NAS Advice

churchill67

churchill67

churchill67

Associate
Joined
28 Jan 2011
Posts
3
Hey guys,

Looking to get a NAS around 500GB-1TB for dumping lots of hefty files on; music, OS's, videos etc etc, nothing ciritical.

After reading a few reviews on some desktop NAS's on various websites, a few people mentioned HDD failure occured after a while, albeit only a few cases. I understand that HDD failure can be more common if the device is left on for long lengths of time? Given this, I wondered whether it is worth putting thought into getting some sort of RAID'd NAS? Like I said the data won't be critical, but would be nice if it was relatively safe!

Basically just wondering what your views and expereience are on this area and if you can recommend any good value NAS's!

Thanks in advance!
 
churchill67 said:
Hey guys,

Looking to get a NAS around 500GB-1TB for dumping lots of hefty files on; music, OS's, videos etc etc, nothing ciritical.

After reading a few reviews on some desktop NAS's on various websites, a few people mentioned HDD failure occured after a while, albeit only a few cases. I understand that HDD failure can be more common if the device is left on for long lengths of time? Given this, I wondered whether it is worth putting thought into getting some sort of RAID'd NAS? Like I said the data won't be critical, but would be nice if it was relatively safe!

Basically just wondering what your views and expereience are on this area and if you can recommend any good value NAS's!

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...



Hard drives fail. Sometimes just randomly and sometime due to other factors. It's just a fact of life.

RAID is for performance, redundancy and uptime. Not for backing up.

You dont need the performance of a RAID, and a cheap NAS will be bottlenecked in places other than disk throughput.

Redundancy/uptime - Are you a business? Will you loose money if your RAID array goes down? Do you need 100% uptime? If not I would suggest you dont require RAID.

If a hard drive fails, it's likely to be down to manufacturing or more likely, heat/dust. A nas raid device is likely to have the hard disks closely located, in a similar environment ans subsequently each disk is equally likely to fail as the others.

Also with RAID is is not a backup, so if you delete a file, or the NAS unit frys it self, or you get data corruption, you have lost you data. You gained nothing from the RAID.

Also with RAID setup you need to monitor it, and know how to rebuild/resurrect it in the case of a failure.


I would suggest using 2 separate USB harddisks for back up purposes. There is plenty software which can backup data from one to another.

Or a NAS unit, and a separate USB backup device. I think some NAS boxes night even allow yo to plug the USB into the NAS to do this.
 
whitecrook said:
...

If a hard drive fails, it's likely to be down to manufacturing or more likely, heat/dust. A nas raid device is likely to have the hard disks closely located, in a similar environment ans subsequently each disk is equally likely to fail as the others.

...

I would suggest using 2 separate USB harddisks for back up purposes. There is plenty software which can backup data from one to another.

Or a NAS unit, and a separate USB backup device. I think some NAS boxes night even allow yo to plug the USB into the NAS to do this.
Click to expand...

Yeah seems logical, just figured I'd see what the consensus was before making any headway. Any brands or models to watch out for?
 
Well a consensus of one is not really a consensus, there's some posters here who'd disagree with me, but meh.

Everybody has their favourite hard drives. I used to like IBM (until deathstar fiasco) then used Seagate for many years, but they've had problems, and I've had personal experience of there USB drives being pretty poor, But I do have around 6 internal in use just now, but in the last years or more I've been quite impressed with Western Digital, for noise, performance and reliability. Although I have had western digital elements , mybooks and Seagates USB fail on me a few times. But I was handling hundreds of drives so that's to be expected.

Also avoid Lacie. I've used about 10 of their 'Big drives' of various specs, and there's only about 2 PSUS still working. They are expensive designer tat. A new PSU is £40 quid and you can buy drives twice the size now for £50

Also, even enterprise level drives fail, just this week a drive failed on the 10TB RAID array at work requiring a new drive to be sent out. Good job there was a hotspare handy to take the load.
 
I'm very impressed with western digital's most recent offering. Around 10W power consumption, spins the drive down when idle (you can change how long it's idle for before this happens). Soft mounted drive. The only port is (gigabit) ethernet so you don't have usb to fall back on.

Performance is at the limits of my 100mbit wired network, the internet seems to think it does well on gigabit networks. It does some slightly exotic things like dlna streaming which you may not be interested in.
 
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