23Sep Running out of storage space. Looking for NAS recommendations.
I’ve slowly been upgrading my storage situation over the last few months. As of right now 2TB of footage and photos are saved on a raid 1 array in my main desktop and another 1.5TB of the same type of critical files are saved on my second work station in the same manner.
Everything is backed up, but it’s not the most efficient use of hard drive space, and if I need to access some of those files I have to make sure the other desktop is on. I’d like to move all that storage to a NAS running raid 6, this should give me the proper combination of storage and backup. With a little over 8TB of storage that should be plenty of room to grow over the next 2 or 3 years.
I know some of you have already made the jump to NAS storage, so I’m looking for some input. Right now I’m leaning towards a Synology deskstation DS1511 or 1512 with five 3TB drives. All said and done I’ll probably end up spending $1200 between the cost of drives and the NAS. If any of you have any lower priced ideas or better recommendations I’d love to hear them. Thanks in advance for the input.
September 23rd, 2012 at 11:10 pm
Hey Deejay you might want to take a look at
http://www.drobo.com/products/professionals/drobo-fs/index.php
This is the unit I’m considering. Don’t know if it’ll come in under 1,200 though once you buy drives to stick in.
It has benefits that go beyond the capabilities of a RAID system.
September 23rd, 2012 at 11:15 pm
I’m quite happy now with my Thecus N4200eco NAS. Since I got cheaper 3tb drives from seagate broken I only go WD caviar black drives in Raid1 pairs. My iMac an MBP only have SSD drives. Asside of that I also have a 512GB SSD external drive for editing. The NAS is purely backup….
I like the fact that I just have to hookup memory cards to the NAS to start copy it to it. Than I put it on the right place of the NAS and to the external SSD for starting edits…
September 23rd, 2012 at 11:16 pm
Yet I would also look into Drobo right now. Just because of its ease of use… My NAS is not good for editing on…
September 24th, 2012 at 9:13 am
I’ve heard a lot of negative feed back from people I’ve worked with that use Drobo units. Lots of lockups, returns, and poor customer service. I’ll take a look at that Thecus N4200eco unit it looks very affordable.
September 24th, 2012 at 1:56 am
I’m currently using this (not a nas) with 20pcs of HDD:s. This was best solution for my groving up business. No storage is never enough. And with prices going down, i dont have to pay any extra in advantage. http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=119
September 24th, 2012 at 4:37 am
I’m very happy with my Synology NAS. The 15* you have a look at also leave enough room for future extension (with the corresponding DX up to 15 hard drives) and are also quite powerful, resulting in relatively high transfer speeds – pretty sure speedier than the cheap solutions from firms like Buffalo or WD.
September 24th, 2012 at 10:30 am
Looking at the specs, Synology is listing 160 MB/sec write and 180 MB/sec read speeds for a 5 drive raid 6 setup. If the speeds are anywhere close to that you could probably work on small projects right from the NAS, assuming you have a good switch and cat 6 cable.
September 24th, 2012 at 7:29 am
I’ve been using a Drobo FS for a while now and I’m super happy. It does everything I need it to do very well and their customer support is exceptional.
September 24th, 2012 at 8:15 am
Have had very good luck with the Synology DS1511 loaded to the gills with 3TB drives. Actually set one up for a Media Arts college for class materials and their giant sound effects library, they’re very happy with it.
Was considering Drobos for down-the-line expandability, but Synology has a feature called SmartRAID that basically allows the same thing – two disk redundancy a la RAID6, but you can swap the drives for bigger ones down the road and have it automatically rebuild and give you more space.
The DS1511 can also be hooked up to two expansion chassis (I think the part number is DX510?) to add up to another ten drive bays (five per chassis), if you really need to add storage.
Their web-accessible OS is also really nice to use (their website has a demo site you can play with, it’s impressive in that it doesn’t feel like a website, it feels like a desktop OS), and it has many, many, many features beyond just file-serving.
September 24th, 2012 at 2:41 pm
I have been contemplating a Synology NAS for a while as well. The Web-accessible OS looks great. They also have a full suite of highly rated iOS/Android Apps to play movies/music from your NAS or just access the files.
~125MB/s is the max transfer rate in a gigabit connection. The way they get beyond that is by using link aggregation. This uses 2 gigabit cables in tandem and requires a network switch that supports it.
Tom’s Hardware has some nice benchmarks:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/multi-bay-nas-charts-2011/benchmarks,121.html
September 24th, 2012 at 3:19 pm
I saved a ton of cash building my own server and running freeNAS on it. Basicly any computer can be turned into NAS box but I built a system specificly for it cost me 300 dollars and I’m running 12tb of storage which cost more obviously.
September 24th, 2012 at 8:19 pm
Are there hardware limitations on what freeNAS supports. I have a few old desktops laying around, but i’m all out of raid controllers.
September 25th, 2012 at 10:09 am
There are some limitations but I built an old duelcore system with no issues. The forums are full of great resources and is a good community. Also freeNAS is built on FreeBSD so you can get a list of what’s compatible and what is not. It also supports software raid so you can mismatch different drives. My first attempt to test it was an old P4 with 3 250gb drive after a month of testing it I was satisfied and built a dedicated server for it.
September 25th, 2012 at 10:52 am
Hmm, I have a couple of old P4 boards laying around, maybe I’ll slap something together with my left over 500GB drives and test it out to see how I like it. It would probably save me a couple hundred over the synology box I was looking at. I’ll check out the freeBSD hardware support list and see what I can find out. Thanks for the heads up.
September 25th, 2012 at 4:35 pm
I think I’ve found an even more affordable FreeNAS solution. I found an old 4 bay WHS box for $100. I’ll see if I can get FreeNAS running on that and drop in a NIC if I can’t get the on board adapter working. I wonder if that will cap my hard drive size to 2tb per drive. Guess I’ll have to do some more research.
September 24th, 2012 at 9:21 pm
I’ve been using this great company, MacGurus. They have many options for “roll your own raids”. The customer service can’t be beat and the 1st raid I bought back in 04 is still chugging along with all the original drives. We used (3) 2 drive FW 800 hot swap-able boxes on the Outdoor Chanel show “Adventure Guides: Fishing Edition” that I edited and Post Supervised without one glitch as well as (4) 5 bay, 15TB SATA boxes on “Best Parks Ever” & “Thousand Ultimate Experiences” for the BBC/Lonely Planet/Travel Chanel. Rick and his staff know their stuff and call back to check on you. That’s rare these days!
They’ve got great articles on drives/raids/controller cards – anything and everything storage. You won’t be disappointed!
Kind Regards,
Chris
http://www.macgurus.com
September 29th, 2012 at 1:38 am
Definatly, go for DSM 1511 or 1512 !
I own a 1511 + 5 x 2Tb hard drives, it has a lot of sharing features, even over the internet. Speed transferts are one of the bests.
Raid 5 (i tested it cause i got a HD with bad sectors, reconstruction is just AUTOMATIC when you change the bad drive !)
You can connect a usb UPS so your DSM151x power down properly in case of power loss
You can connect 2 LANS: speed-up transferts (with the right switch) or use 2 diferent lans
A lot of great software included and, for me a important thing, firmware updates every 3-6 months !
Yes, this is a 5 stars NAS. You can try the DSM (admin panel) on Synology’s website to see all features available concretly.
It’s a profesional way to backup your data and comes with secure and handy capabilities.
Regards
Christophe