Simple NAS advice
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School needs a NAS. Only needs about 6TB capacity.
Was thinking of a 4 bay thing & using 2TB disks so disk rebuilds will be as quick as possible.
Any recommendations for the NAS and what disks to get?
Will be going into a Windows environment. -
What's the specific use case for the NAS? But probably synology and their SOHO models.
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@dustinb3403 Yep, just backing up Hyper-V VMs and files and folders.
School Uses Veeam Community Edition v11.
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While it's no longer made, I have been running a ReadyNAS for the last several years here at the house. It's a four bay in Raid 10 and having had but the one issue that we all have from time to time... drive failure.
Single drive was replaced and rebuilt without issue and has been running without issue for years... I can recommend ReadyNAS as others have experience with Synology..
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@gjacobse said in Simple NAS advice:
While it's no longer made, I have been running a ReadyNAS for the last several years here at the house. It's a four bay in Raid 10 and having had but the one issue that we all have from time to time... drive failure.
Single drive was replaced and rebuilt without issue and has been running without issue for years... I can recommend ReadyNAS as others have experience with Synology..
Thanks for the input @gjacobse
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@siringo said in Simple NAS advice:
School needs a NAS. Only needs about 6TB capacity.
Was thinking of a 4 bay thing & using 2TB disks so disk rebuilds will be as quick as possible.
Any recommendations for the NAS and what disks to get?
Will be going into a Windows environment.If you need 6TB capacity, 4 bays with 2TB drives is not going to cut it. Well, not unless you want to run RAID-5.
You need 4TB drives if you want to run RAID-6, RAID-10 or have 2 independent RAID-1 arrays. Then you'll end up with about 7.1TB (TiB) of usable storage.
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@pete-s said in Simple NAS advice:
@siringo said in Simple NAS advice:
School needs a NAS. Only needs about 6TB capacity.
Was thinking of a 4 bay thing & using 2TB disks so disk rebuilds will be as quick as possible.
Any recommendations for the NAS and what disks to get?
Will be going into a Windows environment.If you need 6TB capacity, 4 bays with 2TB drives is not going to cut it. Well, not unless you want to run RAID-5.
You need 4TB drives if you want to run RAID-6, RAID-10 or have 2 independent RAID-1 arrays. Then you'll end up with about 7.1TB (TiB) of usable storage.
^ That..
Buy a simple 2-4 bay NAS and 2x 6TB drives and put them in R1 if you are worried about losing backups.
I just bought a pair of 8TB drives for my personal NAS for $120 each.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09CT7M3NX -
You're OK with buying renewed drives for your NAS ?
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@krzykat said in Simple NAS advice:
You're OK with buying renewed drives for your NAS ?
Obviously, as I bought them. That said, it was for personal use at home. The best price I could find for an 8TB drive I would use in production at a client are ~$220. For personal use, I don't need to pay $100 more per drive.
That said, the OP is posting about using low end gear for a notoriously cheap type of client (a school). This would likely fit the bill for years for them.
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Thanks everyone for your advice & help, it's great to get the opinions of others.
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@siringo said in Simple NAS advice:
School needs a NAS. Only needs about 6TB capacity.
Was thinking of a 4 bay thing & using 2TB disks so disk rebuilds will be as quick as possible.
Any recommendations for the NAS and what disks to get?
Will be going into a Windows environment.So for the RAID consideration....
SSD rebuilds faster than Spinners.
RAID 10 rebuilds faster than RAID 5.
RAID 5 rebuilds faster than RAID 6.
More drives rebuild more often than fewer drives.
Parity rebuilds are dramatically more impactful than mirror rebuilds.You have to consider all of the factors.
If you are looking at spinners.... 2 6TB drives in RAID 1 almost certainly makes the most sense because rebuilds are not impactful, are decently fast, and you need to rebuild a drive half as often as with RAID 10 with 4x 3TB drives.
If you are looking at SSD.... then you need to do the math with current prices. But RAID 1 is going to have almost zero failures with very fast rebuilds. RAID 5 rebuilds of smaller drives will be slower because it is the CPU, not the IO, that is your bottleneck. So RAID 5 3x 3TB or 4x 2TB might be cheaper, and fast enough, but it will be slower than having RAID 1 or RAID 10.
