[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What type of personal NAS would you recommend?
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Ask HN: What type of personal NAS would you recommend?
It's 2021 and I am still using my home-built NAS (FreeNAS!), but I
am increasingly interested in reducing energy consumption and
maintenance time (mostly to improve compatibility with the family
life, which leaves me less time to tinker with hardware). So I
humbly ask the hivemind: - what are good solutions for storing
personal backup on-site (other than a bunch of external hard
drives)? - What are some caveats that I should avoid? - Can I
trust the 'standard' companies (Synology, QNAP, Seagate, ...) to
keep my data sufficiently safe? Strong opinions, war stories, and
all other suggestions are highly welcome!
Author : Topolomancer
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-09-03 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
| zelon88 wrote:
| I made HRCloud2 [1] a couple years ago. I intend to give it some
| love once I'm done with some other projects.
|
| [1] https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2
| deeblering4 wrote:
| I'm currently speccing out my NAS upgrade and plan to go with
| ODROID HC2 using a scale out filesystem. I plan to test both
| cephfs and glusterfs, although I have more experience with the
| latter.
|
| This is a different NAS model, in that each hard drive has its
| own micro server attached. Which I like, because it means that I
| won't be constrained by a NAS chassis, and it mitigates a lot of
| single points of failure. Plus it will scale in both performance
| and capacity as I add drives.
|
| The HC2 costs about 50 bucks each, so it's the cost of a drive,
| +$50 and some maintenance overhead to keep the small cluster
| running. Starting off with 2 or 4 drives it's cheaper than most
| comparable synology or similar traditional NAS and for my use
| case is far more robust and flexible.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| There's 101 interesting solutions out there, but for me, Unraid
| looks like a really appealing community and offers the ability to
| tinker more than others.
|
| If you want more of a "set it and forget it" simple approach, the
| big players you listed (Synology and others) can work amazingly
| well.
| AnthonyUK wrote:
| Whatever you choose, buy two if your data is real important or
| replicate to the cloud.
|
| I use Synology with one box having 4 disks in RAID5 and the
| second having one large disk with the most important data
| replicated over.
| peter-m80 wrote:
| Build a cheap PC with linux, you can do everything a Nas does and
| much, much more. Way more powerful and you can upgrade to dozens
| of hard drives. That's what I did some months ago.
| subjectsigma wrote:
| I am quite happy with my Synology DS920+. I mostly use it for
| backup and hosting Docker containers. I was surprised by how much
| software is produced by Synology itself and either comes included
| with the machine or is available as a package - LDAP, WebDAV,
| SQL, Plex, replication/cloning/backups, and a host of other
| services.
|
| One thing that surprised me was RAID - I am not very experienced
| with home servers and such and was really disheartened by how
| much of my disk got eaten up by RAID. I was using the Synology
| Hybrid RAID which I think is similar to RAID 5.
|
| TL;DR Synology is pricey but full featured and very pleasant,
| understand your RAID configuration before you purchase disks.
|
| EDIT: Another thing I will say is that docker compose is not
| supported IIUC, so just watch out for that if your configuration
| depends on that (like mine initially did).
| theweissy wrote:
| I've been happy with my Synology DS218+ as well. I use it to
| host some Docker containers for home automation and some other
| things, both with and without Docker compose (need to use the
| CLI to get compose working).
|
| The one thing that burned me recently is DSM version 7 removed
| support for any USB device that's not a mass storage device.
| This effectively kills a lot of what I love about the Synology.
| Next time I'll probably roll my own.
| davidgerard wrote:
| I became very unhappy with Synology when I discovered that boot
| loading was signed, and I couldn't just put Debian on this box
| that was running a hugely overweight customised Ubuntu with
| background services that were difficult or impossible to switch
| off.
|
| The NAS is an underpowered DS216 (two 5.25" drives mirrored,
| 800MHz ARM, 256MB RAM) that I'd bought new, foolishly assuming
| the official OS would work just fine on it. More fool me, eh?
|
| I still have the device - but I am never buying another, and I
| actively disrecommend Synology going forward.
|
| My next NAS box will probably be an old Microserver running
| FreeNAS or some reasonable OS. The Synology's predecessor was a
| tiny Linux box that I had to install my desired services on by
| hand, so I know it's feasible.
| danudey wrote:
| I also have a Synology and it kind of blows me away how much
| stuff is just... available. And whatever isn't available you
| can install via Docker pretty easily.
