Synology DS1813+ as an alternative

[c3]

but even if you do lose more than one drive, all you SHOULD have to do is replace the failed drives, then just restore the data from your backups 

 

What storage system does this not apply to?

[garycase]

but even if you do lose more than one drive, all you SHOULD have to do is replace the failed drives, then just restore the data from your backups 

 

What storage system does this not apply to?

 

NONE of course.  But a lot of UnRAID users apparently do not have backups 

[swells]

Anything that I can't afford to lose or really would rather not be without is uploaded to google drive at least and maybe dropbox. 99.9% of what is on my server can be recreated rather easily but would be a hassle. And with bitcasa being as awesome as it has become, soon I will probably have backups of even the replaceable stuff in the cloud. It worries me some though still that it has so many great features that can be abused. We'll see.

 

I currently fill drives and dump a listing of each disks contents to text and upload that to google drive. This way if i do lose data on one disk, I know exactly what it is.

[c3]

So, you can understand my wondering why you would include "UnRAID is certainly much less likely to cause significant data loss if multiple drives fail". Since the recovery is exactly the same. My experience with unRAID is data lose begins with the second drive failure. While the raidz stripes I use, data lose begins with the 6th drive failure. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I have much experience with multiple drive failures. Comparatively, I could not make such a statement about unRAID. I wouldn't even think dealing with multiple drive failure on unRAID would be easier. Sure the independent file systems are intact, but with multiple shares and split levels, even determining what is missing is a task. I would do a compare against the backup in order to find what was missing

 

my YAAC is about 55-65% full on average, that's 40TB on (21) 4TB drives. Two drives run off to Las Vegas, figure out what is missing, yikes!

 

True, a lot of unRAID users do not have backups, but a lot use unRAID for backup, and a further lot do have a backup (to what is a crazy thought).

[c3]

Anything that I can't afford to lose or really would rather not be without is uploaded to google drive at least and maybe dropbox. 99.9% of what is on my server can be recreated rather easily but would be a hassle. And with bitcasa being as awesome as it has become, soon I will probably have backups of even the replaceable stuff in the cloud. It worries me some though still that it has so many great features that can be abused. We'll see.

 

I currently fill drives and dump a listing of each disks contents to text and upload that to google drive. This way if i do lose data on one disk, I know exactly what it is.

 

Nice to hear you're liking the bitcasa experience.

[swells]

If I had the money to burn and wanted a solution where I could really avoid data loss I would probably go RAID 60 with thirty or so 3TB disks. No data loss until the 7th disk. Then just keep a couple of spares on hand and your set.

[MSattler]

So, you can understand my wondering why you would include "UnRAID is certainly much less likely to cause significant data loss if multiple drives fail". Since the recovery is exactly the same. My experience with unRAID is data lose begins with the second drive failure. While the raidz stripes I use, data lose begins with the 6th drive failure. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I have much experience with multiple drive failures. Comparatively, I could not make such a statement about unRAID. I wouldn't even think dealing with multiple drive failure on unRAID would be easier. Sure the independent file systems are intact, but with multiple shares and split levels, even determining what is missing is a task. I would do a compare against the backup in order to find what was missing

 

my YAAC is about 55-65% full on average, that's 40TB on (21) 4TB drives. Two drives run off to Las Vegas, figure out what is missing, yikes!

 

True, a lot of unRAID users do not have backups, but a lot use unRAID for backup, and a further lot do have a backup (to what is a crazy thought).

 

Even if users had backups, most likely they are not ensuring that A) the backups are running consistently and B) that what is being backed up is valid data.  All too often even bigger companies have these issues.

 

Using unRAID the overall drive usage is going to be lower than using RAID 5, since the striping in RAID 5 requires all drives to be spun up to watch one movie.  If you setup unRAID correctly, you are only spinning up one drive.  The data does not HAVE to be split across multiple drives in unRAID.  If you set the Split-Level correctly for each share then files in one folder/movie will stay on just one disk.  My entire library is setup in this manner.  Doing this, keeps down the usage hours of my drives, and lowers the temperature in the case.

 

In case of a failure, I'm also going to have to restore quite a bit less data than with Raid 5.  With Raid 5, if I lose two disks out of a 6 disk array, I have to restore all of my data.  If using 3TB disks, we are now talking about restoring 15TB of data.  That's going to take time, and who has the $1-3k for a tape backup unit, and tapes?  With unRAID if I lose two disks, I need to restore 6TB of data, which still sucks, but I'd rather be restoring 6TB than 15TB.  And during the restore, I can still keep the kids happy by letting watch shows/movies that are on the drives that survived. 

 

Now mission critical data, and files I cannot lose, those I store on my Synology DS-410.

 

 

[unevent]

Couple links that may be of interest:

 

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1460222/how-to-roll-your-own-synology-diskstation-for-nas-update-5-28-2013-dsm-4-2-3211

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl/

[mrow]

Couple links that may be of interest:

 

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1460222/how-to-roll-your-own-synology-diskstation-for-nas-update-5-28-2013-dsm-4-2-3211

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl/

 

 

Wow, this is awesome. Might have to build one with some spare parts and give it a try.

[aiden]

Wow, this is awesome. Might have to build one with some spare parts and give it a try.

 

+1... seriously considering loading DSM on my N40L and relegating unRAID into a big backend storage NAS (as it was intended to be). DSM is SO much more mature, and plugins are well developed as well. I'm curious if anyone else is doing a double setup like this.

