I'm looking for an easy to use RAID enclosure I can set up mirroring on without a proprietary disk format
I have used the Drobo for many years, today I had some issues with it and now one out of the two Windows 7 machines I have can't seem to mount the volumes anymore (god only knows why) anyway, I realized that the Drobo itself is a single point of failure, if it goes 4+ TB worth of incremental backups are gone
So I'm looking for options (specifically Windows-based options)
So you want a windows server case?
I just want an enclosure I can hook up to a Windows box. I know HP makes one but I wanted to see what kind of suggestions you guys had
Quote from: Mr. Analog on December 22, 2014, 11:50:53 PM
I just want an enclosure I can hook up to a Windows box. I know HP makes one but I wanted to see what kind of suggestions you guys had
I would suggest a NEW case that just has enough drive bays in it... OR a NAS device that uses more standard raid methods.
One thing to consider is that RAID != backups. If you really need it to store backups, make sure you also have another backup copy. Like I had /planned/ lol.
I saw some NAS enclosures this year that intrigued me, but I can't remember what they are now :( Maybe QNap or Synology? I can't remember. Some started getting somewhat affordable ($400~ for the case alone rather than $900+)
I can see a lot of options for repairing RAID 1 setups, my main problem is data backup in case of damage to the array controller which has happened to me twice in the last 10-15 years. Oddly I've never encountered drive failure but I've had controllers die and corruption.
The chicken and egg problem I have is I want to make sure content is backed up but I also have a lot of content, if I put the trust into individual drives I'm inviting disaster but if I trust an array I could lose access to the content if the array is damaged or fails
The option I'll have to run with is manual backups to multiple drives and there aren't a lot of appliances out there at the consumer level that do it
Qnap does seem to be the best rated nas if you want to pay the premium.
Quote from: Mags on December 24, 2014, 11:53:36 AM
Qnap does seem to be the best rated nas if you want to pay the premium.
Like Drobo it looks like it has a proprietary RAID
I think I'll just stick with what I got, I'll just buy some spare drives and set up regular backups via docking station
Build your own enclosure and run http://www.openmediavault.org/ on it..
It will use a very standard linux software raid which is very portable between linux systems...
In my setup I had been using a regular Ubuntu setup, unmounted the drives,, move them to an http://www.openmediavault.org/ setup which is based on Debian, just mounted the raid set.
linux MD raid marks the disks fairly well so as long as you put ALL the disks back in a new linux box it should mount them.
Nice! Thanks for that
You all know my horrors with the Drobo... but until now I was the only one I knew with issues.
Synology has been solid for me as a NAS, and I've proven that they store their RAID data on the disks like a proper raid as you can literally buy a bigger Synology NAS, pull your drives and put them in the new one and the RAID is in tact. Nice that way (and the way it should be).
Unfortunately that option wasn't there for the Drobo. Had to be the same model when my controller died :(. Silly Drobo lol.
Lazy's options are awesome as well. I'll used it myself in the past, but went with the Blackbox NAS' just cause I found them just easy to use and smaller footprint than the computer case.
Anyway, sorry to hear your woes... know I've been there and I know it sux. Good news if you call Drobo they can recover your data for minimal costs (plus your shipping).
I didn't lose any data but it made me think about backups
I'm running out of drive space anyway so changing NAS to something more expandible may be the way to go
There is no perfect solution. QNAP and Synology are great stand alone options vs a Drobo.
There are several NAS build your own distros like openmediavault and Freenas that make the build your own setup not too difficult. I only suggest openmediavault since it uses Linux and well understood md raid that both Tom or myself can probably assist with if there was trouble. There are also a bunch of one click plugins / packages for openemediavault like mumble servers, Plex and other things.
And if you gets bigger storage nas (home built or black box)I have s wack of 1tb drives that Tom never bought from me sitting doing nothing 😉
Well now that sounds just about perfect
Quote from: Melbosa on December 26, 2014, 02:37:43 PM
And if you gets bigger storage nas (home built or black box)I have s wack of 1tb drives that Tom never bought from me sitting doing nothing 😉
Every time we met up someone forgot to bring them ;)
Well you still have first dibs Tom but I think I might have more than what you need in stock.
