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Avenging Dentist posted:At the risk of asking a silly question, does the following look sane? My use cases are to serve media to our Kodi box (no need for transcoding), backing up 2 PCs, and possibly serving media to VLC on mobile devices. I don't have anything I'd consider truly irreplaceable aside from like my password database, but obviously minimizing the amount of stuff I lose would be nice. The plan is to use RAID 6 and whatever I need to get file-level healing (btrfs I think?). I just want something reasonably plug-and-play, since I already have more than enough technology to janitor. I would use SHR w/ 1 disk redundancy/durability, unless you're dead set on having a 12TB array out of your 24TB of disks. FS I leave to the user, I use ext4 as it was what was offered and it's rock solid. Pretty much anything capable of booting Linux is capable of saturating a 1gbps uplink, even for medium sized files (100kb-1mb let's say). You are more likely to be limited by your wifi or router. For getting your stuff offsite Synology offers their Cloud Sync program which you can hookup to something like Backblaze B2. Set it be unidirectional sync ("upload only"), then set your bucket to retain data for X-days. Et voila, you now have X-days of backups in the cloud. You can even get into more granular permissions where 10GB of essentials has a 1 year retention policy in B2 and your 3TB of anime stores 0 versions. Be smart in your folder layouts and it's easy to do, basically don't mix "essentials" and "anime" in the same folder tree/share. Locking it down? Don't expose it to the internet. Log in to your router and disable UPnP right now. Regardless of buying a synology. Just literally don't do any "cloud access bullshit" and you will be fine. This includes remote Kodi, sorry.
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Jan 15, 2019 06:45
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astral posted:Rather than 4x6TB red pros, what about shucking 4x 10TB easystores @ 180ish each from Best Buy? How annoying is it to shuck drives? While 10TB is a lot more, realistically I doubt I'd fill up even a 12TB array before the hardware dies anyway, so I figured I'd just go with a smaller setup for now. (I had considered doing a 6-bay NAS since spending 50% of my storage on parity is kind of galling, but that would probably be overkill for me too.) H110Hawk posted:I would use SHR w/ 1 disk redundancy/durability, unless you're dead set on having a 12TB array out of your 24TB of disks. FS I leave to the user, I use ext4 as it was what was offered and it's rock solid. I figured RAID6 would be the setup where I can rely a bit more on being able to just throw a new drive in if one dies, rather than pulling everything back down from the cloud. If that's overkill for 4 drives, I don't mind switching to something that uses less space for parity. (I'm really not sure what the best practice is here). H110Hawk posted:For getting your stuff offsite Synology offers their Cloud Sync program which you can hookup to something like Backblaze B2. Cool, that makes things a lot easier for me. H110Hawk posted:Log in to your router and disable UPnP right now. Regardless of buying a synology. Just literally don't do any "cloud access bullshit" and you will be fine. This includes remote Kodi, sorry. I've never done any remote Kodi stuff, unless you count strictly on the LAN (my Kodi runs its little web server for JSON-RPC calls over our wifi). None of that leaves the LAN though, unless it turns out I'm even worse at configuring my network than I think. I could disable this if it really mattered though, since I use the IR remote 95% of the time. I do sadly have UPnP on though, since I've never been able to find an alternative that allows multiple PCs to get the port forwards set up for the same online games. (I wonder if I could set up UPnP to work only for specific machines on the network. I'm using DD-WRT now, but I'm planning on moving to Ubiquiti soon.)
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Jan 15, 2019 06:59
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Avenging Dentist posted:How annoying is it to shuck drives? While 10TB is a lot more, realistically I doubt I'd fill up even a 12TB array before the hardware dies anyway, so I figured I'd just go with a smaller setup for now. (I had considered doing a 6-bay NAS since spending 50% of my storage on parity is kind of galling, but that would probably be overkill for me too.) Super easy even to do it without breaking the clips, especially if you have a plastic gift card or some such you can cut up. You will need a Torx screwdriver/bit though which is pretty cheap if you don't have one already. iirc it's Torx T1 for this but worth a double-check to make sure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6VCQ64DkfM The drive inside is most likely a white-label helium-filled 10TB.  edit: Warranty talk, you ideally would want to hold onto the shells and bits in case you would need/want to send them in during their 2yr warranty. However, if you are like a friend of mine who would never said in a hard drive for warranty under any circumstances, feel free to break the clips while opening and toss all the bits out. astral fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Jan 15, 2019 |
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Jan 15, 2019 07:03
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I just got my shipment of four from the last sale today.
