Storage Expansion Project

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » April 17, 2011, 6:18 am

I keep running out of room on my hard drives but more importantly, I'm getting tired of backing things up.

So I bought one of these:

it's an esata raid box.

I'm not much interested in RAID 5. what I want is RAID 1 which is mirroring. I also want speed which my NAS server wasn't giving me.

I picked up four 2 TB Samsung drives and set up two RAID 1 mirrors. The tower came with a host card with two eSata ports. The RAID is software based. I was a little worried about performance but its more than fast enough as a media server. You could always buy a dedicated raid card if you wanted.

A few comments on the hardware:

It's a Sans Digital Toweraid TR8M-B. There is a newer version TR8M-BP if you want a better card thrown in for 319.00 via Newegg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816111141

I picked up the TR8M-B for 279.00 at my local Fry's. (the four 2TB Samsung drives were 79.00 each)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

BTW, all hard drives/brands have tons of comments about bad ones. Besides drives that are DOA or die quickly, these Samsung HDs have the least complaints. The last HD to die on me was a Western Digital 750GB.

Drivers and documentation are crap. In fact, it came with the wrong drivers. I got the drivers for the card that comes with the TR8M-BP. After figuring this out, I grabbed the drivers and browser based GUI RAID Management Software off the web.

I was concerned about noise, and also build quality for something like this. Well this box is high quality. It was packed extremely well...annoyingly well. The box was lined with air bubble tubing, the case itself was in a bag, and then the case was coated in protective plastic which took forever to get off.

There's one large fan in the back. The entire front is a grill as well as two thin grills on the sides. Lighting choices on this thing are odd. For some reason, the back fan is lit up with blue LEDS...huh? There appears to be absolutely no reason for this. Even nerds aren't going to be looking at the back of their case. The power button lights up orange instead of green which just seems to go away from your standard green for on. The eight LEDs for the Hard Drive bays are good. Green if there's a recognized drive in the bay and orange when there's activity. As it should be, both mirrored drives light up orange when in use.

Now for the important part. This case is super quiet. I have an Antec P180 case which is very quiet and this case is even quieter. I was pleasantly surprised as I thought for sure my decibel level would go up with this. The one large fan pumps a lot of air. I researched all the 2 TB hard drives and the SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM drives came out the winner for reliability and quietness. They also perform well. After popping four of them into the case, I can't hear shit from the case.

The hard drive trays work well. You do need to screw your HDs onto the tray but the locking system works well and there's no cables involved.

Time will tell how well the TowerRaid and hard drives hold up. I've already transferred over some monster files (a few single files over 250 GB in size each) with no trouble and good transfer speeds. I checked the drive temperatures after transferring over about 500 GB and they remained nice and cool. They only seemed to vary less than 5 degrees F between idle and max load.

I counted up 13+ TB of storage space I have. This tower thingy alone can handle 16GB (or 24 TB with 3TB drives and other raid card). I'm just going to mirror everything so will eventually get 4 more 2TB drives.

Some of you may prefer RAID 5 or other. I have enough storage space now. I prefer mirroring so I can grab a HD and go if need to or quit RAID altogether and have my drives usable in non raid mode.

Some of you may recall me posting about other storage stuff I've picked up in the past. I have the original Buffalo Terastation NAS. It cost me 1000.00 for 4X250GB drives for a whopping 1TB. I picked up a 2 Drive LG-NAS that has a Blu Ray burner built into it. That thing is also whisper quiet. Turns out I don't like burning Blu Rays even for data storage! I also bought a 4 HD Hotswappable tray system for my PC which I still have in my Antec P180. I have a couple HDs in there but the thing was really loud with two cheapo mini fans in the back. The fans burned out. I'm running my OS off a 128 GB Corsair SSD.

I think this TowerRaid 8 Bay Case has the capacity to keep me happy and mirror secured so I can start to fade out some of my other HDs and servers. My main PC is always on so having a dedicated NAS box isn't that big a deal although I have 4 TB if needed in my LG-NAS. I can always access my main PC as a server. Having the RAID software based should also help for portability of the Towerraid.

Xatrei · Post by **Xatrei** » April 18, 2011, 10:03 am

Winnow wrote:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

BTW, all hard drives/brands have tons of comments about bad ones. Besides drives that are DOA or die quickly, these Samsung HDs have the least complaints.

