NAS recommendations please

hermes

hermes

hermes

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10 Apr 2020
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I have looked at various NAS devices, WD and Synergy but more confused now so after a little advice please.
I primarily need one to backup my camera images, as well as normal every day data. I shoot .Raw files which are huge and really running out of external disk storage. Im after something around the 6-8TB and of course understand the Raid 1 system so would only get half that storage.
I have a Onedrive account but its so flippin slow and un reliable to upload to en mass that I need a better option. Talking Onedrive, how would NAS compare when accessing remotely compared to Onedrive?

Any comments very welcome.
 
How remotely? If it's just on the same network, then it'll be much faster than the OneDrive.

I also see a much bigger performance difference in the house between a wired connection to the Nas and the WiFi. WiFi being much slower as due to my house I drop to a realistic 5mb / s so a large a RAW will take a few second to transfer before even being able to be processed. On a wired setup, that's not the case.

All that said, I now work by having the recent working images in the machine itself and then just using the Nas as the archive to save space on the machine.

Its copies over to the Nas via sync software. Works ok for me, but I have had a whoops moment where my sync rules conflicted with a copy of data I made and wiped a whole heap of images, leading to a vet long recovery process.

So if you do use a NAS then take time to learn and understand your syncibg method to it.
 
Thanks, when I say remotely I just mean the odd thing over the web when out and about, nothing major yet.
Apart from that I really want it for backing up, 99% of my data is photographic related which is why I want to use a NAS as an archive.
I understand its always going to be faster wired, do you mean via USB?. I can put up with a slower WiFi synch backup when I get the majority backed up from this machine and external hard disks.
Im torn between WD and Synergy units, I have looked at My Cloud Expert, and My Cloud Pro plus Synergy and led to believe the My Cloud Expert is a good option.
 
By wired I was meaning ethernet versus wifi.

Right - may be a long post coming ...

I have a MyCloud Ex2 ( an original one ). I've had it for years, and to be fair, its been rock solid in terms of uptime. It has 2x2TB drives in it with 2TB storage available. Its neat, small, smart looking, quiet and wakes up from sleep reasonably quickly. For the most part of transferring a few files to and from it, I get decent transfer across the house with it ( 60 - 70Mb /s ). I just really use it as a store for all the old photos.

but...

When it comes to transferring lots of file in bulk to it ... it becomes downright awful in my experience. The firmware has a built in scanning process which scans photos and images etc and generates thumbnails of them. It then stores those thumbnails its creates by placing them in hidden subfolders in each directory. So as you add lots of files in one swoop, it also starts scanning them. What you end up with is a bottle neck conflict between trying to transfer and write new data to the NAS drives and the NAS itself reading that new data back off the drive, analysing it, then writing more data back to the drive. The multiple reading and writing at the same time thrashes the disk and slows it to a crawl ... like sub 1Mb /s transfer rate. Whilst you can try and log into the drive OS and stop the processes, you cant get rid of this issue completely ... and it cripples the drive and has crippled my opinion of WD NAS'es.

Now I do accept my NAS is old, and its not something I have looked at whether applies to newer ones (i suspect it may) - but its a factor that really has cheesed me off. I t just want a drive i can read and write to, no fuss, and my NAS wont let me do that. I'm now considering building bigger NAS setup based around an ubuntu server machine.

In terms of remote internet access ... I did have mine setup fora while, but i found it just wasnt something I used so disabled it in the settings. When it did work ... it was OK ... but do bear in mind that anything like that would limited to your best upload speed from you house to the internet. As that is what it has to go through to get to you. This is often a lot lower than your download speed.

So ... whilst you may have a much larger capacity from the NAS, compared to normal download from the internet (like a one drive account), it may be slower.
 
Thanks for your long reply Donnie.
I knew what you meant when you said wired, I miss my Ethernet socket, just when I needed one. I also understand your concernes with bottlenecking when moving large quantities of data, thats something I had not heard before.
So, having said that what could you recommend to me, in fact it was the Synology DS218J or the WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra which I was thinking of. I have seen too much info on Youtube so Im sinking fast.
 
hermes said:
the Synology DS218J
Click to expand...

When I was doing my homework last year the Synology was the more professional unit with a great front end in a web browser and the Phone APPs are excellent.
It's also very easy to give somebody access to a folder to get stuff from or give them a folder to upload to.
eg My bands Sound Man records our rehearsal sessions and as I'm on my way home he is uploading the files onto the Synology and the rest of the band also have access to it (obviously not at the moment).
 
If you already have Onedrive, you can set a Synology to sync with it using the 'Cloud Sync' app available on them. Therefore when you're out and about, you can upload your files to your one drive remotely, and your Synology NAS will download them rather than having to arrange direct access to the NAS (although you can do that too).

I have a Synology DS213+ (2-bay) for personal use, I use it as a general storage drive, Plex server for streaming films around the house, and it backs up my Mac via Time Machine and I have absolute no faults with it.

I suggest getting a 4-bay option due to your capacity requirements, and fill it with 2x8TB drives to give you 8TB on RAID1 with redundancy and room to expand if required.
 
Thanks Scythe, I see your logic about getting a 4-bay unit to future proof it to a degree. Are you talking about a Synology DiskStation DS418, that seems the basic next level after the 2-bay units?. What HD's would you recommend, WD Red or Seagate Irinwolf?. Pardon my ignorance, if I put 2x8TB's in, had it running for while, what happens if I were to add 2 more 2x8TB's into the unit?. Would it turn the entire thing into 1x4 drive 8TB over all 4 drives?.

Thanks for your help
 
Generally, a pair of drives are in RAID 1, so they are mirrors of each other holding the same data on each. 2x 8TB drives will give you a capacity of 8TB - but it gives you an element of redundancy.

The normal approach would be to add another 2 drives in their own RAID 1 pair as well. So thats another 8TB added to the total capacity.

As for getting 2 bay or 4 bay ... I'm hitting the limit of my 2 bay now, and thinking about changing up, but looking at an older server instead, but thats for a different thread.
 
hermes said:
So would 4x8TB be seen as 1x 8TB Raid 1?, thats what Im not sure of, does it spread the Raid 1 across the 4 drives?
Click to expand...

SexyGreyFox said:
You can set it up to be 32TB with no backup or what most would suggest would be 16TB with a backup.
That's a quick answer, others will tell you what you need to do.
Click to expand...

Fox is correct.

Using 4 x 8TB drives gives you several options:
4x 8TB storage pools (32 TB) with no back up
2x 16TB storage pools with 1 drive per pool as back up
1 x 8TB storage pool with 3 drives as back up.

Generally if you're setting up in RAID 1, you would use 1 drive redundancy so you'd opt for the 2x16TB option to give you a balance of storage capacity and redundancy.
 
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