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Mr. Crow posted:Is the OP up to date? What is the recommended buy-a-box these days? Looking at potentially buying or building something in the next several months, trying to gauge if it's worth it to just buy something as I'm lazy. Depends on how lazy you want to be. The Lenovo TS- series is a great deal if you're ok with picking and managing your own OS (FreeNAS or whatever else you want), with good hardware (especially the Xeon versions) for the price and a case that you can stuff a bunch of drives in. The N40L has been replaced by the N54L but otherwise remains the same sort of device: moderately powerful and quite compact. If you want to buy an entirely pre-made box, Synology and QNAP are still the only real games in town, and it becomes a question of how much are you willing to spend vs how much space do you need--they get stupid expensive very quickly.
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Dec 13, 2016 20:57
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Stupid expensive becomes $1000+ if you want enough processor muscle to do plex software transcoding with those qnaps with a pentium/i3/i5 and 4 3.5 inch bays + 2 2.5 inch bays).
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Dec 13, 2016 21:00
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Really I want an energy efficient server with easy access and huge amounts of storage. Saw on a random blog post some guys synaptic Nas and he also had like a teamspeak server and some other docker apps running on it, in addition to the usual backup/storage stuff you usually associate with a NAS. Thought it was cool since I don't keep up with hardware and started looking at NASs, maybe I'm battling up the wrong tree. It'll primarily be a Plex server but I'd like to install casual games (e.g. so nothing crazy resource intensive) to play on my tv as well, and probably host a few random small appliances. Recommendations? I like the commercial boxes you can get that act like a server rack and you can easily swap hard drives around, I'm sure I can just buy a case that supports the same features though for building my own. Also this fireproof nas (the modern version) seems appealing as well http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414852,00.asp
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Dec 14, 2016 18:02
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Mr. Crow posted:Really I want an energy efficient server with easy access and huge amounts of storage. First we need to tack down the definitions of things here. Like what "huge amounts of storage" means to you: would a 2x8TB device be enough? Or are we talking 4+ disks? Because if the later, get ready to dig real deep in your pockets if you want something like a Synology. Are you cool with spending $1k on a diskless NAS? If you want pre-built and able to use Plex, you're talking the more expensive models, like a DS1010+. The cheap 2-disk ones will not suffice. By install games, do you mean host servers, or actually play games on the NAS as a stand-alone computer? Because none of the pre-builts are going to let you do the second option. To do something like that you'd need to get a good bit more creative, like a custom-built ESXi box with the NAS as a VM and a Windows VM for the games. Energy efficient is nice, I get it, but let me be frank and tell you it's almost irrelevant compared to the costs of just about anything else you're going to buy for it. Just to give you an example, a DS1010+ costs about $1000. 5x4TB WD Reds (even on sale) is another $675. Running a 100w NAS 24/7 at 10c/kwh for a year costs $87.60. Cutting it down to 50w would thus save you about $42/yr--compared to an initial cost of around $1700. Custom boxes are not terribly hard to put together, and if you're looking at 4+ drive models are vastly cheaper and more powerful than their pre-built competitors. You can get cases/backplanes that will allow similar hot-swap capability. The real catch for roll-your-own is having to do the setup and OS install. If you're not a complete computer novice you can probably accomplish it, but it may take you some time, as it's not always as easy as "plug it into the wall and press the power button." And that "fireproof" NAS is for buisness with expense accounts and really lovely internet connections, as I otherwise cannot see why you'd be willing to pay that much for a 2-bay system of any sort vice just backing up to the cloud regularly instead.