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@pete-s said in Simple NAS advice:
@siringo said in Simple NAS advice:
School needs a NAS. Only needs about 6TB capacity.
Was thinking of a 4 bay thing & using 2TB disks so disk rebuilds will be as quick as possible.
Any recommendations for the NAS and what disks to get?
Will be going into a Windows environment.If you need 6TB capacity, 4 bays with 2TB drives is not going to cut it. Well, not unless you want to run RAID-5.
Exactly, unless they are enterprise SSD. But that's not cheap and not a good choice for backup storage.
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@siringo said in Simple NAS advice:
Thanks everyone for your advice & help, it's great to get the opinions of others.
For backups ask yourself...
What actually matters?
- Capacity. Likely you have a hard need of 6TB usable, so that's a pivot point.
- Performance. You need enough to take your backups in your backup window and enough to restore at an acceptable pace. Figure out what this performance needs to be. This is a pivot point.
- Why do you care about rebuild time? Rebuild time is just one factor in the pool and while it should be considered, it's not a very big deal in the grand scheme of things. It's a rare event, that should not take long (unless you screw up your array design royally), and you shouldn't be down while it happens, and even if you are, does that even matter (99.999% chance it does not for a school.)
- Durability. How reliable does this device need to be? It's school backups, so probably not very but maybe. This obviously should not be your only backup, so it likely can be pretty ephemeral. But you don't want data being lost willy nilly. So that rules out RAID 5 on spinners because of durability.
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@jaredbusch said in Simple NAS advice:
@pete-s said in Simple NAS advice:
@siringo said in Simple NAS advice:
School needs a NAS. Only needs about 6TB capacity.
Was thinking of a 4 bay thing & using 2TB disks so disk rebuilds will be as quick as possible.
Any recommendations for the NAS and what disks to get?
Will be going into a Windows environment.If you need 6TB capacity, 4 bays with 2TB drives is not going to cut it. Well, not unless you want to run RAID-5.
You need 4TB drives if you want to run RAID-6, RAID-10 or have 2 independent RAID-1 arrays. Then you'll end up with about 7.1TB (TiB) of usable storage.
^ That..
Buy a simple 2-4 bay NAS and 2x 6TB drives and put them in R1 if you are worried about losing backups.
I just bought a pair of 8TB drives for my personal NAS for $120 each.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09CT7M3NXAgreed. Two bay NAS, spinners, RAID 1. RAID 1 and done. Rule of thumb for storage... you always use RAID 1 until you can justify something else on the math. You want RAID 1 whenever possible because it is cheaper, simpler and reliable.
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@scottalanmiller thanks for all the input Scott, it's greatly appreciated.
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What about using a refurb (or new) full tower with 2 or 4 drives and a simple server OS install (Ubuntu, Fedora, opensuse or a more focused system like rockstor, freenas etc etc). That way you've got easily replaceable commodity hardware and eliminate dependancies on proprietary HW and probably reduce the timeframe for availability / application of software patches and security fixes.
With it being for a school, are you able to get discounted education pricing?
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@notverypunny said in Simple NAS advice:
What about using a refurb (or new) full tower with 2 or 4 drives and a simple server OS install (Ubuntu, Fedora, opensuse or a more focused system like rockstor, freenas etc etc). That way you've got easily replaceable commodity hardware and eliminate dependancies on proprietary HW and probably reduce the timeframe for availability / application of software patches and security fixes.
With it being for a school, are you able to get discounted education pricing?
No question that it would work. Refurb isn't cheap like it used to be because of supply chain problems. Maybe if you find something a little old (not old old, just not new) you could do this effectively. Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse or FreeBSD would be reasonable options.
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@notverypunny said in Simple NAS advice:
or a more focused system like rockstor, freenas etc
These you'd want to avoid. This is the worst of all worlds. They require more technical knowledge than either of the other two options, have the worst support and package management, have the least business use experience because of the former. They lack the benefits of the NAS hardware, and lack the benefit of the well known, well supported generic operating systems.
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went with a simple synology 2 bay and 2 x 6TB disks.
I could have used old hardware, but nah.
Thanks everyone.