|
| One thing to watch out for is upgradability. My system has 4 GB
| of RAM, which is Not A Lot. There's an easily-accessible SODIMM
| slot that I can throw an 8 GB stick into, and an almost-
| completely-inaccessible SODIMM slot with the original 4 GB. If
| you're going to have slow disks you'll need lots of disk cache,
| and maxing out mine is looking to be a full afternoon project
| and not a quick in-and-out.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > I am not very experienced with home servers and such and was
| really disheartened by how much of my disk got eaten up by
| RAID. I was using the Synology Hybrid RAID which I think is
| similar to RAID 5.
|
| SHR1/2 is basically RAID 5/6 but with a mechanism for handling
| disks that have different sizes. Basically it breaks the disks
| up into partitions such that any "extra" space on other disks
| becomes part of another array which is only redundant within
| the disks that have that space.
|
| Anyways, SHR1 is 1 disk redundancy so you should see
| (disk_count * space_per_disk) - space_per_disk for an array
| where all the disks are the same size. SHR2 has 2 disk
| redundancy and I'm sure you can figure out the math for that.
| Are you not seeing the expected amount?
|
| For the record, I like synology. They keep updating old
| hardware for an incredibly long time. My parents have my old
| DS212j (release 11/2011) and it can run the latest DSM 6.
| You-Are-Right wrote:
| https://www.openmediavault.org
| infogulch wrote:
| My 'storage solution' up to this point has been 'random disks in
| a desktop tower' and I was doing some research just this morning
| for upgrading to a more complete local solution.
|
| My use-cases: primary storage device for home lab, computer/phone
| backup server for myself and extended family, media server, self-
| hosted web archive, general self-hosted services.
|
| My preferences: I don't like the direction that Synology is
| trending in (i.e. the same direction as Ubiquiti) / I don't like
| that it's proprietary. I really like the idea of using ZFS. I
| don't want to spend a ton of time designing building and
| debugging a custom system.
|
| That leads me to the IX Systems Mini X [0], a 5+2-bay integrated
| system with FreeBSD-based TrueNAS OS (successor/rename of
| FreeNAS). One of the X+ models comes with dual 10GbE which is
| pretty nice for future-proofing. So my current homelab plan is:
| Mini X+: 8 core, 64 GB, 2x10GbE - $1600 5x 6TB WD Red
| Plus (in zfs-raidz1 for 24TB net capacity) - $650 1x
| 480GB Kingston DC1000B M.2 PCIE-3.0 enterprise SSD
| with power loss protection (PLP) as a SLOG/write-cache - $130
| MikroTik RB5009UG+S+IN router-switch [1] with 1x10Gb SFP+,
| 1x2.5GbE, 7x1GbE - $185 Encrypted backup from NAS to
| rsync.net using Borg [2][3], maybe raw ZFS snapshots for certain
| workloads (databases). Total: $2565 Monthly:
| internet - $70 (1GB) - $100 (2GB), remote backup: $10 (initial) -
| $80 (half capacity)
|
| That's my current plan anyways. Feedback welcome.
|
| [0]: https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/
|
| [1]: https://mikrotik.com/product/rb5009ug_s_in#fndtn-gallery
|
| [2]: https://www.borgbackup.org/
|
| [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997856
| mindslight wrote:
| Similar, but different: I'd recommend assembling your own
| machine (you get to pick your own case), Supermicro A2SDI for a
| low power motherboard, CRS326/CRS328/CRS309/CRS317 for switches
| (listed in increasing number of 10GbE ports), and routing on
| the A2SDI or another low power amd64 board.
|
| Storage wise I'd either shrink your requirements for simplicity
| (eg two 14TB spindles in a simple mirror), or go for larger
| capacity with larger drives. 6TB drives seem small for a new
| deployment. Also, I'd do more than raidz1 to prevent against
| cascading failures on rebuild.
|
| I'm coming from a different place where I view vanilla Linux as
| a positive (hence the router), but my constraints give you a
| different datapoint to consider. If I could find an inexpensive
| quiet 10GbE switch that was OpenFlow capable to punt switching
| policy to my Linux router, I'd be using that instead of
| Mikrotik.
| infogulch wrote:
| Maybe I'm not weighting the management complexity of running
| different OSes for different devices high enough.
|
| If I upgrade to 2 Gbit internet (recently offered by Google
| Fiber in my area) a motherboard with only 1GbE would be
| annoyingly limiting (though I suppose a PCIE card could fix
| that). I was looking at the RB5009UG because it's relatively
| powerful (cpu,mem,storage) and has that 2.5GbE to cover my
| line upgrade, and I could pair it with a CRS305 or CRS309 if
| I need more 10G switching in the future. Though I admit that
| a clearer delineation between router and switch might be
| nice.
|
| I chose 6TB because it's enough to cover my immediate use and
| it's the lowest $/TB right now (net 24TB is ~4x my current
| capacity and I've been kinda cramped). The idea is to upgrade
| to 14TB drives when it's full for a net 56TB. I guess the
| questions are: How much do I care about the upfront cost
| difference? ($650 vs $2000) How long before I fill up 24TB?