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Dec 14, 2016 19:10
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DrDork posted:First we need to tack down the definitions of things here. Like what "huge amounts of storage" means to you: would a 2x8TB device be enough? Or are we talking 4+ disks? Because if the later, get ready to dig real deep in your pockets if you want something like a Synology. Are you cool with spending $1k on a diskless NAS? I'd prefer more, smaller disks, so yea probably 4+. quote:If you want pre-built and able to use Plex, you're talking the more expensive models, like a DS1010+. The cheap 2-disk ones will not suffice. The games thing isn't really a requirement, I have a steam link that does a good job, it would just be nice to be able to run them natively and take out the extra layer. At most I'll need to be running 2 1080p videos at once, which is probably unlikely. What kind of specs would I need for that? quote:Energy efficient is nice, I get it, but let me be frank and tell you it's almost irrelevant compared to the costs of just about anything else you're going to buy for it. Just to give you an example, a DS1010+ costs about $1000. 5x4TB WD Reds (even on sale) is another $675. Running a 100w NAS 24/7 at 10c/kwh for a year costs $87.60. Cutting it down to 50w would thus save you about $42/yr--compared to an initial cost of around $1700. Fair point. Maybe for babies first NAS I don't really need to go crazy on hard drives and backups/space. This is probably getting into other thread territory, but what's the cheapest box i could get that can stream 1080p to one device? quote:Custom boxes are not terribly hard to put together, and if you're looking at 4+ drive models are vastly cheaper and more powerful than their pre-built competitors. You can get cases/backplanes that will allow similar hot-swap capability. The real catch for roll-your-own is having to do the setup and OS install. If you're not a complete computer novice you can probably accomplish it, but it may take you some time, as it's not always as easy as "plug it into the wall and press the power button." I know my way around computers, mostly I'm just lazy. Is there a cheap cloud service goons recommend for backups? I deal with this poo poo at work but my home setup is 2000s era and at work it's all enterprise level.
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Dec 14, 2016 21:16
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Mr. Crow posted:Fair point. Maybe for babies first NAS I don't really need to go crazy on hard drives and backups/space. This is probably getting into other thread territory, but what's the cheapest box i could get that can stream 1080p to one device? If you're willing to put some effort into it, you can easily grab a Lenovo TS140 of some variety (they come with i3's or Xeons) for <$300 that will absolutely crush the power of a Synology. You can even use EXPenology for a Synology-like OS if you care to, or something like FreeNAS/NAS4Free or a variety of other options if you want something more flexible (and complicated). Those options will all handily do whatever you damned well want. Going with a vt-d capable CPU would get you the ability to run ESXi and virtualize both a NAS and Windows platform. Gaming would still require a video card of some sort unless it was a real simple 2d game, but it does work. This would take notable effort, though, and frankly unless you're doing it because you enjoy doing it, I'd stick with the Steam Link. Mr. Crow posted:Is there a cheap cloud service goons recommend for backups? I deal with this poo poo at work but my home setup is 2000s era and at work it's all enterprise level. Crashplan is a perennial favorite for its low cost and unlimited storage. Backing up from a PC is easy, and with some effort you can shove it onto a NAS and back that bitch up, as well.
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Dec 14, 2016 21:39
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DrDork posted:First we need to tack down the definitions of things here. Like what "huge amounts of storage" means to you: would a 2x8TB device be enough? Or are we talking 4+ disks? Because if the later, get ready to dig real deep in your pockets if you want something like a Synology. Are you cool with spending $1k on a diskless NAS? I feel like most of this along with the previous "updated" hardware recommendations should go in the OP.
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Dec 14, 2016 21:42
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Thwomp posted:I feel like most of this along with the previous "updated" hardware recommendations should go in the OP. I would agree, nice summary there!
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Dec 14, 2016 22:04
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The PowerEdge T20 is on sale again. $250 shipped. Xeon E3-1225 v3, 4GB DDR3, 1TB HDD https://slickdeals.net/f/9457947-dell-poweredge-t20-server-xeon-e3-1225-v3-4gb-ddr3-1tb-hdd-249-free-shipping?v=1
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Dec 15, 2016 16:41
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That's a great deal, as the CPU alone often goes for ~$250. Considering you can get 10+% cash back from one of the various sites, as well, that's a steal for anyone looking to set up a new NAS.