Interesting. Before seeing this, I just finished reading through many reviews for different 2 TB HDDs. I settled on the same drive, which I just ordered. I need 3 for my purpose. I'm putting one in each of my xbmc machines (connected to the TVs in my office, living room and bedroom), which are outgrowing their 1 TB drives. I'm not worried about any level of RAID since I use rsync to keep the filesystems of the two wireless machines synced with the wired machine in the office. I don't watch videos via wifi because the best bandwidth I can get in either room without an unsightly antenna is about 20 mbps. That's plenty to synchronize the filesystems as a few videos are added to the collection at a time, but it results in choppy video when viewing HD.

Canelek · Post by **Canelek** » April 18, 2011, 12:29 pm

I'd go 1+0 for data that is accessed often, and another physical RAID 5 for longer-term storage(just for the parity).

Tired of DAS though!

SAN SAN SAN!

This reminds me I should really look into better storage at home.

masteen · Post by **masteen** » April 19, 2011, 4:38 pm

miir wrote:Why wouldn't you want RAID 5 for a storage array? It gives more capacity than RAID 1 or 0+1 with a performance hit I cannot imagine you'll notice.

masteen · Post by **masteen** » April 19, 2011, 4:42 pm

miir wrote:Why wouldn't you want RAID 5 for a storage array? It gives more capacity than RAID 1 or 0+1 with a performance hit I cannot imagine you'll notice.

miir · Post by **miir** » April 19, 2011, 5:03 pm

Why wouldn't you want RAID 5 for a storage array? It gives more capacity than RAID 1 or 0+1 with a performance hit I cannot imagine you'll notice.

masteen · Post by **masteen** » April 19, 2011, 5:51 pm

miir wrote:Why wouldn't you want RAID 5 for a storage array? It gives more capacity than RAID 1 or 0+1 with a performance hit I cannot imagine you'll notice.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » April 19, 2011, 7:01 pm

I explained why I didn't want RAID 5 in my first post. I want exact copies of my drives (that would be MIRROR, RAID 1) I'm a big fan of parity files, etc when it comes to newsgroups but atm,I like being able to have individual hard drives easily removed. Speed isn't a concern or I might to the +1.

Storage space isn't an issue, I can add four more 2 or 3 TB drives if needed.

If someone suggests a Drobo, they need to be shot.

masteen · Post by **masteen** » April 20, 2011, 10:43 am

Isn't the drive unreadable unless you put it back into the same array?

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » April 20, 2011, 11:45 am

masteen wrote:Isn't the drive unreadable unless you put it back into the same array?

Only RAID 1 stores all data on each disk. Although it may depend on the controller, some RAID 1 disks can be read as a single conventional disk. This means a dropped RAID 1 disk, although damaged, can often be reasonably easily recovered using a software recovery program. If the damage is more severe, data can often be recovered by professional data recovery specialists. RAID 5 and other striped or distributed arrays present much more formidable obstacles to data recovery in the event the array fails.

I'm using software based RAID so the controller is not a concern.

Aabidano · Post by **Aabidano** » April 20, 2011, 2:34 pm

I've got a HW SCSI 2 raid card, the mirror sides are readable by themselves.

Wish I'd have seen this earlier, bought a new NAS box a couple months ago, the little bit extra this would have cost me would have been worth it.

valryte · Post by **valryte** » May 5, 2011, 5:57 pm

Besides the reasoning that Winnow gave for not using raid 5 for what he needs, if you ever have to rebuild a large raid 5, you'll want to shoot yourself even if you have a top of the line hardware raid controller. And consider that using standard drives which are prone to higher failure rates, it's something you'd be doing about once a year or so as you get more and more drives. And adding additional drives is another mission. Doing mirrored sets of single drives, while wasting half of your total drive space, is still a simple method for providing redundancy.

My unRaid server is still kicking strong at a current 16.5 TB. It's actually full of 1.5TB drives, so my next step after the last 500GB are used is to either get a bigger case to add 4-8 more drives or build a second server.

Xatrei · Post by **Xatrei** » May 10, 2011, 1:35 pm

If anyone is interested, those 2TB Samsung drives are on sale at newegg for 69.99 with a $10 discount code (EMCKEJK37) until 11:59pm PT on 05/11/2011. Free shipping, too.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » May 10, 2011, 2:14 pm

Xatrei wrote:If anyone is interested, those 2TB Samsung drives are on sale at newegg for 69.99 with a $10 discount code (EMCKEJK37) until 11:59pm PT on 05/11/2011. Free shipping, too.