| (1/2y?) What will the price of 14TB be when I get there?
| (<$1300 total?) How much value am I getting from upgrading to
| new drives? (MTBF) How much trouble will it be to upgrade?
| I'm honestly not sure how to weigh these.
|
| Is it 'get to pick your own case' or 'have to pick your own
| case, power supply, memory, motherboard, cooling fans,
| assemble wire and test it, ...', though I guess these are two
| sides of the same coin. I'm not afraid of assembling PCs from
| parts (I've used my own PCs for 10+ years), but if I'm paying
| a $400 premium for eliminating 20+h of the above tasks + a 1y
| warranty that doesn't seem like a bad deal to me. Though now
| that you bring it up I might downgrade to the $1200 Mini X
| and add a $200 SFP+ card myself.
|
| Thanks for weighing in. :)
| traceroute66 wrote:
| As always with tech its : Speed. Quality. Price. Pick Two.
|
| You have carefully omitted your budget. Your budget will likely
| ultimately determine your options.
|
| Otherwise I'll tell you to get a 10Gb switch and build a five
| node CEPH cluster. :-)
| 3np wrote:
| > build a five node CEPH cluster. :-)
|
| OP was looking to spend less time, not more :P
| sandreas wrote:
| It depends on your needs, but here is my expierience. I like my
| data encrypted, no cloud and backed up, so my config is:
|
| 1. Intel NUC + Internal 2TB NVME SSD (24/7) -
| Encrypted with LUKS - All-Day-Data like personal Photos,
| Music, Audiobooks shared via SFTP / SMB - Low Power
| consumption + good performance
|
| 2. Dell T20 + 32GB ECC RAM with encrypted ZFS 10TB RAID 1 (wake
| on lan / on demand) - FreeNAS - Backup
| Server for NUC and all other clients - ZFS Snapshots for
| Ransomware protection
|
| 3. Alix APU 4GB with ZFS (24/7, off site at my fathers home)
| - disaster backup for my most important data - sync via zfs
| send with one specific dataset from machine 2
|
| Its pretty low power, but also low on storage - it took a while
| to find out that the data for my all day use is < 2TB. This is
| often not enough for most people...
|
| I can recommend to use an cheap old machine as NAS with ECC RAM
| (a must) and ZFS, like a - Dell T20 - HP
| N54L - HP gen8.
|
| OS can be FreeNAS/TrueNAS, napp-it or another reliable one. I
| never had problems with these and once configured, there is
| hardly any effort to maintain them.
|
| What I don't recommend is: - Raspberry PI based
| (not reliable, slow) - Custom build (expensive, much
| effort)
|
| Soho NAS like Synology are ok-ish, but I don't like them - Bad
| things happend to me. Broken filesystems, damaged files, non-
| working backups, slow performance and so on. But that was a while
| ago, maybe now they are better :-)
| Topolomancer wrote:
| Thanks, really appreciate all those details! Guess a NUC looks
| awesome---that plus FreeNAS with 2 drives essentially replaces
| my current setup but in a much nicer form.
|
| (I share your reservations wrt. Synology; it's working for my
| parents so far but I like the extra degree of control)
| tyingq wrote:
| I had a terrible experience with the Western Digital products[1],
| and a much better one with Synology. The nice thing about going
| with product from a vendor, versus building your own, is that
| they provide a lot of niceties that aren't easy to maintain
| yourself. Like...
|
| - Whatever crazy tunneling and so forth that they do so that I
| can access the admin interface over the internet regardless of
| how brain-dead my home ISP router is. Synology is very good at
| this.
|
| - Mobile apps that make it fairly easy to do stuff like "sync any
| photos after I take them to the NAS, but only when the phone is
| on WiFi, and optionally delete it from the phone after the sync
| is confirmed.".
|
| Also worth looking at with Synology is their support for really
| cheap offsite backup, like Backblaze B2. I was able to set
| something up to protect against say, a house fire, and be
| selective about what I was sending, and it's something like
| $1/month for that peace of mind.
|
| [1] For example, it's fairly easy to mostly brick them and the
| recovery process is having to send hand-crafted/altered ICMP
| packets to it during boot and hope that coaxes it into a BOOTP
| mode. They are also quite underpowered and just go unresponsive
| for minutes at a time. The WD products are awful all around.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| I think I was in a similar situation as you - after having a kid
| my already dwindling time and appetite to play with backups waned
| even further. I ended up buying a Synology DS418j NAS a couple
| years ago and it's been adequate. I wouldn't quite rave about it,
| but I also haven't experienced anything better.