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Dec 15, 2016 17:06
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I ordered that one last month. Haven't gotten it setup yet due to being slow but I did find out that 8TB WD Reds fit into the hard-drive sleds so that's good. You will have to disconnect the dvd-burner if you want to shove in four hard-drives.
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Dec 15, 2016 17:25
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havenwaters posted:You will have to disconnect the dvd-burner if you want to shove in four hard-drives. If you're making a NAS you might as well rip it out entirely: all the modern NAS OS's load off USB sticks, rendering a disk drive redundant.
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Dec 15, 2016 17:29
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DrDork posted:If you're making a NAS you might as well rip it out entirely: all the modern NAS OS's load off USB sticks, rendering a disk drive redundant. Yeah. That would leave a hole on the top of the box though where the dvd-burner used to be. It's part of the top hard-drive cage that you have to slide out of the case to put hard-drives into. I guess there's a different variant of that cage/part you can screw onto the cage to replace the dvd-burner with two 2.5 inch hdd slots. 'Course at that point you then need to buy the SATA Power splitter from Dell and a 2 sata port pci card because the case doesn't have enough sata power plugs by default and the sata power plug for the dvd-burner is non standard. MagusDraco fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 17:32
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havenwaters posted:and the sata power plug for the dvd-burner is non standard. Hah hah, what? Oh Dell, you wascly wabbit, you! Still, 4-way SATA power splitters are like $5, so you could always just utilize one of the standard ones that they do have. Nice that they advertise up to 6 drives, though! Also...what the gently caress? Is that really a legacy PCI slot on there?
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Dec 15, 2016 17:52
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I was looking at that, is there a recommended hot swap bay I can shove into the front bays that fit? Apparently the drives on the bottom can run hot as well, not much air flow. Seems like a good deal still though.
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Dec 15, 2016 18:11
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Mr. Crow posted:I was looking at that, is there a recommended hot swap bay I can shove into the front bays that fit? The drives at the bottom can run hot until you take some electric tape and block the middle front vents on the case bezel or something. Then they cool fine since the air is reflected back at the drives instead of just escaping out of the front of the case? I dunno If it becomes an actual problem I'll look into that. edit: Not sure what to do about a hot swap bay or if there even is one. I guess there's hotswap drive trays but you'll still have to open up the case to get to the drives. DrDork posted:Also...what the gently caress? Is that really a legacy PCI slot on there? Sure is. MagusDraco fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 18:15
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havenwaters posted:The drives at the bottom can run hot until you take some electric tape and block the middle front vents on the case bezel or something. Then they cool fine since the air is reflected back at the drives instead of just escaping out of the front of the case? I dunno If it becomes an actual problem I'll look into that. Cool idea. (  )quote:edit: Not sure what to do about a hot swap bay or if there even is one. I guess there's hotswap drive trays but you'll still have to open up the case to get to the drives. Sorry that was a request, I want to install some bays aftermarket, looking for suggestions and sanity checking that is possible.
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Dec 15, 2016 18:41
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You could always just transplant the entire thing into a new case. That being said the power button cable, system fan header, and atx mobo power connectors are all Dell proprietary stuff so have fun with that. edit: It won't boot without someone hitting f1 if there's no case fan connected to the system fan header. If you want to see one person's crazy bs to get it to work in a 3U case. https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=30222101&postcount=171 MagusDraco fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 19:02
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Moey posted:The PowerEdge T20 is on sale again. $250 shipped. Xeon E3-1225 v3, 4GB DDR3, 1TB HDD Was the deal over quick? It's showing $489 for me.
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Dec 16, 2016 03:13
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ChiralCondensate posted:Was the deal over quick? It's showing $489 for me. You have add the coupon code 249T20 once you have it in the cart. Coupon code expires on December 23rd
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Dec 16, 2016 03:18
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havenwaters posted:You have add the coupon code 249T20 once you have it in the cart. Coupon code expires on December 23rd Ah, thanks! I didn't think to scroll down on the slickdeals page.
