Best method for home network data storage?

[FireGryph]

Ive had multiple HDD's, and expanded on these, for years and years. In the past Ive always just kept these drives in the case of my server PC, but Im starting to look into moving these drives out of the PC case itself, and into some network attached device, or external drive bay.

But which is the best solution. Im talking drives for documents, pictures, videos, etc. THere are NAS devices that connect via ethernet to a switch or router, or devices that connect to a PC or router via USB. Or other sorts of connections. But which is the most efficient or effective method? Ive already got the HDD's after all, so Im leaning more towards a drive bay system to simply plug the HDD's into.

[Lord Flashheart]

You have a couple options at least.

You could buy a NAS.
If you have an old machine, use that as a NAS. There is TrueNAS software which is free.

It depends on your priorities. A machine that is always on as a NAS uses power.

Whatever you do, I strongly suggest you have redundancy in case of a drive failure. It seems your data is important to you. Also consider backups to maybe external drives also.
The zfs file system is much better than most. It is used on Truenas and some other systems.



I needed a machine that is always on, so use an old machine, i7-3770k & 32GB DDR3 RAM.
The OS - freenas (similar to truenas) can do virtualisation, which is partly why I chose it.
I have 5 x 4TB drives in there in raidz1 config. It is similar to raid 5. So around 16TB storage with redundancy. Also a 512GB SSD for some virtual machines.
Everything is also backup up on multiple external hard drives.

Through loss of data in the past, It seems it pays to be paranoid about your files.

[iceman1980]

Escrito originalmente por FireGryph:

Ive had multiple HDD's, and expanded on these, for years and years. In the past Ive always just kept these drives in the case of my server PC, but Im starting to look into moving these drives out of the PC case itself, and into some network attached device, or external drive bay.

But which is the best solution. Im talking drives for documents, pictures, videos, etc. THere are NAS devices that connect via ethernet to a switch or router, or devices that connect to a PC or router via USB. Or other sorts of connections. But which is the most efficient or effective method? Ive already got the HDD's after all, so Im leaning more towards a drive bay system to simply plug the HDD's into.

Depends on your application RAID0 is not recommended for any thing other than a scratch disk for a system to use which does not contain permanent or required data if it is lost. The most common types of RAID used right now are RAID5 and RAID6 each with pros and cons. If you want the highest performance and the most redundancy you create a RAID10 array each RAID1 set is divided into 2 drives in RAID0 this gives you the highest read and write speeds as well as the lowest latency possible. RAID1 has good redundancy but is quite slow.

In terms of what your options are.

• RAID0 (Good for high speed scratch disks where you don't care about the data)
  
• RAID1 (Mirrored drives each drives capacity is halved in an array so 4TB becomes 2TB available space the rest is occupied by the mirroring.
  
• RAID5 - (Single disk parity can suffer 1 drive failure before destroying the array completely)
  
• RAID6 - (Can suffer double drive failures before destroying the entire array)
  
• RAID10 (Mirroring and Stripe benefits of both mirroring and striping still the same result as a RAID1 (1/2) the disk is dedicated to the mirror
  
• Nested RAIDs but as a user you'll seldom ever hear or see this (Big data centres use them a lot)

NAS units are often good options due to them using non-standard RAM namely they often install ECC RAM into NAS units, ECC is good for reliability and stability in terms of the NAS operating system that is running using standard DDR3 or 4 type RAM which is not ECC is not recommended in TrueNAS arrays the ZFS file system prefers if you use actual ECC and every TrueNAS forum user will tell you the same, use ECC ram not Non-ECC.

And one other thing many NAS boxes support hotspare and often cold spare capability what this does is if there is a drive failure then, the expected result is to immediately switch to a currently "online" hotspare and initialise and start rebuilding the RAID array onto the hotspare.

The main options you can look at in more ridged design the following NAS manufacturers are solid options.

• QNAP (Often Pricey but make very good high performance NASes, they often also support other features like hardware decoding for videostreams or more sysadmin entered features)
  
  
• Synology (Not as powerful as many QNAP systems still a solid choice good easy to use UI)
  
  
• ASUSTOR ( Now Asustor is actually a subbranch of ASUS and they sell some incredibly beefy well kitted out NAS units.
  
  
• Or you can go a do it yourself route, but you'd need 1. a case, 2. specific unique motherboard often ITX or MicroATX motherboard. 3. SAS Controller / SATA controller then you have to get 8087-SFF (Mini SAS cables) to to SATA / SAS basically SATA / SAS cables which are branched off a single cable. SAS controllers can work with SATA yes, but SATA doesn't work with SAS. So a SAS drive cannot be installed in SATA port / controller e.g standard consumer motherboards.

[emoticorpse]

I use drive docks. Last two I got were the Orico 5-bay docks on Amazon. They're like $120 or so each. I really like them all things considered.

Only thing that kind of stinks is that the power button is on the back and annoying to reach depending how you have it positioned. Windows works with them just fine. I also have a Sabrent 4-bay one.

I keep them powered off at all times except when I need to access the data and the copy speeds are about 100-130 on average.