It's only been 3+ weeks so far but the four 2TB Samsung drives I used in my raid box have been outstanding. Quiet and Cool.

Xatrei · Post by **Xatrei** » May 10, 2011, 5:47 pm

Yeah, mine have only been spinning for a few weeks, but I have no complaints so far. I'm not worried so long as all 3 don't fail at once, and at the moment, you just can't beat the price.

Ransure · Post by **Ransure** » May 12, 2011, 8:48 pm

Winnow you have the LG 2 bay NAS? I have the CD burner version right now. I have been struggling with trying to get it setup for WoL... do you let yours power down? Would love some assistance, this NAS is nice, but the online support sucks ass.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » May 12, 2011, 10:10 pm

Ransure wrote:Winnow you have the LG 2 bay NAS? I have the CD burner version right now. I have been struggling with trying to get it setup for WoL... do you let yours power down? Would love some assistance, this NAS is nice, but the online support sucks ass.

You have CD burner version? I have Blu Ray. What's the situation? I'll see if I can help. I'm guessing mine powers down if not active.

Ransure · Post by **Ransure** » May 14, 2011, 3:15 am

Do you have to manually power yours up? Or can you have it wake on lan? My problem is that my NAS is in my AV rack in the family room, and 1 floor down from my office, so if I need some files I have to walk downstairs to power it up...

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » May 14, 2011, 5:40 am

Ransure wrote:Do you have to manually power yours up? Or can you have it wake on lan? My problem is that my NAS is in my AV rack in the family room, and 1 floor down from my office, so if I need some files I have to walk downstairs to power it up...

That doesn't sound right. Mine always available although my PC always on and I access the LG-NAS through my PC even if using iPad (Air Video), etc so that's probably the difference. I also don't have any issues directly accessing the LG-NAS from my iMac though.

Did you look for a sleep setting in the options? Keep it running 24/7. It's quiet.

The only issue I ran into was Truecrypt containers kept unmounting from the LG-NAS after more than like 15 mins so I moved them to the RAID Box.

Xatrei · Post by **Xatrei** » July 21, 2011, 4:10 pm

Winnow's next storage project:

http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/pe ... e-secrets/

Well, if he can get over that linux hurdle, that is.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » July 21, 2011, 11:49 pm

Amazon Web Services does not look like a good deal!

Xatrei · Post by **Xatrei** » November 4, 2011, 1:51 am

The Samsung 2 TB drives that Winnow and I bought for ~80 bucks each are currently going for $230 on newegg thanks to the drive shortage panic caused by the floods in Thailand.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » November 4, 2011, 3:29 am

Xatrei wrote:The Samsung 2 TB drives that Winnow and I bought for ~80 bucks each are currently going for $230 on newegg thanks to the drive shortage panic caused by the floods in Thailand.

Ouch. Glad I'm in good shape for storage right now with 4 of those. I can wait out the crazy prices before getting more.

Time flies. It's been 1/2 year since I got my drives. 2 sets of 2TB Mirrored drives and have had no issues. Very nice drives.

Xatrei · Post by **Xatrei** » November 4, 2011, 9:54 am

Winnow wrote:Ouch. Glad I'm in good shape for storage right now with 4 of those. I can wait out the crazy prices before getting more.

Time flies. It's been 1/2 year since I got my drives. 2 sets of 2TB Mirrored drives and have had no issues. Very nice drives.

Yeah, I've been very pleased with these drives. Just before the floods, I was thinking about adding a couple of drives and centralizing my storage now that I've resolved some of the networking issues I mentioned earlier in the thread (added 3 access points around the house). I got busy with some other concerns, and let that idea slide. After prices started climbing after the floods, I checked the price a couple weeks ago, and they were going for 130 which I thought was too steep. I was shocked when I checked them last night, and saw 230! It makes me wonder how much higher they'll go before availability is restored. I read earlier this week that Asus says they'll run out of drives for net/notebook production before year end if there are no changes to the situation.

Fairweather Pure · Post by **Fairweather Pure** » November 4, 2011, 10:09 am

I've been watching the prices climb too. Thank god I still have 1 3T external unopened that I bought on sale 6 months ago for $120.00. Several of my externals are starting to fill up at the same time. I was would rather add a couple more internals, but not at these prices! Was considering 1 more, larger SSD and 2 2-3T internals depending on price. That upgrade looks a long way off right now!

