpinflag.nz
Email Me

Geekzone

Want to support Geekzone and browse the site without the ads? Subscribe to Geekzone now (monthly, annual and lifetime options).

driller2000

936 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 374

ID Verified

#1798810 12-Jun-2017 19:24

Given its for media i.e. non-critical - do you have some old hardware you could re-purpose using unRAID:

https://lime-technology.com/

I have been running one for 5 years now for my media - it is well reliable and i definitely recommend having a look at it.

Free 30 day licence is a good way to test it - and the $$ versions are good value IMO.

JimmyH

2898 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 1554

#1801654 15-Jun-2017 18:03

gnfb:

Hmmmm The good or the bad news I dont have a clue what you are talking about fortunately the TLER?? does not seem to be causing any problems as the whole thing works wonderfully well as a storage bin for all my junk (media) and I can access it from any of the devices or mac or pcs that I have connected to it. Have been doing so for months!

Goodness imagine if what you said had been true LOL it would have completely screwed up any ability to sell the unit . Good job there are people like you around keeping us all honest well done!

They won't cause any problems - until they do.

Green drives are designed to be used individually and to be energy efficient. They have aggressive head parking and high TLER (time- limited error recovery). Basically, when your hard drive needs to perform a read operation and that sector is bad the hard drive will go into error recovery mode. That is what you want in a desktop drive - park the heads when not in use, and have a couple of goes at reading data if there is a read error. However, in a striped array using hardware RAID it isn't.

When a hard drive is in error recovery mode the hard drive will not respond to commands from the computer, such as another read or write operation. The RAID controller can interpret this as a failed disk and boot it off the array. For RAID environments, it's important to have a very low TLER to prevent a drive from being removed from the RAID by the RAID controller. Drives designed for NASes work this way, green drives don't.

That means you can have an unstable array that keeps rebuilding. Furthermore, you can't RMA the drives because they keep dropping out of your array. The are behaving as designed and will pass all diagnostics fine.

Head parking is a different issue. My understanding is that Green drives park the head after 8 seconds, which causes a higher number of on/off cycles in NAS or Server operations, and means that the drive will likely fail faster. Again, NAS drives are designed for this type of environment.

KrazyKid

1247 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 616

#1803653 19-Jun-2017 20:41

Thanks for all the offers.
I ended up buying the 251 from Rappelle in this thread

gnfb

2685 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 197

ID Verified

#1803872 20-Jun-2017 10:22

JimmyH:

gnfb:

Hmmmm The good or the bad news I dont have a clue what you are talking about fortunately the TLER?? does not seem to be causing any problems as the whole thing works wonderfully well as a storage bin for all my junk (media) and I can access it from any of the devices or mac or pcs that I have connected to it. Have been doing so for months!

Goodness imagine if what you said had been true LOL it would have completely screwed up any ability to sell the unit . Good job there are people like you around keeping us all honest well done!

They won't cause any problems - until they do.

Green drives are designed to be used individually and to be energy efficient. They have aggressive head parking and high TLER (time- limited error recovery). Basically, when your hard drive needs to perform a read operation and that sector is bad the hard drive will go into error recovery mode. That is what you want in a desktop drive - park the heads when not in use, and have a couple of goes at reading data if there is a read error. However, in a striped array using hardware RAID it isn't.

When a hard drive is in error recovery mode the hard drive will not respond to commands from the computer, such as another read or write operation. The RAID controller can interpret this as a failed disk and boot it off the array. For RAID environments, it's important to have a very low TLER to prevent a drive from being removed from the RAID by the RAID controller. Drives designed for NASes work this way, green drives don't.

That means you can have an unstable array that keeps rebuilding. Furthermore, you can't RMA the drives because they keep dropping out of your array. The are behaving as designed and will pass all diagnostics fine.

Head parking is a different issue. My understanding is that Green drives park the head after 8 seconds, which causes a higher number of on/off cycles in NAS or Server operations, and means that the drive will likely fail faster. Again, NAS drives are designed for this type of environment.

I remenbered afterwards that the drives i got were from memory on the list of suitable from netgear.

Your knowledge is obviously extensive on this matter Us laypeople tend to accept what the companies say as we have no real alternative other than spending 3 years at MIT :)

Is an English Man living in New Zealand. Not a writer, an Observer he says. Graham is a seasoned 'traveler" with his sometimes arrogant, but honest opinion on life. He loves the Internet!.