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Jan 15, 2019 07:56
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Another Easystore shucking tip: if the drive won’t initialize and you need to tape over pin 3, realize you can actually tape over pins 1-3 without messing anything up, as all three pins are involved in the 3.3v circuit you need to disrupt. Cutting and using a slice of tape ~3x wider than one needed for a single pin makes it all the easier. bobfather fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Jan 15, 2019 |
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Jan 15, 2019 13:22
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EasyStore are a model that are only available in the US, and I've yet to see/figure out which model is the equivalent for EMEA when it comes to shucking possibilities that avoid the cheapest drives and worst drives.
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Jan 15, 2019 16:39
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bobfather posted:Another Eastore shucking tip: if the drive won’t initialize and you need to tape over pin 3, realize you can actually tape over pins 1-3 without messing anything up, as all three pins are involved in the 3.3v circuit you need to disrupt. And if they're using a Synology they don't have to worry about the pins.
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Jan 15, 2019 18:16
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necrobobsledder posted:It's going to be the 10th birthday of my 1 TB WD Black I got for just a tad over $110. That's kind of impressive how poorly drives advanced in the past 10 years price-capacity wise. The price/gb has dropped 65% in those 10 years but there's still a floor on how much it costs to make a drive. A 1TB drive isn't 1/2 the cost to make as a 2TB drive, it's the same internal parts just one extra platter. On the other side the technology involved to hit 8/10/12tb drives has gotten more expensive to develop with helium fills and shingled recording media.
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Jan 15, 2019 20:41
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I’ve RMAed two of the EasyStores and one experience was fine and the other a nightmare where they lost the replacement drive. Do keep an extra outer shell handy and the inner shell is what they’ll check. I put a note that I tried to put the drive in a separate enclosure for troubleshooting. It’s kind of annoying holding onto 8+ of those shells but keeping an extra set of foam around for shipping is not really necessary.FCKGW posted:The price/gb has dropped 65% in those 10 years but there's still a floor on how much it costs to make a drive. A 1TB drive isn't 1/2 the cost to make as a 2TB drive, it's the same internal parts just one extra platter.
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Jan 15, 2019 21:59
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Are Toshiba NAS drives good?
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Jan 16, 2019 17:08
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I've got four of their non-NAS 5TB drives with *checks* about 13000 hours on each and not a single error reported among them, so there's that.
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Jan 16, 2019 17:14
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I also have 4 Toshiba non-NAS 3TBs and 2 6TBs with 4.5 and 2.1 years on them respectively with no issues. When I bought the 6TB drives, one of the 2 died about half way through my burn-in tests, but that could be due to the some poor packing for shipping more than anything (Walmart sale with the retail box just sliding around inside a much bigger shipping box and zero packing material). Exchanged in-store for the dude running today. I do know that their warranty program was mess a couple years back, so if that's something you care about it might be good to check on it. At one point they would issue you Toshiba store credit to buy a new drive but no drives were in stock so you were SOL, then later a visa gift card for what you paid... No idea what it looks like now.
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Jan 16, 2019 17:30
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Drives have always been a bit pot-luck; I have a small handful of cheap Samsung HD204UI drives that the power-on hours in S.M.A.R.T data say have all been running for 65697 hours with 15 power cycle counts (huh, only 15 reboots in 7 1/2 years - that's surprising even to me). EDIT: Ha, I just noticed the S.M.A.R.T self-test log: code:BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 18:26
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IOwnCalculus posted:I've got four of their non-NAS 5TB drives with *checks* about 13000 hours on each and not a single error reported among them, so there's that. Yeah I have a mix of these and 5TB WD Reds. When a drive died and it turned out to be a Red I went shopping. The Toshiba's were super cheap and I didn't hesitate in favor of a "real" NAS drive. Based on that sure I'd certainly trust their NAS line, but yeah it's always a crapshoot. I did think about shucking on of those 10TB easystores, but by the time I'll want to grow the pool I'm sure there'll be cheap 12+ TB drives so it'd be a waste.
