No idea what to buy. Help me with NAS recommendations please.

[dhokes]

With a failing hard drive on my iMac, I’m looking at possible long term solutions and could do with some advice as to what’s best for my needs. Sorry for the many questions as I'm very new to this sort of stuff!

I’ll be getting a MacBook that I want to back up regularly (probably best to use Time Machine?). I’ve also got a few external hard drives containing videos that I want to collate so that they’re together and be able to stream on Plex. I don’t believe they need to be transcoded. I’ve got a large mp3 collection too and not sure whether to keep it on my laptop or the final solution. I want to be able to access the songs on my laptop and on my phone. I don’t particularly need any of it to be accessible outside my home network. I believe I could transfer the music I want to my phone. I’ve also got things that I want for medium term storage that I may want to access e.g. photos, tutorials, ebooks. Apart from the time machine backups (or included, if it’s easier), I want everything to be backed up in case a disk starts to fail.

Summary:
- Time machine backups
- Videos (Plex)
- Music + other medium term files
- The above two I wanted backed up too.

What would you suggest that’s easily available in the U.K.?

I’m confused about RAID. Would you suggest it? If a video or a file becomes corrupt, I don’t need immediate access as long as there’s a backup available that I could use. Or is it good practice to use RAID so backups are available if files get corrupted?

Would I generally be better off by buying the enclosure + hard drives separately?

I understand the cost vs speed/efficiency argument of HHDs vs SSDs. What’s the typical life cycle for each? I don’t want to have to keep replacing them.

Should I avoid certain branded hard drives and only consider certain ones? I've hard bad experiences with Seagate external hard drives before.

Finally, does the NAS have to be connected directly to the router or can it be elsewhere and connected by power line adapters?

Also, are there are particular retailers in the UK that you'd recommend to buy hard drives from i.e. that have decent packaging and customer support if they fail?

Sorry, I'm sure I'll have future questions later on.

 

[BigT]

I'll answer in reverse order to get the specific points out of the way.

Also, are there are particular retailers in the UK that you'd recommend to buy hard drives from i.e. that have decent packaging and customer support if they fail?

Overclockers UK is really the only recommendation we're allowed to give on computer equipment on these forums.

Finally, does the NAS have to be connected directly to the router or can it be elsewhere and connected by power line adapters?

It does not need to be directly on the router, anywhere on your network including via powerline adapters if you have to. However powerlines are likely to cripple your file transfer performance at best and not work a lot of the time at worst. I could not recommend them less.

Should I avoid certain branded hard drives and only consider certain ones? I've hard bad experiences with Seagate external hard drives before.

Opinions will differ. I've had problems with Seagate in the past but with their Exos enterprise range I currently have in my most recent NAS I'ver had no issues. I think they are tainted because of a terrible range they had years agoAlso not had problems with WD Red CMR drives which I think these days are badged Red Pros. I think spend a little extra on ensuring a NAS optimised drive. The reason I have Exos is because the cheapest way to get drives of large capacity is to buy them in external drive enclosures and shuck them (rip them out). For me Seagate enclosures of 16TB were guaranteed to have enterprise drives in and they didn't need a trick with tape to get them to work in a normal computer. WD drives are a bit more hit and miss as to what you'll find inside them.

I understand the cost vs speed/efficiency argument of HHDs vs SSDs. What’s the typical life cycle for each? I don’t want to have to keep replacing them.

I don't know and it isn't measured in time but number of operations normally on the spec sheets. My very oldest NAS drives (WD Reds) have been going for about eight years without issue but the same is true for my five year old SSD cache drives.

Would I generally be better off by buying the enclosure + hard drives separately?

The general recommendations I think you'll get on here, and I'd agree, with are going to be Synology, QNAP and build-your-own. All three options will likely require you to buy your drives separately from the enclosure.

I’m confused about RAID. Would you suggest it? If a video or a file becomes corrupt, I don’t need immediate access as long as there’s a backup available that I could use. Or is it good practice to use RAID so backups are available if files get corrupted?

I always think the key thing to get your head around RAID is the word redundant in the acronym. It's all about protection from a drive failure (or more than one simultaneous failure if you get into fancy versions). The idea being you can replace a drive that fails and return to normal operating conditions without resorting to backups. This is normally faster and more convenient. It is not a replacement for backups and you should think about how you will do that too. You lose some of the raw space available on the disks to provide that redundancy - how much depends on the version of RAID you use.