I have two shops online allshop.nz patchpinflag.nz
Email Me

cshaun

407 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 72

ID Verified

#1803978 20-Jun-2017 13:03

gnfb:

I remenbered afterwards that the drives i got were from memory on the list of suitable from netgear.

Your knowledge is obviously extensive on this matter Us laypeople tend to accept what the companies say as we have no real alternative other than spending 3 years at MIT :)

Can't quite tell if you're being sarcastic. Interesting if the green drives are on the approved list. It's a very well known issue with the green drives. (Used to be able to actually change the setting.) WD basically nerfed them so they could charge more for the red ones.

As you said they do run absolutely fine, it's only when you start getting issues reading (typically later in their life) that it really causes issues with RAID.

Apple TV

Stream your favourite shows now on Apple TV (affiliate link).

speshnz

84 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 23

ID Verified

#1807397 27-Jun-2017 09:35

JimmyH:

gnfb:

Hmmmm The good or the bad news I dont have a clue what you are talking about fortunately the TLER?? does not seem to be causing any problems as the whole thing works wonderfully well as a storage bin for all my junk (media) and I can access it from any of the devices or mac or pcs that I have connected to it. Have been doing so for months!

Goodness imagine if what you said had been true LOL it would have completely screwed up any ability to sell the unit . Good job there are people like you around keeping us all honest well done!

They won't cause any problems - until they do.

Green drives are designed to be used individually and to be energy efficient. They have aggressive head parking and high TLER (time- limited error recovery). Basically, when your hard drive needs to perform a read operation and that sector is bad the hard drive will go into error recovery mode. That is what you want in a desktop drive - park the heads when not in use, and have a couple of goes at reading data if there is a read error. However, in a striped array using hardware RAID it isn't.

When a hard drive is in error recovery mode the hard drive will not respond to commands from the computer, such as another read or write operation. The RAID controller can interpret this as a failed disk and boot it off the array. For RAID environments, it's important to have a very low TLER to prevent a drive from being removed from the RAID by the RAID controller. Drives designed for NASes work this way, green drives don't.

That means you can have an unstable array that keeps rebuilding. Furthermore, you can't RMA the drives because they keep dropping out of your array. The are behaving as designed and will pass all diagnostics fine.

Head parking is a different issue. My understanding is that Green drives park the head after 8 seconds, which causes a higher number of on/off cycles in NAS or Server operations, and means that the drive will likely fail faster. Again, NAS drives are designed for this type of environment.

What you're saying is valid for high end use with hardware raid, not so much for something like an netgear NAS.

cshaun

407 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 72

ID Verified

#1807580 27-Jun-2017 12:50

https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-features/31202-should-you-use-tler-drives-in-your-raid-nas
Pretty good answer to the question (with responses from manufacturers).

Seems it 'mostly' doesn't matter for these consumer based NAS products. I certainly wouldn't worry about it if the drive is on the manufacturer's approved list.

JimmyH

2898 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 1554

#1808411 28-Jun-2017 18:13

I'm not an expert. I'm not even an IT guy. But I did some reading before dripping money on a NAS and 4x6TB drives to go in it 2 years ago (and another 2x6TB drives subsequently), since I was spending a fair chunk of change.

The advice from the NAS makers, the advisory guides, and gurus on the forums was pretty consistent. Namely, that green drives in a hardware RAID is asking for trouble. So I paid the circa $20 per drive (at the time) extra to get NAS-rated drives and hopefully reduce the risk of issues. All I can say, based on a sample of 1 setup, is that my setup has been running with nary a problem for 4 years now.

@gnnb - I think you were being sarcastic, when I was trying to help you. I'm not sure what I did yo annoy you so much. Plus, I'm also not sure that the Manakau Institute of Technology (MIT) even teaches system engineering?

But if you want to risk your data on drives that aren't rated for your use case, then I wish you luck. Personally, I would replace them PDQ if the data stored was difficult to replace, and would make doubly sure I had good backups until I did.

KrazyKid

1247 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 616

#1808426 28-Jun-2017 18:46

I think the issue is that he was trying to sell the NAS and your reply came across as don't buy as the drives are an issue.

Do the right thing and buying manufacturer recommended drives and then your comments.

I have no opinion who is correct on the issue of what drives to go into that NAS btw.

I was hoping for a Synology or Qnap NAS so overspent my budget to buy the 251 on offer so your comment didn't effect my choice but I can see where he was coming from.

1 | 2