Leonaerd · Post by **Leonaerd** » November 4, 2011, 12:01 pm

We've got a ton of these lying around at work (big image):

[Show]

My lab is happy.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » June 7, 2012, 6:22 pm

Xatrei wrote:The Samsung 2 TB drives that Winnow and I bought for ~80 bucks each are currently going for $230 on newegg thanks to the drive shortage panic caused by the floods in Thailand.

That HD is back to 119.00 still 40-50.00 more expensive than when we bought it for 69/79 each in April 2011.

All four of mine are silently cruising along with zero issues. If SSD is still spendy (more than $1.00/GB for the 540GB drives) by the time these get back to 79/each, I'll buy 4 more.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » June 7, 2012, 6:30 pm

Winnow wrote:
Xatrei wrote:The Samsung 2 TB drives that Winnow and I bought for ~80 bucks each are currently going for $230 on newegg thanks to the drive shortage panic caused by the floods in Thailand.
That HD is back to 119.00 still 40-50.00 more expensive than when we bought it for 69/79 each in April 2011.

All four of mine are silently cruising along with zero issues. If SSD is still spendy (more than $1.00/GB for the 540GB drives) by the time these get back to 79/each, I'll buy 4 more.

I think the bigger issue is the Samsung HDD division is now owned by Seagate. Pass! I know a lot of people that have no problem with Seagate. I'm not one of them so any Samsung HDD is now not an option for me. I'll stick with Western Digital for now. Which yes I know a lot of people aren't a fan of WD either. I guess it pretty much comes down to your personal experience and preference.

In December 2011, Samsung Electronics sold its hard disk drive (HDD) business to Seagate.

Canelek · Post by **Canelek** » June 7, 2012, 6:33 pm

OCZ and Corsair have fairly decent SSD, but not sure about the 250GB+ drives though.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » June 7, 2012, 7:19 pm

I was mostly just addressing the HDD aspect. As far as I know the Samsung SSD business is still Samsung owned.

Canelek · Post by **Canelek** » June 7, 2012, 7:26 pm

My bad, I obviously read that wrong.

I have the worst luck with spinning drives...may go to WD if I get one more bad Seagate 'Cuda.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » June 8, 2012, 10:18 am

Aslanna wrote:
Winnow wrote:
Xatrei wrote:The Samsung 2 TB drives that Winnow and I bought for ~80 bucks each are currently going for $230 on newegg thanks to the drive shortage panic caused by the floods in Thailand.
That HD is back to 119.00 still 40-50.00 more expensive than when we bought it for 69/79 each in April 2011.

All four of mine are silently cruising along with zero issues. If SSD is still spendy (more than $1.00/GB for the 540GB drives) by the time these get back to 79/each, I'll buy 4 more.
I think the bigger issue is the Samsung HDD division is now owned by Seagate. Pass! I know a lot of people that have no problem with Seagate. I'm not one of them so any Samsung HDD is now not an option for me. I'll stick with Western Digital for now. Which yes I know a lot of people aren't a fan of WD either. I guess it pretty much comes down to your personal experience and preference.

In December 2011, Samsung Electronics sold its hard disk drive (HDD) business to Seagate.

Think I've said this before somewhere but my last two western digital drives crashed on me. Maybe keeping an eye on new models would be prudent but this model is excellent for mass storage....efficient and dead silent x4 with no issues. Hoping I can hold out for SSD. I've still got a few mirrored TBs left and don't save movies for the most part so it should take awhile to fill.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » August 8, 2016, 2:01 am

Winnow wrote:It's a Sans Digital Toweraid TR8M-B. There is a newer version TR8M-BP if you want a better card thrown in for 319.00 via Newegg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816111141

That particular model no longer seems to be available but man the reviews on the one that is available are not good. I'd stay away!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816111168

This is something I've been looking into as I want to rip all my CDs and DVDs and have them available on my network. I think I've settled on a Synology 1515+ although the 8 bay 1815+ is only $150 more. Not as cheap as a "raid box" but the reviews are much better!

