Looking for some advice on storage

[Maverick52]

I'm currently using a Synology DS218j NAS for storing photos (wife & I have a small photography business) but I need to figure out a better long term solution as I'm approaching filling up the 6TB on it. We don't work with the photos on the NAS, it simply stores them. Occasionally we will access a couple for marketing purposes.

 

I realize I could replace the 6TB drives with larger drives, but that kind of seems like a short term solution as my need to store these files isn't going to decrease anytime soon. So, looking at options I stumbled upon unRAID and the ability to just add another HDD when I need the space sounds really appealing. I realize I could do that with a larger Synology model as well, but the models with lots of bays seem quite expensive for what they are. So I have a couple of thoughts on what to do...

 

1. Just spend the money on a larger Synology. It keeps things simple but it appears to be the (much) more expensive route, and it would essentially be garbage in the future with any hardware failure.

 

2. I have a Intel NUC (model NUC7CJYH, Celeron J4005 CPU, 4GB of RAM, 250GB SSD) running Windows 10 that I currently use as small Plex media server, with an external 1TB drive for media. I like how small, quiet, and power efficient the NUC is. It hangs out right next to my Synology NAS on my entertainment center. I was thinking I could setup my NUC to run unRAID, buy a Mediasonic H82-SU3S2 8 Bay 3.5-inch Hard Drive Enclosure, connect it to the NUC, and pop a couple of new drives into it. I was thinking this would give me 8 bays for expanding my storage and if I were to need to expand even more I could buy a 2nd enclosure and add it in. This allows for more expandability in the future and if I understand things correctly it should allow me to move the disks to another "host" if my NUC were to stop working. I also like that it would be fairly compact, much smaller than a typical PC case and would mostly take up vertical space versus a 8+ bay Synology that would take up lots of horizontal space. The downside I see is that USB would probably make things a little slow, but since I access it rarely that doesn't seem like a huge issue.

 

3. I have some spare desktop PC parts from an old workstation I just replaced, so I could do a unRAID build with those. I have an old ASRock H77 Pro4/MVP ATX motherboard, i5-3570, and 8GB of RAM. I'd have to buy a new PSU for it, a HBA card (not enough SATA ports on the motherboard), and a new case (so it can hold more than a couple HDD's) but otherwise it was working fine when I replaced it. Since I already have the majority of this hardware there isn't really a price difference between this option or buying a HDD enclosure for the NUC. The only drawbacks I see here would be that the case would be much larger, it would draw more power, and most the hardware already has ~8 years of use on it. To be fair though, if the hardware were to fail then replacing the motherboard/cpu/ram could be accomplished fairly easily and inexpensively.

 

4. Buy the Mediasonic enclosure from option #2 and just use it as DAS plugged into my Windows 10 workstation. There really isn't a need for us to access the photos via the network, we would only be accessing it from our workstation anyways. The downside I see here is I would have to buy the hardware RAID version of the enclosure as I wouldn't be able to use unRAID for those disks, and I would have to have the enclosure take up desk space. It is kind of nice to have our NAS storage somewhere out of the way instead of having HDD's on the desk. The bonus with this route though is that I could buy the USB-C version of the enclosure since my workstation has USB-C ports available for it.

 

You guys know unRAID (and probably data storage in general) better than I do, so I'm really hoping for some guidance on how to proceed. When we bought the little Synology we have now it was a huge step in the right direction, but our business has grown quite a bit since then and can see the need for more expandability going forward. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide, I really appreciate it.

[trurl]

Parity operations ideally happen in parallel. Multiple disks are read at the same time. Trying to do that through a single port is going to be a bottleneck. Depending on the specific hardware, USB can cause other issues besides this bottleneck. For these reasons, option 3 seems like it is more suited to Unraid, with a separate connection for each disk. This is the way the vast majority of Unraid users have their systems configured.

[Decto]

As said above, USB drives, especially multi disk devices like the Mediasonic are not recommended as array devices for many reasons including the way disks are identified by the controller, connections dropping and so requiring rebuilds etc.

 

The board you have in option 3 is a reasonable start, there are 6 intel SATA ports and 2 Asmedia SATA ports all of which should be fine with unraid. A lot of boards in that time had Marvel controllers for 2 of the ports which cause issues.

 

Add $10 for another 2 port PCI-E 2.0 x1 Asmedia AS1061 /1062 and you are at 10 available ports quickly with the two x16 physical slots available. One of those (x4) electical would be fine with either an 8 port LSI HBA in IT mode or a 5 port JM585.

 

You can test out on a trial for 4 weeks + 2 x 2 week extensions (from the menu), if it doesn't work out then you can always use the drives in a different device. Like most, once you've tried it, you'll probably stick with it due to the flexibility.

 

Power consumption should be ~30-40W idle for the base system, then ~8W per spinning drive.

 

One important point though, Unraid is not a backup. It will cover 1 or 2 drive failures while maintaining availability (depending on parity drives), however it can't protect you from theft, fire, complete hardware failure or fat finger syndrome... user errors probably destroy more data than hardware failure in any system. If it's your business, make sure you have an independant backup for at least the critical data.

 

 

[Maverick52]

Alright, you've convinced me. Option 3 it is 😄 Ultimately the only real drawback is the size and age of the components I'll be using, but I can get over the size issue and I don't really have reason to doubt my hardware. It's ran well for a long time.

 

I do have a question about unRAID though, and Decto already touched on it slightly. Currently with my Synology I have it mapped to my Windows 10 workstation as a drive. This allows me to do a cloud backup of both the NAS and my workstation via Crashplan with a single computer subscription, and easy access to uploading/downloading files from it. If I build this NAS using unRAID will I be able to configure it in a similar fashion?