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Jan 16, 2019 20:47
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The Milkman posted:I did think about shucking on of those 10TB easystores, but by the time I'll want to grow the pool I'm sure there'll be cheap 12+ TB drives so it'd be a waste. If you're not immediately trying to fill all available new space in a pool so that you're driven to replace it with a new, larger pool, which you then immediately try to fill in a never ending cycle 
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Jan 16, 2019 20:51
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D. Ebdrup posted:Drives have always been a bit pot-luck; I have a small handful of cheap Samsung HD204UI drives that the power-on hours in S.M.A.R.T data say have all been running for 65697 hours with 15 power cycle counts (huh, only 15 reboots in 7 1/2 years - that's surprising even to me). Clearly much better than my HD154UI 1.5TB drives. Granted, I'm not complaining because I got warranty life and a good bit past it out of them, but they all had mechanical failures of the "read head grinding the drive platter" variety shortly after the first one died.
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Jan 16, 2019 21:17
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There were a rash of issues with several 1.5TB drives, to the point where I'd be cautious using any of them, honestly.
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Jan 16, 2019 21:22
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DrDork posted:There were a rash of issues with several 1.5TB drives, to the point where I'd be cautious using any of them, honestly. Under 4TB avoid right now.
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Jan 17, 2019 03:20
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Realistically what you guys are all getting at is, "if it doesn't die a premature death (i.e. within a few months if not the burn-in period) then an HDD will last several years until its natural death from normal use."
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Jan 17, 2019 07:29
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Atomizer posted:Realistically what you guys are all getting at is, "if it doesn't die a premature death (i.e. within a few months if not the burn-in period) then an HDD will last several years until its natural death from normal use." I'd agree to that, with the stipulation that "several years" is "some duration of time among the batch the drives were all from" But if one of a group starts going, this is time to upgrade them all and relegate the survivors to non-critical tasks if not entirely dismiss.
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Jan 17, 2019 07:33
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Sniep posted:I'd agree to that, with the stipulation that "several years" is "some duration of time among the batch the drives were all from" Agreed. When I say "several years" though it's just an estimate based on how long I suspect guys like us use their drives, because in 24/7 service with heavy use I'd expect <5 years of life, while a backup drive that spends most of the time offline could last (meaning, "still be usable if not desirable") a decade plus; I'm guessing a drive like the latter would be usable until something like the seals or lubricant or whatever dries up. I have a 3 TB WD Green with IIRC ~65k hours of "on" time (which equates to almost 7.5 years  ) but it's still healthy because it was self-powered-down for nearly all that time.I bought 3x 1 TB WD Greens IIRC >10 years ago (for like $240 each  ), and they're all still functional; 2 are boxed up, and one is in my spare desktop with some games on it, which is a perfect non-critical task for it.I also have some very old (e.g. 14+ years) SATA and PATA drives that still work like new, with no reported errors. They're not practical anymore, but they're otherwise usable. Basically what we're getting back to is that, premature deaths aside, HDDs will last until you've worn them out but this totally depends on how hard you use them.
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Jan 17, 2019 07:48
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Atomizer posted:Realistically what you guys are all getting at is, "if it doesn't die a premature death (i.e. within a few months if not the burn-in period) then an HDD will last several years until its natural death from normal use." 
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Jan 17, 2019 14:03
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I'm on the verge of taking the plunge on a home NAS for the purpose of  storage and streaming around the house, photo/document storage/viewing, and system image backup. I might also get into some home security stuff down the line.I can't justify the price of the DS918+ so I think I'm going to go with the DS418PLAY which I think meets all my needs. I think I'll start with 3x 6TB drives in RAID1 and add another down the line. The information around Plex decoding seems to be conflicting but I think it can handle everything I want it to (only need it to do 720p x265 decoding or 1080p x264 decoding). In case it doesn't though, is the critical part for decoding the CPU? If so, is upgrading the CPU on the NAS exactly the same as upgrading the CPU on any board or is there an extra layer of complexity involved?
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Jan 18, 2019 00:09
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Looten Plunder posted:I'm on the verge of taking the plunge on a home NAS for the purpose of I don't believe any Synology products have user-replaceable CPUs, and oftentimes the difference between tiers of product mean a difference in CPU architecture....you're kinda stuck with what you start out with.