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » August 8, 2016, 10:41 am

Aslanna wrote:
Winnow wrote:It's a Sans Digital Toweraid TR8M-B. There is a newer version TR8M-BP if you want a better card thrown in for 319.00 via Newegg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816111141
That particular model no longer seems to be available but man the reviews on the one that is available are not good. I'd stay away!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816111168

This is something I've been looking into as I want to rip all my CDs and DVDs and have them available on my network. I think I've settled on a Synology 1515+ although the 8 bay 1815+ is only $150 more. Not as cheap as a "raid box" but the reviews are much better!

Yeah, I am still using that tower but am transitioning away from it. I bought an 8 TB hard drive to move things on as I repurpose the four 2 TB HDs in the tower.

Your linked products look nice but don't think I'd ever go Ethernet again due to them being too slow for big file xfers.

I picked up this external hot swap 2 drive thingy and highly recommend it if you have USB 3.0 or 3.1:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N1 ... UTF8&psc=1

It's impressively fast (UASP being the key)

I initially had my 8 TB hard drive in there and was able to transfer massive amounts of data at a good clip. I am now using it to "hot swap" the four TB hard drives (and older SATA drives). Really handy to have for any SATA drive you end up with for easy access.

As for an external multi drive bay. When I replace my 8 Bay SATA, I'll go USB 3.1 as it's very fast and super easy plug and play. I love ease of use and USB 3x works really well for that.

I didn't have time to check out your linked products in detail, just noticed the ethernet part.

edit: not = now (using to hot swap)

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » August 8, 2016, 11:15 am

While an NAS is going to be faster than using cloud storage, it still is no where near the speed that a USB attached device can achieve. Even USB 2.0 drives often can reach speeds up to 400Mbps which is four times the speed of the average wired ethernet or 802.11n wireless network. If you have USB 3.0 on your PC and computer, it can achieve well beyond even what gigabit ethernet can provide.

NAS devices also tend to be far more expensive than using USB external hard drives. Your typical USB external hard drive is not that much more than buying a bare drive for a computer. NAS devices cost more because they also require the network interfaces and small controllers to allow them to run the servers necessary for network file access. Adding additional features such as multiple drive enclosures, RAID, VPN, media file server can drive the cost up to that of a low cost desktop computer system which can be configured to do just about the same thing (and more) albeit with higher power consumption. Some high end base NAS units can cost upwards more than $300 and that is without any hard drives for storage.

Even though NAS devices can be accessed over a local area network, they are still restricted generally to just that network. This means that if you are way from the network the devices is attached to, you will not be able to access your files. Now some more expensive models do offer some VPN access but most home network connections will not allow such a tunnel for them to be used. They are of course vulnerable to a catastrophic event such as a file in a home because they are in the same location. This is where cloud storage has an advantage.

Not all NAS devices can be easily accessed from all kinds of devices. Devices such as tablets, smart phones or even certain operating systems may have difficulty connecting and accessing the files without a lot of setup work. This can make them much more difficult than just using a couple of external USB devices. This of course goes back to how much you spend on a device as more expensive NAS devices will often have better support for devices and operating systems.

I hated my Gigabit Ethernet NAS 4 bay storage. So incredibly slow. I highly recommend you rethink that. USB 3.0/3.1 is really fast and easy these days.

I don't know if you plan to use VPN/Remote Desktop but I can access all my USB 3x Hard Drives remotely as well if that's a factor. The beauty of USB 3 is the speed as well as the extreme portability/swap/easy plug and play. I wouldn't go eSATA again either after using my current 8 Bay tower for the past several years.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » August 8, 2016, 7:54 pm

If you want something sitting attached to your PC then sure, USB is an option. But I want something on my network that can be used with multiple devices and that is scalable if needed. I'm sure 1Gb Ethernet is more than fast enough for serving up media files and the like. Of all the reviews I've read about the Synology I don't think I've seen any that mentioned it was slow. Most of them just say it's overpriced!

If you have USB 3.0 on your PC and computer, it can achieve well beyond even what gigabit ethernet can provide.

Not even sure who wrote that or for what reason.. A PC IS a computer!

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » August 8, 2016, 11:18 pm

PC = Pocket Calculator!

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » August 9, 2016, 12:30 am

Aslanna wrote:If you want something sitting attached to your PC then sure, USB is an option. But I want something on my network that can be used with multiple devices and that is scalable if needed. I'm sure 1Gb Ethernet is more than fast enough for serving up media files and the like. Of all the reviews I've read about the Synology I don't think I've seen any that mentioned it was slow. Most of them just say it's overpriced!