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Dec 16, 2016 03:25
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Moving my array out of my box and into the new QNAP, one of the drives is starting to throw a SMART abnormality. Any lines on a cheapish 6tb drive with 3yr warranty? Also, considering getting my dad a T20 for Xmas. Am I looking at spending as much on 2012r2 as I am for the hardware, or can I get a copy cheaper somewhere?
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Dec 18, 2016 03:28
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Toshimo posted:Moving my array out of my box and into the new QNAP, one of the drives is starting to throw a SMART abnormality. Any lines on a cheapish 6tb drive with 3yr warranty? Ebay has really cheap license copies, probably OEM but whatever.
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Dec 18, 2016 22:25
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How bad of performance should I expect from Seagate Archive drives in various scenarios? I’ve seen some benchmarks for the usual 4 k random writes and whatnot, but I’m wondering about performance in real‐world applications. If I try to write a bunch of files in the hundred megabyte–low gigabyte range, for terabytes at a time, will it slow to a glacial pace once it fills the flash cache? I know there are some people here who have been using them for a while, or someone might have seen the benchmarks I’m looking for. e: Found a 128 k sequential benchmark. It sounds like it should also be all right for cloning another drive, which is a use case I’m interested in. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 12:26 on Dec 20, 2016 |
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Dec 20, 2016 12:07
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Platystemon posted:How bad of performance should I expect from Seagate Archive drives in various scenarios? The Archive drives are made for write-once-read-many type scenarios. The cache has little to do with its performance downsides--it's quite happy to chug along with extremely long sequential writes all day. The biggest performance hit from the SMR tech it uses is when you've written to an area once and now need to re-write over it: at that point performance tanks since SMR requires quite a bit more effort to rearrange all the various bits of data than traditional technology does. There are also some other use cases that cause degrade performance (like semi-random writes followed quickly by a long sequential read), but they're probably less noticeable. Using an Archive drive as a clone target and then sitting it on a shelf until you need to use it to re-image a machine or something seems like pretty close to ideal use for an Archive drive.
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Dec 20, 2016 14:11
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Incremental back‐up is something I would consider “archiving”, but it sounds like the drive would not handle that well if done to a boot volume. I think I’ll promote my old PMR clone drives to incremental back‐up duty and use the archive drive for cloning. I just didn’t want to buy the thing and find there’s some other catch, that the cloning process took an entire week perhaps, because I will be re‐writing the whole thing regularly. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Dec 20, 2016 |
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Dec 20, 2016 14:34
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If you're going to be re-writing over it regularly, I'd go with something else. You can get a WD 8TB external for almost the same price ($230) and not have to worry about SMR shenanigans. You can get a Seagate 8TB external for $200, but that drops your warranty down to 1 year.
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Dec 20, 2016 14:45
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Why is that cheaper than a bare drive? Capitalism works in mysterious ways?
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Dec 20, 2016 14:52
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Because stepping into the world of external drives is to step through the looking glass into bizarro world.
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Dec 20, 2016 15:02
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External drives are not intended for the level of use an internal drive sees, in general.
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Dec 20, 2016 15:26
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Platystemon posted:How bad of performance should I expect from Seagate Archive drives in various scenarios? I have a couple of the 8tb archive drives that I use for backups using rsync with a USB3 dock. If you are writing "new" data, the drive will chug along at 80MB/s. If you start rewriting/shifting files (basically what rsync does), it can be as slow as 3MB/s write speed for large files. I would really recommend a different drive unless you are doing long term offline backups where you only update the backup once a quarter/once a year, and just plan to let it run for days if there are a lot of changes.
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Dec 20, 2016 18:26
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At that point wouldn't it be faster to just format and push a fresh copy over?