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Jan 18, 2019 00:23
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If you want to tinker then build your own box and run Unraid on it. You pay a price premium for the set-and-forget nature of a Synology box which doesn't seem like it would benefit you.
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Jan 18, 2019 00:26
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That's cool thanks. I'll do some more research, but I think it will be fine. I can always have my PC (which is always on anyway) do the encoding if need be. I'm a complete noob to all this NAS stuff and networking has always been my weak point when it comes to PC Hardware/Building so I think I'd rather get an out of the box solution that is built to work than come up with my own cobbled together solution.
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Jan 18, 2019 00:34
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Building an Unraid server is no harder than building a typical desktop PC, and the software is super easy.
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Jan 18, 2019 00:38
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Enos Cabell posted:Building an Unraid server is no harder than building a typical desktop PC, and the software is super easy. This is true. If you have the parts, I would recommend Unraid. If you don't, I would recommend Synology. Synology has nice apps for mobile stuff.
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Jan 18, 2019 01:02
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Unraid was easy to setup, incredibly stable, and I love that I'll be able to continually add new drives down and not have to worry about transferring data or juggling drives.
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Jan 18, 2019 01:11
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Sheep posted:It's called a bathtub curve. I know exactly what it is, my point was that for all the posting about different brands of HDDs the end result is going to be that. Looten Plunder posted:I can't justify the price of the DS918+ so I think I'm going to go with the DS418PLAY which I think meets all my needs. I think I'll start with 3x 6TB drives in RAID1 and add another down the line. The information around Plex decoding seems to be conflicting but I think it can handle everything I want it to (only need it to do 720p x265 decoding or 1080p x264 decoding). Make sure your specific NAS model is capable of hardware transcoding, first of all; some similar models have the same CPU but different firmware I guess and not all can transcode. Next, you can check the CPU (e.g. N3700) to see what level of QuickSync it has, which will let you know what it can, separately, decode and encode. This is mostly going to be critical in terms of HEVC, which newer CPUs support but not necessarily beyond a few generations ago (AVC is widely supported now.) Note that both decoding (i.e., your source) and encoding performance are important, and they're not linked (e.g. IIRC decoding support for a given codec at a given feature level generally comes in an earlier generation than encoding support for the same thing.) So for transcoding, the critical part is usually the CPU.* In software transcoding, which is what Plex originally used, the CPU simply brute-forces the process. Hardware transcoding still involves the CPU (in this scenario,) but it's done in a specialized core/ASIC, and in Intel's case, this is their Quick Sync engine. (AMD's is VCE, and nVidia has NVENC.) Note that Quick Sync is literally designed for speed over quality and the results may be visibly more artifacted than a more intensive software transcode. *So Plex has added hardware transcoding to more and more devices; first it was the WD My Cloud PR2100/4100 using Quick Sync, and around the same time the nVidia Shield with NVENC, and now you can enable it on any desktop PMS installation and it can also use NVENC and I believe VCE, so in these specific cases the "critical part" could actually be the GPU.
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Jan 18, 2019 09:55
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The issue with hardware decoders is that they tend to take algorithmic shortcuts that are optimized for speed over quality and you can get some noticeable quality loss on certain videos. The primary advantages of technologies like QuickSync and Nvenc are to let lower power systems decode videos in real-time primarily for purposes like video conferencing where fidelity is not important compared to saving power. You don’t need to be a cinephile to see some of the artifacts in my experience, but if you’re just viewing some random crap with your buddies in college it’s totally fine.
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Jan 18, 2019 15:30
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QSC and NVENC are also useful if you're streaming to small form-factor devices like a smartphones, because even people who know what artifacts to look for simply don't notice them on such a small screen.
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Jan 18, 2019 18:45
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necrobobsledder posted:The issue with hardware decoders is that they tend to take algorithmic shortcuts that are optimized for speed over quality and you can get some noticeable quality loss on certain videos. The primary advantages of technologies like QuickSync and Nvenc are to let lower power systems decode videos in real-time primarily for purposes like video conferencing where fidelity is not important compared to saving power. You don’t need to be a cinephile to see some of the artifacts in my experience, but if you’re just viewing some random crap with your buddies in college it’s totally fine. Well yeah, I literally already wrote the "speed over quality" part. For what it's worth, another proposed use for Quick Sync was in live streaming gameplay, where output quality isn't really that important, although the well-known streamers do tend to use 2 separate PCs for this purpose, one for the actual gaming and a second for the encoding, which I think is overkill.