You can still use USB with multiple devices and it's more flexible. Gigabit Ethernet is so slow. What are you wanting to use the NAS with? I use Air Video App to stream to my iPad. You can buy some wireless dohicky if you want to stream to your TV if it's not close to your PC. With USB 3 you can plug that thing into any PC and if not in a RAID setup, take any of your Hard Drives (SSDs too) along with this Inateck USB 3.0 to SATA Dual-Bay USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docking Station with Offline Clone Function for 2.5 Inch & 3.5 Inch HDD SSD SATA (SATA I/ II/ III) Support 2x 8TB & UASP, Tool-free and quickly plug and play your hard drives anywhere you go with fast transfer speeds.

If you DON'T RAID you might consider this 8 TB HD Seagate 8TB Archive HDD SATA 6GBps 128MB Cache SATA Internal Bare Drive (ST8000AS0002) Writes slower than average, reads (which is what you use multimedia servers for primarily) really fast for much cheaper price than most 8TB HDs. It's not designed to be in a RAID though. Two of those and you have 8TB of mirrored data for like $480 total. In fact just barely over $500 total for the dual USB 3.0 UASP dock and 16 TB of space or mirrored 8 TB.

That's just an example though. I am fed up with NAS boxes. I bought my original NA way the fuck back. I'm sure can find it on this forum. Was Gigabit 1TB (4x250GB) for $999 Buffalo Station. I bought another gigabit NAS years later. No way I'd go back to those speeds.

With mega huge SSDs just around the corner, buying an 8 TB spinning HD to expand capacity was the right thing to do for me. I hate spinning drives and can't wait to have everything on SSDs relatively soon. Not going to invest a ton in non SSD solutions at this point.

Xatrei wrote:
The Samsung 2 TB drives that Winnow and I bought for ~80 bucks each are currently going for $230 on newegg thanks to the drive shortage panic caused by the floods in Thailand.

Got those four drives five years ago now in April 2011 and all four have worked flawlessly spinning 24/7.

Before you go all crazy on a big RAID. Read up on them. They can be a freaking nightmare. I'm not even using RAID 1 anymore. If you decide to do something like RAID 5 with large drives....good luck if you need to rebuild! At most, I'd do a simple 1:1 mirror (not RAID 1)

Kluden · Post by **Kluden** » August 9, 2016, 4:11 pm

Yeah, I thought this was solved through modern routers having USB 3.0 connector(s) on them now, so you can hook up a usb drive to it and pass across the network. Perhaps I'm wrong, as I don't actually use that feature...but it seems it would be better than getting a whole setup going, considering the consolidated cost of setting up a USB HDD with a 4+ TB drive in it. Sure, you're still constricted to your network speeds, but like you mentioned, media sharing it would be perfectly suitable. You can just disconnect and hook up to your PC that you want to transfer things from to speed up that process if needed.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » August 9, 2016, 11:53 pm

Seagate's new 60TB SSD dwarfs the others on the market

Soon. Not soon enough, but soon!

I'd settle for reasonably priced 2TB SSDs.

I've got 20+ TB of HD space but mostly all spinning drives which sucks.

I do have my ludicrous speed Samsung 950 PRO M.2 NVMe 512 GB stick for my OS and primary games though! Crazy fast like 4X a standard SSD.

Windows 10/8.1 (32/64bit, Which Natively Support NVMe) Compatible*

Only for those that upgrade!

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » August 10, 2016, 12:29 am

Two main things I'm looking for:

1) Capacity. The 2 drive dock things don't cut it even with 8 or 10 TB drives especially considering my second item. 8 TB (factoring in mirroring of a drive) is not enough for anything. That's like saying 640k RAM is all you'll ever need!

2) Reliability. I don't want to rely on not having redundancy of my data. So if one drive (or even two!) goes bad it's not the end of the world.

3) Bonus item. You can install apps like Plex on these. Currently I use my PC as my Plex server but who knows... Maybe it's better to offload that elsewhere.

As for rebuilds, while a pain isn't that a good thing? It found bad things and is fixing! I still need to do more research but I'd probably go with RAID 6 at this point. Supposedly as drive capacity grows in the future this becomes more of an issue and is the reason why pretty much nobody uses, or at least seriously recommends, RAID 5 anymore.