|
| I've thrown tens of thousands of photos at it, and my only
| complaint there is the background processing to generate
| thumbnails is very slow, especially with "Live Photos" from
| iPhones (which are essentially photos with short videos
| attached). If I upload a couple thousand of those, the NAS might
| not finish generating the thumbnails for over day, so if you
| browse using the apps Synology provides for photos, you just see
| lots of placeholders for a while.
|
| I did have a (SeaGate IronWolf) disk fail on me already, and the
| NAS did it's thing correctly - it made audible beeping alerts
| (which were definitely attention getting as the NAS had never
| played a sound prior to that). When I swapped in a new disk I was
| easily able to instruct the NAS to add it to the RAID array and
| recover, and everything was back to healthy pretty quickly.
|
| If I were to shop for a replacement I'd be tempted to look for
| something with a beefier CPU as the thumbnail generation thing is
| occasionally annoying. But honestly the CPU is mostly idle most
| of the time, so if I did get a more powerful NAS the CPU would
| probably be idle 99.9% of the time instead of 99% of the time.
| dubyabee2 wrote:
| Well for a whole home I don't recommend and WD cloud products,
| they don't have the performance and cross-platform protocols that
| make sense for more than 1 computer.
|
| I always comeback to FreeNAS, which I have had configured various
| ways. I recently updated all my core hardware to mac mini so it
| has power/sleep modes that save that energy consumption...however
| payback is a lot longer than a PC..
|
| In the end it will always be a challenge of performance vs.
| energy consumption.
| mikestew wrote:
| Others have already sung the praises of Synology boxes, so I
| won't repeat (and do a worse job of it) what has already been
| said. But I will say this, the DS410 in the garage is still
| plugging away after all these years. How many years? The last two
| digits of Synology model numbers represent the year they were
| made. Eleven years of hourly Mac backups, document and picture
| storage, and I paid the eye-watering sum for the camera storage
| license, so cameras are hitting disks all day, too. Without
| looking, there are four of what I believe to be WD Greens, and
| I've had just the one die. Still have a backup in the closet that
| I've never used. (Granted, drive longevity probably has little to
| do with the NAS brand.)
|
| Yeah, it's slow, long in the tooth, and maybe I should replace it
| this year. But I'll replace it with another Synology.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I have a very similar story with a Netgear ReadyNAS nv+ that
| has been running for about 10 years. I put 4x 2TB disks into it
| on RAID 5, and have a spare sitting in a box in case I get a
| failure. Daily offsite backup. Not a single issue over the
| years. I have ssh, and it's just Debian under the hood, so I've
| added a bunch of extra stuff to it.
|
| I have no idea what I'd use nowadays. As someone pointed out,
| if the box itself dies, I'm screwed. I _think_ it uses mdadm
| under the hood, but that 's a guess. Maybe I'd just buy a mini
| ITX barebones that holds 4 drives, boot off a usb stick that
| runs FreeNAS and configure the disks in a simple 2x2 mirror.
| JeremyHerrman wrote:
| I've had my Synology DS918+ for about a year, and overall I've
| been happy with it except for one huge mess with encrypted
| folders completely wrecking my Dropbox for a few weeks. Here's
| what happened:
|
| I wanted to have a backup of my Dropbox on my NAS, so I used
| Synology's CloudSync service to back up to an encrypted folder.
| Unfortunately Synology's encryption actually encrypts each file
| individually, which Dropbox happily syncs to all of the computers
| that use that Dropbox, making all of those files unusable!
|
| In the end, I had to write a script that detected which files
| were encrypted (files start with `__CLOUDSYNC_ENC__`), then use a
| WINDOWS ONLY decryption utility provided by Synology to decrypt
| and finally get back to a clean state. Then I wrote another
| script to move the decrypted files back into the proper path in
| Dropbox while correcting the newly decrypted files with the
| original metadata (creation date) from the encrypted bad files.
| What a pain!!
|
| I'm still not sure of a good way to achieve my original goal of
| backing up Dropbox while still protecting my data with
| encryption. Let me know if anyone has a solution!
| hikarudo wrote:
| Couldn't you have simply restored the original files via the
| Dropbox web UI?
| coretx wrote:
| zfs and rsync on FreeBSD
| t0bia_s wrote:
| I use QNAP with 2 HDD's. One for media (it has HDMI, so it is
| great for Kodi) and second for backup of my main HDD from PC. I
| don't trust RAID, so I use SW solution for regular backup (Bvckup
| 2 - it has nice UI btw).
|
| Today I would probably buy NAS with 4 slots to run Nextcloud.