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Dec 20, 2016 18:37
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DrDork posted:At that point wouldn't it be faster to just format and push a fresh copy over? It takes 24-48 hours to fill it up entirely, so it depends on if you can predict how much data has changed and how slow the drive will be to write all of it on average. I would guess the overall average speed for modified data is somewhere in the 10-20MB/s area. Also, I did a format on one of them and rewrote from scratch and it still seemed to have random slowdowns that I don't remember it having when the drive was brand new - so I think even a format might not make it perfect again. But that's just my anecdotal experience based on watching rsync progress, not any actual data.
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Dec 20, 2016 18:44
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If I'm building a server that utilizes a SAS (3Gb) backplane, will that impact the maximum drive size I can use? The backplane I have should work with an M1015, but I've been reading conflicting things about drive capacity and SAS1 vs SAS2. Yes, I know rack servers aren't ideal for home/hobby NAS, but it was cheap and IDGAF 
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Dec 22, 2016 06:21
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Just got a Synology, it's great so far! Quick security question: how do you rotate your passwords on your encrypted folders? I've created an encrypted shared folder, but can't seem to figure out how to change the password, other than creating a new folder with a different password and moving everything there.
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Dec 22, 2016 07:26
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I've got an old (but running fine) Synology DS412j. I've got 2 x 3 TB drives in there at the moment (Synology's mirroring RAID). However, I'm now out of space -- mainly due to Time Machine backups from various devices on there. What's considered the best way of expanding this? For example: 1. Upgrade to a 4-drive NAS, and add two more 3 gig disks in there? 2. Replace the disks with larger capacity ones, e.g. 2 x 6 TB drives? 3. Something else?!
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Dec 22, 2016 10:53
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Mewcenary posted:I've got an old (but running fine) Synology DS412j. If the DS412j is a 4 bay NAS (I can't actually find specs on that model, so not sure if you mean 212j or 412+ or 411j or 413j heh), you should be able to add a new 3tb drive and convert to Raid 5 (if you are in Raid 1) or just leave it as SHR if you are using SHR. If it's a two bay NAS and it has an eSATA port on the back, you can do the same thing using an external ESATA dock. If it's a 2 bay unit with no eSATA port, then you should be able to replace the drives one at a time without losing data, but at that point you might want to consider buying a 4, 5, or 8 bay unit and setting up a new NAS depending on your future needs/money situation.
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Dec 22, 2016 15:47
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salted hash browns posted:Just got a Synology, it's great so far! I've never used encrypted folders with Synology but this might not be possible - I know with Truecrypt, the actual structure of the encrypted volume is built using the password and you are never able to change the password without creating an entirely new volume. From the Synology forum posts it seems like they might have a similar setup.
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Dec 22, 2016 16:00
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Mewcenary posted:I've got an old (but running fine) Synology DS412j. I'm assuming your 412j is a mistake and that you actually have some 2-bay variant. If you actually have a 4-bay, just throw in another 2x3TB and call it a day. The real questions are (1) How much space do you need/want, and (2) How much are you willing to pay for it? If you have a big budget, by all means, grab a 4-drive NAS and throw whatever sized disks you need in there. A 416 will run you around $360 and then whatever else for drives. If you wanted to just double your space, another 2x3TB WD Reds would be $220ish, for a total cost of about $600. Most of the 4-bay units are also more powerful than the 2-bay units, so you may see higher performance out of this option. Replacing your current drives with 6TB would also double your space, and cost you about $460, potentially minus $$ for selling your current drives (you can buy a new 3TB WD Red for $110 and still sell them used on eBay for $80 or so). So you save some money going this route, but obviously have minimal further expansion options. DrDork fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Dec 22, 2016 |
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Dec 22, 2016 16:39
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Platystemon posted:How bad of performance should I expect from Seagate Archive drives in various scenarios? Its REALLY loving slow at re-writing areas that have been deleted. Such as incremental backups. Do I care? Nope. I run my backups once a week and don't care if it takes 30 mins or overnight. If you need to write anymore than rarely, do not buy these. I've filled my drive and deleted a bunch of stuff. My incremental backup which runs around 200GB takes 6-8 hours. When the drive was new, more like an hour.
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Dec 22, 2016 17:17
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