My ideal scenario is an 8 bay NAS unit. Assuming RAID 6, and all bays filled, that's 6 drives worth of usable space. I was thinking of going with 4 TB drives as they are relatively cheap. That gives me 24 TB to play with which should be good for awhile. This is just something I've been thinking about for awhile but I'm not quite ready to jump in right now. I might hold out for a hardware revision and see if the next model has a CPU that's a bit speedier or some other improvements.

Not sure what sort of speed you need. What are you doing all day where you're transferring massive amounts of data? The Synology has 4 ports and supports Link Aggregation so all you need is a switch that supports that and you're boosting your speed! At least that's how I think that works. A bunch of tech terms I don't know anything about. An overview of it can be found on their site. It has some "cloud" type stuff as well so it's not just a bunch of drives in an overpriced box. Sure it may be overkill for home use but hey, go big or go home!

Winnow wrote:
Windows 10/8.1 (32/64bit, Which Natively Support NVMe) Compatible*
Only for those that upgrade!

Or not. "Natively supports" is meaningless.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » August 10, 2016, 3:00 am

Aslanna wrote:Two main things I'm looking for:

1) Capacity. The 2 drive dock things don't cut it even with 8 or 10 TB drives especially considering my second item. 8 TB (factoring in mirroring of a drive) is not enough for anything. That's like saying 640k RAM is all you'll ever need!

The 2 drive dock is just a tool for quick use of any SATA Spin/SSD drive. You can also use it as a stand alone to clone drives while not having to attach it to a PC as all which is a nice bonus. It's only $30 something and is excellent for plugging in any SATA drive into any device (even linux) that has USB.

2, Reliability

RAIDs can be a curse. you're stuck with it once you build it. I'd much rather be able to pull a drive whenever I want and use it where I want. Even in a RAID 1 which essentially mirrors drives, I had to dump all of my data off the hard drives before I could reformat them and use them again. Pain in the ass which becomes an even greater pain in the ass as your RAID size increases. An error was detected in my RAID 1 (both 2 pairs sets) all it takes is an unlucky power outtage or any disruption and you have a nightmare disk grinding verification fest as the RAID rebuilds. That is mega huge time and stress on the HDs with a monster sized raid.

You'd be better off getting eight 4 TB hard drives and mirroring them in 4 sets. There's no need for one monster multidrive spanning partition which can cause even more problems. Plex can read data from multiple drives/folders (even Air Play app can do that) Four 4 TB (better would be 8 TB but I know they're still expensive) and when the time comes to update to higher capacity, you plop your 4 TB drive into the dual dock thingy and your 8 TB drive in the other slot and hit the clone button and boom, 4 more TB of space X 4.(plus you have your original 4 TB drives to cold store the data already on them (and accessible as a stand alone drive) already (but not if choose to RAID because you can't just place those old drives by themselves with the data as it's useless that way unless you rebuild a lost RAID) You can then replace the mirrored 4 TB drive with the other 8 TB and mirror it over. All the while keeping data safe.

3. Bonus Plex

I don't know about this one. Multi Core CPUs can handle a lot these days. I don't think Plex is stressing anything by streaming data. I'm old school though, simple folder structure is easy enough for me to organize and find things. (see pic I posted in some other thread recently on that) Plex is pretty but when it came down to it, I just didn't feel all the overhead was worth it and getting straight to my library using a file browser worked best and most efficiently. I used Plex before it was plex (it's based off of the old XBMC - Xbox Media Center use on the original Xbox) i'm the same way with all media though. There are very nice Comic Book catalog software apps but no reason IMO, I prefer directories/folders. I can see the appeal of Plex though, just not for me.

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Most TVs have USB ports. Take your favorite 1000 or so movies with you while traveling on a HD and use the $30 dock to plug it into the back of a modern TV and watch away. You might be able to stream it from home depending on your wireless data plan and speed but probably not at the quality of a USB 3 connection. With VR catching on, you'll relatively soon have really high res monster VR theater to watch wherever you go, not something that's going to stream remotely though. SSD would be desirable but can use 3.5 inch drive as well.

A big RAID sounded good to me too but even after getting my 8-Bay SATA tower, I still went with the smallest RAID possible and regret even doing that. Even JBODs can be a pain as those aren't stand alone either even though they're single disks.

Anyway, good luck with whatever you decide. I cringe at Ethernet no matter what fancy multi pipe thing they're preaching and RAIDs make me cringe as well. I haven't found the perfect solution (or even one I kind of like) yet so am keeping things piecemeal until I do.