| btach wrote:
| Perhaps not an answer that fits your criteria, but I have been
| using FreeNAS for several years now. My configuration was simple
| - SMB with a few jails running Gitea and Syncthing (and other
| misc self-hosted things off and on). Haven't had to touch the
| config in years -- only tinkering was for the sake of tinkering,
| not maintaining. So I got started when I only wanted to tinker
| and experiment. Bought an _old_ Core2Duo motherboard and put 8GB
| DDR2 RAM on it. 2 3TB hard drives plus an old laptop hard drive
| for the FreeNAS install. ZFS mirror. Few years later the
| motherboard stopped working (not sure the problem, all capacitors
| seemed fine by my multimeter). Data recovery was relatively easy.
| I have a SATA- >USB converter meant for smaller laptop hard
| drives. I connected one of the desktop hard drives to it by a
| SATA cable with the plastic on one end cut away to expose the
| pins (to turn it from female to male) and fit it in the USB
| converter and the unmolested end to the HD. Powered the HD from
| my power supply with a normal SATA power cable. Hooked it up to
| my laptop (with ZFS on it, of course) and bam! Was able to
| recover files. I didn't touch the setup for a while, but finally
| I bought an older Supermicro motherboard for its inexpense and
| ECC compatibility, got 2 CPUs to place, some ECC, and connected
| the original hard drives to it. Nearly plug-and-play. FreeNAS was
| able to resume from where I left off when the previous
| motherboard died. Updated to latest (as it had been a couple
| years!) and didn't have to fiddle with the config. Maybe not
| power efficient like you were asking, but I'm happy with it.
| That's my NAS "war story" -- a mild one, anyway.
| andy800 wrote:
| This advice makes me extremely unpopular in NAS forums, but I
| strongly recommend you never use any other RAID option than
| RAID-1. When a disk goes bad, you have a single mirror disk that
| you can directly and immediately connect to your computer and
| recover from. With any of the NAS proprietary RAIDs, or something
| like RAID-5, you'll need to somehow hook up 3 or 5 disks to your
| computer to have any chance of a recovery.
|
| The NAS gurus always say "RAID is not a backup", and it is true
| you should have additional backups. But no backup solution is
| perfect, none get updated every day, especially if you plan on
| keeping the backup off-site. For most users, the NAS _is_ the
| backup. All I 'm saying is that when a disk fails on your NAS,
| you'll be in panic mode and will want the easiest, most direct
| path to data recovery, and there is no RAID option in this
| scenario preferable than RAID-1.
| joshAg wrote:
| For most people I agree with that. Heck, that's basically what
| I'm doing with my vdevs, since they're all mirrors.
|
| But I think there's a semi-common exception: people who are
| using ZFS where they are maxing out the drives their enclosure
| can hold (or have a plan for that expansion). In that case,
| sure, fine, use raidz1 or raidz2 (with a hot or cold spare),
| because the rebuild commands are the same.
| amelius wrote:
| With RAID-5 your system still functions when a drive breaks.
| With RAID-6, two drives can fail without causing problems.
| andy800 wrote:
| RAID-1 always survives a single drive failure too, and it can
| also survive 2 (or more) disks failing, if they aren't two
| mirrors of each other (not that I would wait to allow that to
| happen). But what about when the NAS itself fails (and they
| almost all do, just read the forums)?
| doubled112 wrote:
| This is why I've always used either Linux RAID or ZFS.
|
| If the RAID is in software I can slap those disks into
| anything (like my desktop) and keep going.
|
| If the RAID is NAS specific or on hardware, well, now you
| need something specific.
|
| Of course you should have backups too, but why add
| something that will make your life more complicated in an
| already stressful time?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Synology at least just uses mdadm and lvm under the hood,
| so any Linux box can read its volumes.
| aborsy wrote:
| How about Synology SHR? Do you need DSM to rebuild?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| What SHR does is take the smallest disk size and create
| partitions of that size across all disks and raid them
| together, then take the second smallest disk size and
| create partitions across all disks with at least that
| much space and raid them together, then finds the third
| smallest, etc. [0]
|
| It's all still just lvm partitions and mdadm.
|
| > Do you DSM to rebuild?
|
| Depends what you mean. If a disk fails, I hot-swap a
| replacement in and press the volume rebuild button in the
| GUI.
|
| [0] https://kb.synology.com/en-
| my/DSM/tutorial/What_is_Synology_...
| [deleted]
| mindslight wrote:
| Mirroring is a good recommendation for simplicity, but you're
| half touching upon two different aspects.
|
| 1. Think about the contents of your bare disks, in terms of
| what is required to read them. Lots of RAID-1 will stick
| headers at the start of the disk (including Linux software raid
| by default, iirc). Using ZFS mirroring will necessitate the use
| of ZFS to read it, and so on. I prefer using only Free software
| raid for this reason, while opting to make myself reliant on
| Linux/ZFS.