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Jan 18, 2019 19:34
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What is a decent multi-drive (5+) enclosure that one could connect to an already existing computer? Under $200 or so if possible. Is USB the only connectivity option or are there more speedy and enterprisey options, while keeping cost down?
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Jan 18, 2019 23:06
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Volguus posted:What is a decent multi-drive (5+) enclosure that one could connect to an already existing computer? Under $200 or so if possible. Is USB the only connectivity option or are there more speedy and enterprisey options, while keeping cost down? e-sata is likely the only step up you're going to get over USB-3. I imagine most of your options are going to be more like $300-350 ish than <$200 for 5+ bays. There is likely a smattering of stuff that likely works enough. What's your use case?
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Jan 18, 2019 23:20
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H110Hawk posted:e-sata is likely the only step up you're going to get over USB-3. I imagine most of your options are going to be more like $300-350 ish than <$200 for 5+ bays. There is likely a smattering of stuff that likely works enough. What's your use case? Home use. Files and ... files. I have a NAS that's really really slow and I already have a workstation in the basement (HP something) that's holding VMs and various crap. So, i thought I wouldn't want to buy a NAS (which is expensive) but to attach something to the already existing workstation (which has a crappy case that i don't think I can fit in more than 1 HDD). RAID can be done in software or buy some ebay LSI card for cheap.
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Jan 18, 2019 23:25
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It's extreme overkill for your situation, but NetApp DS4243 disk shelves (and related ones like the Xyratex HB-1235) can be found very cheaply and connect over external SAS. The NetApp ones use a wonky QSFP cable, but it's cheaper to get a Xyratex / Compellent 6Gbps module and a regular external SAS cable instead. I'm currently midway through expanding my server this way. It's actually cheaper than buying a SAS expander and associated cables to convert my Norco case into a DAS.
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Jan 18, 2019 23:38
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Volguus posted:Home use. Files and ... files. I have a NAS that's really really slow and I already have a workstation in the basement (HP something) that's holding VMs and various crap. So, i thought I wouldn't want to buy a NAS (which is expensive) but to attach something to the already existing workstation (which has a crappy case that i don't think I can fit in more than 1 HDD). RAID can be done in software or buy some ebay LSI card for cheap. If it's down in the basement and space isn't a factor it might be cheaper just to get a bigger server case and swap your stuff into it.
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Jan 18, 2019 23:55
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IOwnCalculus posted:It's extreme overkill for your situation, but NetApp DS4243 disk shelves (and related ones like the Xyratex HB-1235) can be found very cheaply and connect over external SAS. Hmm, for a decent price that would be overkill now, but perfect for future expansion. How does it look to the computer when attached to it via a SAS cable? A bunch of HDDs? A really big one? Does it have any settings of its own or is it just a dumb HDD holder? My main beef (and why i call it slow) with my current NAS is that since I have gigabit internet i have started to download big files. Everything is over 15GB. All is cool and dandy, repairing and unpacking is done on the downloading machine, but then it comes time to copy it over to the NAS. And that takes longer than downloading it in the first place and that's just ridiculous. Mounted over samba I get 10MB/s or so. Plus, if it copies something and I play a movie from the NAS at that time sometimes I do get choppy playback, especially at very high qualities (40GB +) . Enos Cabell posted:If it's down in the basement and space isn't a factor it might be cheaper just to get a bigger server case and swap your stuff into it. That's certainly one very good idea. No idea how "proprietary" the MB on the HP workstation is though, how malleable would it be to relocate it.
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Jan 19, 2019 00:13
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If you set the LSI hba up in it mode, they'll look the same as internal individual drives. The only downside is they'll be sharing a single SAS 6g link. I found a DS4243 on Craigslist for $50 locally, ordered two 6g Compellent controllers for $40. Really I only need one but a spare blanking plate is more expensive.
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Jan 19, 2019 00:22
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