For the love of god, just don't get a Drobo no matter what.

https://www.amazon.com/Drobo-5N-Attache ... B00AMAJGOO

Read the description of that and it will seem like a dream to you based on what you're looking for. Bad news!

Aslanna wrote:
Winnow wrote:
Windows 10/8.1 (32/64bit, Which Natively Support NVMe) Compatible*
Only for those that upgrade!
Or not. "Natively supports" is meaningless.

Extra steps. More hassle!

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » August 18, 2016, 9:27 pm

That Synology DS1815+ seems a popular item. Amazon got 20 in and in about a week they now they are all gone again. Apparently Synology has some conferences coming up in Sep/Oct where they will probably announce a new version (1817+?) so I'm just biding my time until then. I would like to see a version with a slightly beefier CPU.

I prefer directories/folders. I can see the appeal of Plex though, just not for me.

Plex is awesome. I paid for the lifetime subscription back when it was $75. I think it's $150 now. I've definitely received my moneys worth.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » August 19, 2016, 4:55 am

Good luck with whatever you end up with. My only suggestion is researching as much as you can before pulling the trigger which helps with all tech purchase decisions.

Plex is awesome. I paid for the lifetime subscription back when it was $75. I think it's $150 now. I've definitely received my moneys worth.

What costs money with Plex? Downloading the TV/Video info? That used to be free. Aren't there still free databases with that stuff available?

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » August 19, 2016, 11:06 am

Winnow wrote:
Plex is awesome. I paid for the lifetime subscription back when it was $75. I think it's $150 now. I've definitely received my moneys worth.
What costs money with Plex? Downloading the TV/Video info? That used to be free. Aren't there still free databases with that stuff available?

All the free stuff that was free is still free. Most people could easily use the free version and find that's all they need.

I mainly paid for it to support the developers as I had been using it for a couple years at that point. That and they announced the lifetime rate was going to $150. I figured $75 for a lifetime of updates and future features was worth it.So far it's not been a purchase I've regretted.

I use the cloud sync a lot, which happens automatically whenever I add new music to my server. It ends up on my phone without me really having to do anything. A few other things as well but nothing major.

https://www.plex.tv/features/plex-pass/

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » June 5, 2017, 11:43 pm

I decided to downscale my NAS plans a bit with Thunderbolt 3 on the horizon and not go crazy big spending a lot of money on an 8 bay NAS. Well, Thunderbolt 3 is already here but with Intel making it royalty free soon, and including it on the CPU in a year or so, it will hopefully start to be much more widespread than it currently is. Thunderbolt 3 is 4 times faster than USB 3.1 (40Gbps vs 10Gbps) so when more mainstream NAS systems start using that it will be leaving USB in the dust. The only downside is cables are more expensive but that's acceptable for the performance.

For now I'm just going with a 4 bay NAS (DS916+) with probably 8TB drives. That should hold me for awhile. And if it doesn't they make a 5 bay expansion unit that can be added. Multitudes of terabytes!

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » June 6, 2017, 1:13 am

Aslanna wrote:I decided to downscale my NAS plans a bit with Thunderbolt 3 on the horizon and not go crazy big spending a lot of money on an 8 bay NAS. Well, Thunderbolt 3 is already here but with Intel making it royalty free soon, and including it on the CPU in a year or so, it will hopefully start to be much more widespread than it currently is. Thunderbolt 3 is 4 times faster than USB 3.1 (40Gbps vs 10Gbps) so when more mainstream NAS systems start using that it will be leaving USB in the dust. The only downside is cables are more expensive but that's acceptable for the performance.

For now I'm just going with a 4 bay NAS (DS916+) with probably 8TB drives. That should hold me for awhile. And if it doesn't they make a 5 bay expansion unit that can be added. Multitudes of terabytes!

Any spinning drive isn't going to benefit from something more than USB 3.1.

The SSD parts shortage is forecast to end sometime later this year. Next year we'll finally start getting reasonably priced large SSD drives. That would be the time to create a larger scale project with no moving parts. In the meantime, a couple cheap 8 TB drives mirrored (anything that's not a RAID) would work that you could eventually use as cold storage back up drives. Spinning drives are a temporary solution at this point.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » June 6, 2017, 11:11 pm

Don't sass me!

Besides, you can easily plug SSDs into a NAS if/when they get cheap. Then you'll want a speedy port. Down with USB it's ancient technology!