NAS needed for my messy backup!

Mp4

Mp4

Soldato
Joined
21 Apr 2006
Posts
8,460
Location
Eastbourne
Well its taken me 6 months to finally save for a NAS drive. At the moment looking to spend £400 or lower. But with the option to upgrade HDD's

I have been looking at Synology.

My main goal is to get rid of a few EXT drives. as I have far too many! :D

I use Acronis to backup



I have currently

Main HDD (windows/everything installed) 750GB.


EXT HDD's
------------

1HDD - All photos+ LR backup 2TB - 1.43TB Used. (2TB Drive)

2HDD Mirror of main HDD 583GB - 1TB Drive.

3HDD - Mirror of HDD1 - 1.43TB used - 4TB Drive.
 
For that volume of data you probably want a 4 bay unit. Problem is that's not happening for £400 unless you use your existing disks because a 4 bay bare NAS is about £350.

Do you want to run RAID to protect your data?
 
Okay well any recommendations for a 4 bay??

No idea about the raid.

And I will look at the micro server
 
The easy way or the hard way.

I to have also been looking for possible nas solutions and like you there are commercial easy and fast tools out there however for the functionality they offer it does cost. For backups i always look at the primary software they have and how good it is and the plugins they offer aswell. For me i find most integrated backups are very unfreindly so when ever i have the opertunity i try to find one that supports plugins like bittorent sync so you can back data as soon as it comes in.
The budget then is £400 and hounsetly for a good nas that is not enough money in my opinion unless you go down mu prefferd route.

So the aspect are obvioulsy the mthrB and the RAM and the CPU so first the board, it doesnt have to be special as long as it has a minimum of a gigabte nic and usn ports etc but nothing special required then you can bye a cheap one for £50 minimum. ok next the CPU for this i would advies getting an amd one as although they are not as efficent you do get more for your buck interms of course etc and it is more often than not cheaper.You can find easly a cheap 6-8 core amd CPU for £100-150 online.
Next the ram, i would just suggest getting a 1600mhz ram 8-16GB ECC. that would cost between £80-150.

Ok so leets so you met everything half way so 50 for the board and 125 for the CPU and 125 for the Ram so that £300, so what about the operating well thats easy my faviroute option in the past is FreeNas a great option with tone of plugins and functionality.

Then the HDDs well you can get WDreds or Deskstar HDDS both are good abd both are expesive so you got £100 left for that £80 2tb wdred etc. Then the case well i presume like most of the people you have a old case around the house or you can jsut get one cheap from your local dump just give it a clean and you can get a very good and fast and pro-consumer setup.:D:):p
 
I'll say again, as I did in another thread... Build a custom low powered PC (or use an HP gen8 microserver) and run Synology DSM 5.1 on it (see the thread in this sub-forum). IT will give you the almost full DSM experience, with access to all normal RAID modes and also SHR for easy expansion but for a fraction of the price of a normal box.
 
I'll say again, as I did in another thread... Build a custom low powered PC (or use an HP gen8 microserver) and run Synology DSM 5.1 on it (see the thread in this sub-forum). IT will give you the almost full DSM experience, with access to all normal RAID modes and also SHR for easy expansion but for a fraction of the price of a normal box.

Truth.
 
Hi guys well ive been scouting around and will look as said above and also the

HP G1610T 150W PS ProLiant Gen8 Micro Server - £189 sounds ideal!!

1 x Gen8 MicroServer with
1 x Intel Celeron G1610T processor; 2GB memory
1 x 332i Dual Port NIC network controller
1 x Integrated B120i SATA RAID storage controller
1 x 150W power supply

I will start with 2X WD RED 3TB Drives

and upgrade the ram to 16GB
£525 so just over what i wanted.
 
Last edited:
Read this: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/

You can have an micro server and 4x3TB Toshiba's (read Hitachi... yes this is coming from a multiple DETHSTAR survivor, but keep reading) for £505.90 delivered or like for like with two of the above drives fro £342.94 before cash back (not currently on offer, but it's usually back on each month). With the Toshiba's they're 4.5w active, 4.2w idle on a 5.9k spindle with a 2 year warranty. In a home environment it's usually write once, read lots and with redundancy built in at an OS level i'd much rather have an extra drive on site than pay for WD RED's up front when the real world failure rates look like that.

Also 16GB for a NAS of this size? Waste of money unless you're going to run a hyper-visor/esxi set-up and a load of VM's which you've not mentioned, in which case the G1610T could be more of an issue.
 
Last edited:
I have found this for £200

HP Proliant Gen7 N54L Microserver.
AMD Turion 2.2Ghz Dual Core Processor.
16GB Crucial DDR3 1600Mhz RAM upgrade.
7x onboard USB ports (6 external + 1 internal).
1x onboard gigabit NIC.
Onboard VGA output.
Onboard eSATA port.
2x gigabit NICs on a PCI-E card, Intel chipset.
**NO HDDs**

Includes all screws, the allen and front door locking keys plus the power lead.

This appliance was originally purchased on the 24/2/2014 and previously used as a VMWare host running ESXi 5.5 with all the RAM and additional NICs being fully supported and present. I'm selling this appliance after purchasing something more powerful, otherwise it works perfectly.

The RAM kit installed is the following:

Crucial CT2KIT102464BA160B 16GB (2X8GB) DDR3 240 Pin PC3-10600 CL9 Unbuffered UDIMM Memory Module Kit
 
IMO The Gen8 micro server is the better bet for the money.

It's quite a bit more powerful and able to transcode 1080p on the fly which the gen7 can't. A must for running something like plex.

Also if you ever need to the cpu can be upgraded !
 
What about Drobo's? :)
in the mean time

Gen8 £175 for the case. (seem good?)

and probably need about 10TB of HDD's!
as that's what my externals add up too :D


Anyone local in Eastbourne or near to help with setup? :D
 
Last edited:
No, your storage adds up to 7.75GB in marketing terms, you're backing it up by mirroring it which is not optimal so your data is less than half that. Using SHR-1 with 3x3TB drives would give you 6TB of fault tolerant storage, you have under 4TB of data to backup, adding another 3TB will give you 9TB of available space. I would question if you actually need a NAS or would you be more comfortable with some internal drives in your existing PC and something like stablebit?

Buying a Drobo is just like buying a Synology, you pay for the name and get a very expensive low end PC, Synology will abandon you in 3 years for example.
 
I'll say again, as I did in another thread... Build a custom low powered PC (or use an HP gen8 microserver) and run Synology DSM 5.1 on it (see the thread in this sub-forum). IT will give you the almost full DSM experience, with access to all normal RAID modes and also SHR for easy expansion but for a fraction of the price of a normal box.

Can you link me to the thread you are referring to please.
I have an older pc after recently upgrading that may be suitable.

Thanks
 
Synology ds414j
WD Red 6tb

Then add more 6tb drives when you can afford it.

Keep your existing hard drives as an extra backup. Can never have too many backups.
 
WD Red's are not a drive i'd recommend to anyone based on the reported failure rates over a significant sample size published by BackBlaze (see link earlier). Synology ditch mainstream product support on a 3 year cycle, i've known peole spend a few grand with them on atom based solutions only to find that 3 years later they don't get official access to the latest DSM and have to bodge it. This is not a combo i'd suggest offers good reliability or value for money compared to a micro server or a self build.

Anyway the reason I came back to this thread was to point out the cash back offer is on (yet) again, so if you want a Gen8 it's now £143.86 delivered after cash back.
 
Back
Top Bottom