|
| 2. Mirroring is much simpler for the sake of
| rebuilds/performance, and if you're looking for a simple
| hassle-free setup that's the way to go. I've got a 4+3 raidz3
| for my main array, not even for capacity's sake but rather for
| redundancy's sake (it was going to be a 3+3 until I realized
| how ZFS deals out chunks). But I realize that's going to be a
| hassle if I do start getting correlated disk failures (I've
| also got true backups).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > you'll need to somehow hook up 3 or 5 disks to your computer
| to have any chance of a recovery
|
| If you are using only 2 disks, the only reasonable options are
| 0 or 1. So, you are saying that 0 is too unreliable, what I
| think nobody will disagree.
|
| But when you have enough disks, RAID 6 is a no-brainier.
| cpach wrote:
| Seems like very reasonable advice to me.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| RAID-1, RAID-10, RAID-5, RAID-6, etc. none offer protection
| against an accidental `rm -rf`.
|
| With that in mind, the NAS is not the backup. Once a file is
| deleted, it's gone.
|
| With regard to recovering from a RAID-5 dual disk failure,
| typically a USB 2x sata toaster is enough to connect the failed
| disk and the replacement disk to a system that can run a
| ddrescue to clone the failed disk. Often times disks that are
| ejected from a RAID array still have enough life left to copy
| data off very slowly (over several tries/passes)
|
| For backup, a simple solution is connecting very large external
| USB3 disk(s) and running daily rsync hardlink backups. There
| are several scripts to do this, and it's quite low effort to
| maintain after its set up.
| andy800 wrote:
| Yep, exactly, all the home users know what a sata toaster is
| and a ddrescue and a rsync hardlink script. No problem!
| tommiegannert wrote:
| > With that in mind, the NAS is not the backup. Once a file
| is deleted, it's gone.
|
| Snapshots can be used to catch that failure mode, so I don't
| think this is universally true. Whether there actually are
| NASes that would have snapshottable file systems out of the
| box... Is there?
| cpach wrote:
| There is!
|
| https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Synology supports snapshots if you choose to use BTRFS, but
| it also lets you enable recycle bins so you can recover
| things you deleted.
| tyingq wrote:
| Note that not all the Synology products support BTRFS....
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Right, but the recycle bin is universal, just to clarify.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I have a Readynas (now owned by netgear) 'prosumer'-ish nas. 6
| bays desktop form factor. It's great, i replaced an older
| readynas (pre-netgear) which i got about ~10 years out of. It's
| actually functional except for the power supply. I couldn't find
| a replacement fast enough for my needs so I upgraded, bodged a
| normal pc power supply to do a data transfer. It was so old I
| couldn't just put the old drives in the new chasis and preserve
| the data.
| 3np wrote:
| It would help a lot to reduce the scope by knowing some
| requirements you may have in terms of storage size/number of
| disks/specs/performance/features/integrations/etc.
|
| Without knowing anything else, for a small and power-efficient
| setup I can recommend the Odroid HC4 with Armbian (manually
| upgraded to Bullseye; Bullseye builds are currently broken but
| building Buster and then upgrading works fine) and a ZFS mirror
| of whatever SATA drives you choose. I use one as a backup sink.
|
| https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/
|
| As for drives, I've been committing myself for Toshiba recently.
| They have a good reputation for reliability/durability and
| reasonable cost-performance.
|
| If you're going for SSDs, that market segment is in a bit of
| constant flux.
|
| For something beefier and way more extendable I've been writing
| about my experiences with ASROCK RACK's X570 boards here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28302303
|
| Though, from what I understand you may get lower idle power
| consumption from the right Intel CPU/chipset combo than AMD
| Ryzens as of now. This is just something I gathered from others'
| remarks and not something I researched or benchmarked properly
| myself so take that with a grain of salt.
|
| I never used a prebuilt QNAP/Synology but I'm curious what it is
| that takes time for you these days that you hope to cut down on?
| A DIY can be pretty much as fire-and-forget once you have it set
| up and on the flip side you still have plenty of room for
| tinkering with containers and whatnot on Synology et al... Like,
| is there ongoing maintenance you have to do on your FreeNAS box
| just to keep things in place or is it more a personal tendency to
| keep changing things that makes it never ending?
| Topolomancer wrote:
| Thanks, that's really helpful! I have relatively mild specs in
| mind---was thinking of probably having 2 x 1 TB RAID 1 or
| something.