So 2 years later and I bought a Synology 8 drive NAS
When I got it home yesterday I started working out the logistics of how to actually shunt data and the drives themselves into the new NAS, some of them were quite small (500 GB) and only one was SATA III
So long story short I bought 8 2TB hard drives on sale at MemEx online. Hard drives really are cheap
Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 29, 2016, 10:23:31 AM
So 2 years later and I bought a Synology 8 drive NAS
When I got it home yesterday I started working out the logistics of how to actually shunt data and the drives themselves into the new NAS, some of them were quite small (500 GB) and only one was SATA III
So long story short I bought 8 2TB hard drives on sale at MemEx online. Hard drives really are cheap
Yup. Since I'm limited to 7 drives max in my current nas, I slapped 5TB drives in there when they were on sale :o what a whack load of money that still was, but I have space for /years/. I "typically" go through about 1TB/yr of new data, if I never delete much of anything. I currently have a lot of junk I can delete, and still have about 8.8TB free on my 19TB nas which has room for another 2 drives.
Quote from: Tom on August 29, 2016, 12:43:09 PM
Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 29, 2016, 10:23:31 AM
So 2 years later and I bought a Synology 8 drive NAS
When I got it home yesterday I started working out the logistics of how to actually shunt data and the drives themselves into the new NAS, some of them were quite small (500 GB) and only one was SATA III
So long story short I bought 8 2TB hard drives on sale at MemEx online. Hard drives really are cheap
Yup. Since I'm limited to 7 drives max in my current nas, I slapped 5TB drives in there when they were on sale :o what a whack load of money that still was, but I have space for /years/. I "typically" go through about 1TB/yr of new data, if I never delete much of anything. I currently have a lot of junk I can delete, and still have about 8.8TB free on my 19TB nas which has room for another 2 drives.
Looking at it rationally 12 TB should keep me going for a while. At maximum I'm probably using around 6 TB currently, I can slowly upgrade the drives over the next 5 years or so to meet demand as it comes
Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 29, 2016, 01:15:29 PM
Looking at it rationally 12 TB should keep me going for a while. At maximum I'm probably using around 6 TB currently, I can slowly upgrade the drives over the next 5 years or so to meet demand as it comes
Yes, now that we know that Synology has that SHR and SHR-2 style of RAID that works just like Drobo's, where you can put in mismatched drives and then just put in a bigger one in one spot later and you don't have to rebuild the whole array.
Still, you probably spent $2k altogether, right?
Quote from: Thorin on August 29, 2016, 01:31:34 PM
Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 29, 2016, 01:15:29 PM
Looking at it rationally 12 TB should keep me going for a while. At maximum I'm probably using around 6 TB currently, I can slowly upgrade the drives over the next 5 years or so to meet demand as it comes
Yes, now that we know that Synology has that SHR and SHR-2 style of RAID that works just like Drobo's, where you can put in mismatched drives and then just put in a bigger one in one spot later and you don't have to rebuild the whole array.
Still, you probably spent $2k altogether, right?
Yup
It's worth it IMO, I have this feeling like DROBO is going to die soon and I don't want to lose my stuff again
And so begins my journey...
I can install Plex right on here.... huh!
Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 30, 2016, 07:40:25 PM
I can install Plex right on here.... huh!
How well that works will depend if your NAS supports transcoding or if your clients can natively direct play most of your content.
Quote from: Lazybones on August 30, 2016, 07:44:17 PM
Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 30, 2016, 07:40:25 PM
I can install Plex right on here.... huh!
How well that works will depend if your NAS supports transcoding or if your clients can natively direct play most of your content.
I still have a spare machine with a decent CPU I'll probably let it continue to handle Plex
Man this is exciting
Fun stuff!
Apparently there's a lot you can control on Synology NAS via CLI, that bright blue power light? You can turn it off
Anyway, 4 AM fun stuff because can't sleep and was watching Twilight Zone and getting annoyed by the blue laser beam to the face (during the day I don't notice it)
Next step is to build some kind of startup script that runs it so I don't have to enable SSH
check to see if you can write to /etc/rc.local (and it exists, if its some strange OS it mght not be part of startup) and place your command in there.
easiest way to get something to start on startup on lunix.
It actually has a framework for scheduling scripts on events like startup / before shutdown etc
Ah, I assumed you were asking cause it didn't have that feature or smth.
Quote from: Tom on October 16, 2016, 06:22:29 PM
Ah, I assumed you were asking cause it didn't have that feature or smth.
The GUI controls are actually pretty good over top whatever OS its running, there are a few things (like LED control) which are still command line
For anybody else out there running Synology there was a patch in August that removed root from users belonging to the Administrators group so if you are using SSH CLI you have to use sudo to access some commands