[jaybee]

Questions about DSM:

 

What is the maximum number of disks it can support?

I take it disks cannot spin down as it is RAID5 based?

Does it support hot spares?

Does it support 2 disk failures?

Can it be expanded easily? I think yes as it features "hybrid raid".

What happens if your hardware fails as opposed to the disks failing..how do you get backonline if at all?

 

 

[neilt0]

Build yourself a Lian-Li PC-Q25B HP Microserver based system 

 

VERY small; VERY low power;  VERY quiet; built-in hot-swap cages for 5 4 drives (with room for 2 more).

 

Fixed.

[neilt0]

Questions about DSM:

 

What is the maximum number of disks it can support?

I take it disks cannot spin down as it is RAID5 based?

Does it support hot spares?

Does it support 2 disk failures?

Can it be expanded easily? I think yes as it features "hybrid raid".

What happens if your hardware fails as opposed to the disks failing..how do you get backonline if at all?

Can you use drives of different size?

In an 8-driver server, what is the minimum number of drives that need to be spun up to a) read and b) write?

[unevent]

Questions about DSM:

 

What is the maximum number of disks it can support?

I take it disks cannot spin down as it is RAID5 based?

Does it support hot spares?

Does it support 2 disk failures?

Can it be expanded easily? I think yes as it features "hybrid raid".

What happens if your hardware fails as opposed to the disks failing..how do you get backonline if at all?

 

Google is your friend:

http://www.synology.com/support/tutorials_show.php?lang=us&q_id=512

http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=106&t=40458

 

In a nutshell, Synology is RAID based and you can choose the level you want as described in the first link.  Being RAID the data is striped and all disks spin together.  They have 1-2 disk redundancy based on RAID level or SHR.  SHR (what they call a hybrid RAID) allows you to use drives of different sizes with 1-2 drive redundancy.  Bottom line is it is a pretty wrapper over limited hardware.  It is for those that like pretty wrappers and don't pay much attention to how it works.  The link I posted earlier where you can run DSM on your own hardware improves it a bit, but it is still RAID based and comes with RAID limitations, which is not all that bad unless you have large arrays and only periodic access requirements.  As for drive quantity I've seen 15 drives/45TB numbers for the stock hardware, not sure what the software limits are. DSM is a Linux distro that has been stripped down and supports limited hardware as you will see in the first links for rolling your own.

[Bizarroterl]

I added a DS1812+ to my home network.  I added it as my primary and a recently rebuilt unraid became my backup.  I've been unhappy with my unraid system's write performance and franky was tired of messing around with it.  Yeah, the Synology was expensive, but there's something to be said for plugging it in and it just works (write=~90Mbs, read=100+Mbs). 

 

Backing up to the unraid has been slow (20Mbs) and I've been considering another Synology.  If Tom fixes the slow write performance I'll stick with unraid.  Otherwise you'll eventually see my server in the for sale section.

[jaybee]

So you went with Synology because of performance basically. Ok. That's fair enough. I think the only advantages I can see are:

 

- RAID6 if you want dual drive redundancy (which also has the disadvantage of...errr... being RAID6

- Nice, slicker, intuative GUI ? (guesses)

- Stable ?

- Better write performance

- "Just works" in that it is more "plug and play" and simplified. (also a weakness)

 

[MSattler]

I added a DS1812+ to my home network.  I added it as my primary and a recently rebuilt unraid became my backup.  I've been unhappy with my unraid system's write performance and franky was tired of messing around with it.  Yeah, the Synology was expensive, but there's something to be said for plugging it in and it just works (write=~90Mbs, read=100+Mbs). 

 

Backing up to the unraid has been slow (20Mbs) and I've been considering another Synology.  If Tom fixes the slow write performance I'll stick with unraid.  Otherwise you'll eventually see my server in the for sale section.

 

You are not going to see much better write performance with unRAID simply because of the fact you are writing to an individual disk in most cases, not spreading your writes across all disks.  Additionally all parity is being written to one disk, with true RAID 5/6 that parity is being written across all of the drives, hence faster writes. 

 

I love my synology DS-410's, however, as I mentioned before, I love unRAID for allowing me to be able to spin up just one disk to watch a movie instead of 8-10 disks.  It saves on the health of the drives longterm.

[Bizarroterl]

It's more compact (and quiet) than what is available for unraid.  Stable - I've used Readynas, qnap, synology, freenas, and unraid.  All seem to be quite stable.

 

The interface on the Synology is "prettier" than unraid, but with a NAS I'm so infrequently on its console it doesn't really matter.

[chickensoup]

I added a DS1812+ to my home network.  I added it as my primary and a recently rebuilt unraid became my backup.  I've been unhappy with my unraid system's write performance and franky was tired of messing around with it.  Yeah, the Synology was expensive, but there's something to be said for plugging it in and it just works (write=~90Mbs, read=100+Mbs). 

 

Backing up to the unraid has been slow (20Mbs) and I've been considering another Synology.  If Tom fixes the slow write performance I'll stick with unraid.  Otherwise you'll eventually see my server in the for sale section.

 

A good cache drive setup can easily reach these speeds. If you are worried about unprotected data in the short term (prior to the cache drive being dumped to the array) then you can mirror two drives for a cache volume. If you really want to give your network a run for its money, mirror SSDs. Granted, there is some cost to this setup but still an option