|
| The main reservation I had for going DIY is that there's a lot
| of initial building involved (getting hardware that works well
| together etc.) whereas Synology et al. is more like 'plug and
| play.' However, I revised that opinion whilst reading that
| thread, primarily because I learned about NUCs and other such
| alternatives. I know myself very well, though, and I know that
| if there's a fully-fledged OS, I am bound to change stuff, try
| out new things, etc., when in reality all I should be doing is
| making backups :D
| cpach wrote:
| Synology seems like a good choice to me. Rarely heard a bad word
| about them. I consider going DIY to save a few nickels but if I
| had a larger NAS budget I would definitely go for Synology.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Whatever your needs, consider separating by function.
|
| If you want something simple and standalone that just works, buy
| a MacMini and a DAS.
|
| If you need a cold storage backup server that you only boot once
| a month, build that.
|
| If you want something that you can assign to a Windows domain and
| scale, maybe some Intel NUCs would work.
|
| A netbooted, POE-enabled Raspberry Pi 4 or two can do quite a
| lot, depending on your needs.
|
| I've use several proprietary consumer NAS products over the
| years, and mostly I've found they make great gifts to friends
| after a year or two.
| pengo wrote:
| We bought our second Synology NAS three years ago, an Intel four
| bay with SSD caching. It's fantastic. Some of Synology's
| ancilliary software is buggy or has missing features, but as a
| backup intermediary (it backs up our backups to cloud storage)
| and file server it's been flawless. Also the apps available for
| multiple platforms make integration with phones and tablets easy
| as well as latop and desktop.
| amelius wrote:
| Why not buy a simple Linux box with a bunch of large harddrives?
| Then you can install whatever you want on it, and you don't have
| any unwanted corporate cruftware preinstalled.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Maintenance isn't free as it takes time to do it. Some just
| want a COTS solution that works.
| tyingq wrote:
| You do end up having to roll your own stuff that the vendors
| like Synology provide. Depending on your ISP and router, for
| example, a reliable way to manage it remotely isn't always
| easy. The Synology setup figures out how to punch holes, make
| reverse tunnels to a Synology owned jump box, etc, in a way
| that you don't have to think about...it just works. Similar for
| the mobile apps to sync photos, integration with various 3rd
| party offsite backups, etc.
|
| All possible to roll your own, of course, but time is money.
| SecureToaster wrote:
| I personally use unRaid, but i also like to tinker, and very much
| have had to tinker with it. I would recommend it if you want
| power, flexiblity, etc. (i personally choose it over FreeNAS for
| the VM's).
|
| My friend however wanted a no hassle solution, he brought
| Synology and it just works, he's never had to mess with it. To
| quote him: "if Apple made a NAS"
| minikites wrote:
| I have an HP Microserver N54L and it's been incredible. I use
| XigmaNAS (similar to FreeNAS) and it's been rock solid for many
| years.
| akvadrako wrote:
| Microserver is the way to go. Same price as dedicated NAS with
| much more power.
|
| The new model is also half the size, still with 4 full size
| drives.
| rkuykendall-com wrote:
| I highly recommend Synology. QNAP and FreeNAS seem really great
| in a lot of ways, but Synology is the solution for people who
| want something solid that takes up as little of their time as
| possible. Avoid Drobo and Seagate.
|
| I would make your first / boot drive a SSD, and put WD Reds in
| the rest, 2 drive redundancy if you want to be super safe.
|
| In addition, I recommend using the built-in cloud backup software
| to backup high-value data to Blackblaze B2.
|
| Happy to answer any other questions.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I recently was comparing. Both QNAP and Synology have demo web
| UIs to try. That was enough for me to stop considering QNAP. It
| was almost like a joke of the worst most annoying UX possible
| with all kinds of alerts popping up and everything inconsistent
| and terrible.
| 3np wrote:
| What makes you recommend WD Red?
|
| Given the history of the WD Red series they should be avoided
| by anyone who cares about data integrity in a NAS.
|
| After the SMR scandal, WD did a rebrand and now any drive with
| any form of promise for NAS use are called WD Red Plus.
|
| I'd go with Toshiba or Seagate Ironwolf.
| joshAg wrote:
| i'd say wd red pluses, not just wd reds.
| 0xabe wrote:
| Another good option according to published Backblaze data[0]
| is HGST.
|
| [0] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html
| altano wrote:
| Seagate Ironwolf is cmr on the lower end line making it
| cheaper than the analogous WD Red Plus line. Given the price
| and that Seagate hasn't _recently_ fucked consumers I would
| recommend those drives instead.
| joshAg wrote:
| Yeah, anything non-SMR and with RAID-focused firmware
| should be fine. For WD specifically that means Red Plus not
| Red, because Red has SMR. Seagate Ironwolves should be just
| fine, but I haven't bought any since the WD version was
| cheaper at the time I was purchasing.
| docflabby wrote:
| I've got one of each (wd red/ironwolf) in my Nas at the
| moment both still going strong 4 years later.
| joshAg wrote:
| If it's 4 years old, that WD Red is from before WD pulled
| the SMR shenanigans.
|
| The TLDR is they switched the WD Red drives from CMR to
| SMR technology without announcing it or noting it on
| drive specifications, and then when they got caught they
| announced the WD Red Plus line which became their
| cheapest CMR drives with NAS -focused firmware.
|
| So before this, WD Red was just fine, but for new
| purchases, we have to specify WD Red Plus, not just WD
| Red.
