External USB, NAS, Server... what?? Argh!

matt100

matt100

matt100

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Very quick up to date thing..

I used to use my PC a lot, I have what used to be a fairly high spec watercooled gaming PC.. that was several years ago and I've sort of gotten out of that so a 2500k/GTX 580 etc etc isn't necessary anymore.

In the last couple of years I've been using macbooks for work so I figured why not just grab a mac mini and move over to full mac. Simples.

And the 3TB of films/TV/Photos etc that I have on my main PC ghosted to an external USB will have to go and I'll get another USB drive and ghost one against the other as backup.

So I made the move and the external drive I had died almost overnight :(

So now I have to get 2 3TB USB drives to have the solution above, the expense of which has me thinking about other solutions... I already have 1 internal 3TB drive, in fact I also have an intel NUC knocking about too...

So I've been weighing up the various options..

Buy 2 USB drives and plug them both into the mac, one for content the other for backup..

Buy a 2 bay NAS and put 2 3TB drives in it.. my reservation here is are there any NAS drives that have USB 3.0 IN? Once I have 2 drives in there I am not going to be copying 3TB over ethernet.. it'll take forever. And how easy is it to set these things to copy themselves? I guess that's just RAID1?

Purpose/repurpose the intel NUC or buy a microserver and have a dedicated server? Somewhat makes the mac mini redundant, I may as well just buy another macbook then.. or have just my work PC but that feels completely mental to me, although I'm also not keen on the 3 pc solution either (mac mini, work laptop and server)...

I guess an option is to keep the PC as-is but I can't help thinking a 3 year old or whatever it is gaming GPU all watercooled with an overclocked CPU being used to basically host some movies is a bit silly and will no doubt break before too long anyway.

So... ramble over.. what would you do? Can I get a NAS that has USB 3.0 in? Is the easiest thing just 2 USB drives on the mac mini? Is a server a super duper easy thing to make nowadays and a sensible thing with numerous benefits?
 
1Gb network just about maxes out a single HDD's write speed so if your network is working at it's full potential you're not going to gain much of anything by transferring via USB 3.

Yes RAID 1 is drive mirroring.

Most NAS's now have USB 3

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/syno...ork-attached-storage-enclosure-hd-061-sy.html

The Microserver is finally EOL the current cheap home server is the Dell PowerEdge T20 which can be had for ~£100 after cashback you just need to install an OS.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18707248
 
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Are there any NAS enclosure things that have USB a LOT cheaper than that? I could have 2 3TB USB external drives for £150ish at a guess?
 
All I can see on that is USB out.. so I can attach a printer or thumb drive or something? I'm expecting a USB type A port on there?

For example there's a startech thing I've seen that has USB A on it to use the thing as both a standard USB 3.0 drive(s) or as a NAS.. I just assumed there'd be loads more choices?
 
Just grabbed one of these.. it may be rubbish but has everything I need..

http://sgcdn.startech.com/005329/media/sets/S352BMU3N_Manual/S352BMU3N manual.pdf

USB 3.0 in, it's a NAS and will RAID 2 disks which I guess I might as well use (although always been a bit concerned about what happens if I get some crap on a drive I really don't want or manage to delete something by accident... would the better option for lazy storage be to keep using something like allwaysync like I have been so I can sync whenever I want to?)..

Fingers crossed this will work!
 
Just out of curiosity.. if I am planning to use JBOD not RAID I effectively have 2 3TB drives with different drive letters in a NAS enclosure.

What's the thing limiting the speed of me copying the contents of the existing drive to the new drive if they are both in the NAS? I was thinking it would be USB but if the drives are both in the same NAS isn't it SATA that'll be the limiting factor?
 
This is driving me mad lol...

I wound up buying a startech S352BMU3N which is basically a 2 bay NAS that has a USB 3 INPUT.. so that part worked fine, I copied my 2 and a bit TB onto it in I'd guess 5 or 6 hours.

But it turns out to use it in JBOD mode you can only use 1 drive.. Also if it's in JBOD mode you only get the USB 3 connection, not the ethernet.. it can only do RAID then.

If I switch it to RAID it formats the drive.. also it has a horrifically loud fan.

So how do people do this? Whats the point in being able to have tons of NAS space if to fill the drives over ethernet will take weeks? I need to be able to drop 2-10gb files onto it without it taking weeks?

I keep coming back to just getting a USB 3 drive and share it on the network and leave the PC on but this seems like a set of really stupid limitations? All I want is a direct connection to both the PC by USB 3 to get files ONTO it and then ethernet to share them.. why is that so hard? Argh!

Something like this would be ideal http://www.dlink.com/uk/en/support/product/dns-320l-sharecenter-2-bay-cloud-storage-enclosure but surely it would take the rest of my life to transfer the whole backup onto that before I can make any use of it? But other than that being able to stuff 2 drives in there and have it all available from anywhere would be amazing.
 
RAID 1 is useful if one drive fails you don't lose all your data stored on it since it is mirrored onto the other drive. It is highly recommended for storing precious data.

It should strongly noted though that RAID is NOT a backup solution you would still need an off-site backup on something like Amazon Glacier to actually backup your files.

Yes RAID 1 does mean you only have the capacity of the smallest drive in the array but the redundancy is very useful. I'm pretty sure you'd want your data to survive even if you had a hard drive failure.

As for copying speed. I have that problem with my Synology NAS connected over gigabit ethernet as well. At the moment I'm only getting 10MB/sec which way too slow, I'll have to do some investigating as to why that is. Actual performance should be way more than that.

If you want to actually increase the speed of the RAID array you'll need 4 hard drives in a RAID 10 array which is two RAID 0 arrays mirrored across each other which means you only get the storage capacity of two hard drives in the array but the speed is worth it plus you also get the benefit of being able to survive a hard drive failure in the same way as you could in a RAID 1 array.
 
Thanks but I get RAID.. I don't want to increase the speed of it once it's full I want to understand how on earth people fill things like 2 or 3tb NAS drives whether in RAID or not because for the most part it's normally via ethernet only which seems like madness.
 
matt100 said:
So how do people do this? Whats the point in being able to have tons of NAS space if to fill the drives over ethernet will take weeks? I need to be able to drop 2-10gb files onto it without it taking weeks?
Click to expand...

Gigabit lan isnt going to take weeks to write your files pal, just bang it on the network and you should be done with it; the drives themselves will be the bottleneck.

I have 3x3tb drives in raid z1 on a freenas vm on my home server. I usually get burst write speeds of over 130 mb/s, and between 80 & 90 for sustained writes.

If you're getting crappy performance over your home network, maybe you should look into your network hardware. Using an ISP provided router?
 
Interesting.. to be honest I haven't tried recently so I don't know what the performance is I just recall it being awful the last time I tried.

I do have an ISP router, its a BT Homehub 4 which I have to say has been by far the most stable router I've ever used.

Just checked it and it has 1 gigabit port so slightly problematic when trying to get in and out of my pc.. could I grab a gigabit switch and add extra ports? Would that work properly or would I be dividing the bandwidth of the 1 gigabit port?

I could just grab a homehub 5 which is all gigabit I guess.. so then at that speed is it comparable to USB 3 (roughly... I don't mind leaving it doing something for a day.. weeks however is no use to me).
 
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