What would you suggest that’s easily available in the U.K.?

Synology, QNAP or make-your-own. The first two are well regarded enclosures but I have no personal experience. I'm sure others who have will be along to provide insight. I personally have made my own. I've tried two NAS operating systems OMV and UnRaid - but there are a wealth of free and paid for OS to do it from Windows and Linux through to more NAS specific distributions. I ditched OMV pretty quickly and used UnRaid for years now. It's low cost, supremely flexible and provides redundancy by a different means than RAID that is more efficient and flexible in terms of drives at the cost of lower write performance which doesn't matter to me. I like it's easy to use web GUI for a luddite like me, VMs are easy to spin up, the docker ecosystem is striaghtforward and it has a great app store for everything you could want. Community support is also excellent thanks to their forums and youtube.

Since you seem to have sensible media choices for Plex and your clients, so don't need transcoding, a quiet and efficient build based around a fan-less mITX solution would work great. My smallest build is based on a J5040 with just 16Gb of RAM and 6 x 16TB Exos drives and a 1TB SSD cache all in a small Fractal Node 304 case. That gives me 80TB usable, provides time machine backups, serves Plex, *darr and a few other bits and bobs no problem and it sips power most of the time sitting quietly in the corner of the office. Cost wise the self build for such a bespoke chassis and the OS is probably on a par with a six bay enclosure from Synology or QNAP. However if you're going for fewer drives then the cost of the Synology and QNAPs are going to be much keener and if they fulfil your core requirements, as I think they would from what you've said, then that'd be where my money would go unless you just like tinkering. While UnRaid I found straightforward, Synology and QNAP are much more easy to get around from what I've seen.

 

[Berserker]

WD Red CMR drives which I think these days are badged Red Pros.

Red Plus. Red Pros are designed for bigger NAS (more than 8 bays I think), and if you're considering Red Pro you should look at WD Gold (Enterprise) as well - the spec is similar but the price is often not.

Agree with the rest. Especially the NAS is not a backup. If you delete a file, its gone. If your NAS gets encrypted by ransomware (look up Qlocker), then all your files are gone. There are even some circumstances in which even with RAID you can get file corruption (known as 'bit rot') because if the parity check fails when reading data but all the disks return data, the controller may have to guess which disks are 'correct'. Some of the better NAS options implement 'data scrubbing' to guard against this, but if this hasn't convinced you to have a separate backup, nothing will.

As for picking a brand, depends what you want to do with it. QNAP tend to have better options for media/transcoding, Synology tend to have better options for pure data storage, but both have fallen out of favour with me recently so I'll be going UnRAID in due course.

 

[Avalon]

Most of this has been covered either above or in other threads, but to pick up on a few points…

If something goes wrong with a drive, you are usually better off sending it direct to the OEM rather than dealing with the retailer unless it’s within the DOA exchange period, as beyond that most will just add days/weeks processing it and sending it on and the same coming back to you. SSD’s are faster/quieter/more power efficient, but you are still limited to the slowest link, which is usually going to be the network, so SSD’s are only really beneficial for local (on NAS) workloads.

Again, do not use powering adapters for networking, they are a horrible, horrible idea and you will literally be crippling the speed of any NAS access.

RAID is *NOT* a backup. If you think it is, you probably need to do more reading.

I really like UnRAID for home use, as long as your usage fits it’s strengths, it’s great, but it does have some limitations. Your read speed is only as fast as a single drive, your write speed requires parity calculation so can be slower, the work around is to use a cache disk/pool so that you can land the data and then the mover writes it to the array later. The key thing to remember with that is the cache disk/pool needs to be large enough for the data you are writing. You could get round an initial write by adding the parity disk after you have written your data, but you would want to use a tool that will compare hashes on files to verify a 1:1 copy. Multiple cache pools are now a thing and multiple storage pools are coming, you can also pass a drive direct to a docker/VM so it’s not hitting the cache pool. For example if you have a really heavy IO task that you know is a drive killer, you may want to push it away from the storage pool and the cache pool. If you are heavily into VM’s, it’s also not as robust as say Proxmox or ESXi, so lots of heavy VM’s probably aren’t ideal.

Personally self build, it gives you vastly better options/upgrade potential and minimal effort. If a server dies, I can have it running again in minutes if I have parts on hand, same day via Prime Now, or next day via anywhere else, that’s not happening with a Synology/Qnap.