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/311182-red-alert-
| wd-su...
| sliken wrote:
| Not a fan of the WD reds, they have 10x the error rate
| (according to their spec) of the normal enterprise drives. I
| believe they takes it from one bit error per 120TB read to one
| bit error per 12TB. Not something I want to worry about during
| a RAID rebuild.
| Topolomancer wrote:
| Thanks, that's helpful! What would you recommend for actually
| running the backup? Can I mount a Synology NAS over SSH or
| something? I'd ideally just run my normal backup scripts
| without thinking too deeply about the end point.
| rograndom wrote:
| SSH, NFS, SMB, rsync, pretty much anything. It also has built
| in applications to backup to another synology or S3/glacier.
| Ziggy_Zaggy wrote:
| I 2nd the Synology recommendation.
|
| A solid product with zero regrets (thus far).
| joshAg wrote:
| how much time is freenas administration taking? That's what i
| use, and i barely need to spend time on it, so i'm not sure how
| much time you can save switching. If the issue is power, then you
| can stick with freenas as well just with a very small system. If,
| you just don't want freeNAS and you want something that should be
| more turnkey, any device with 2 drive slots and raid 1, with a
| plug-in or something to automatically sync to backblaze or
| similar will be fine.
|
| Ideally you want to follow 3-2-1 (3 total copies, 2 local, 1
| offsite) for backup, so I'd recommend the following setup:
|
| A small FreeNAS box. Like, 3 hot data drives at most, small. If
| you really want to save on power and are willing to take a hit on
| performance, you can use something as small as a raspberry pi.
| (again, if you don't want freenas, then swap this for anything
| with 2 drives that can RAID 1 and can automatically sync with
| backblaze or similar).
|
| On the local PCs pick a specific folder to back-up instead of
| everything, since you'll only have a small backup.
|
| Personally, I would stay away from anything that isn't ZFS
| backed, but i've heard good things about synology. I wouldn't
| trust any solution from an HDD mfg, because i don't think their
| code is that good for that sort of thing (eg
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/2/22561140/wd-cloud-os-3-sec...)
| tunesmith wrote:
| What if you don't want to hack/tinker and want a Drobo-level
| solution that isn't Drobo? (My Drobo is very old and I don't want
| to upgrade to a new Drobo.)
| kvakvs wrote:
| Running a 2-drive Synology DiskStation, because MacOS backs up
| literally every hour, and shingle storage on NAS drives requires
| data relocation after write, the NAS-type hard drives are noisy
| and LOUD. It will be loud as long as your Macbook or iMac is on
| and is used. On the contrary Windows backs up weekly so its never
| a noise problem when my wife with Macbook is away. This has to be
| hidden somewhere where it won't overheat and also will not bother
| you with clicking/crunching the data.
|
| At this point i have installed it and i stopped looking around
| for other solutions. It works for Windows, it works for Mac, i
| did not try Linux, but i don't really backup my Linux data, its
| all in Github anyway.
|
| Is your data safe? Definitely as safe as 2 NAS-type drives can
| be. Did not experience data loss, but don't trust a comment on
| the internet, look for some research and statistics if you can
| find.
| danaris wrote:
| When you say "loud", what kind of noise are we talking about?
| Is it fans, or just a loud version of the standard "disk
| access" sounds anyone who lived through the pre-SSD era would
| recognize from any hard disk?
| pronoiac wrote:
| I like Synology, but I'd suggest more than two drives, so that
| increasing the size can be done gradually rather than by
| replacing every drive at the same time.
| mindslight wrote:
| What are you currently spending so much maintenance time on? My
| experience with Debian+ZFS is that once you spend some time
| setting it up, it just works. I would think FreeNAS would be
| similar, assuming you pick a straightforward setup. If you want
| to downsize, look into 2 or 3 disk mirror setups and low power
| motherboards.
|
| As for trust, you can trust anybody for anything. _Should_ you is
| a different question. I rest easy knowing there will never be an
| article about a product I critically rely on deciding to sell me
| out. And needing to navigate least-worst commercial options seems
| like a much larger maintenance burden.
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