d-i-y Nas. Hard drive makes?

[T i m]

A couple of friends have them Bob (and I think I remember they could be good VFM when bought with some form of cashback?) but I was concerned of how specific the hardware was over building my own for 'std' PC parts.

What OS is running on it?

That was my thought re using std PC components (mobos and PSUs specifically), you just swap out the bad 'bit'.

And that's the thing. Whilst I know daughter would be pi$$ed off if she couldn't access her data because the only disk had failed, I'm not sure what the odds are on the hardware itself failing (removing access to both mirrored drives) over the drive (if only a single drive etc) failing?

I'm not sure it's *always* easy though is it Rob? I have read many tales of the rebuild process screwing up and taking all your data with it, hence you are *still* reliant on a backup?

Excellent. ;-)

OOI, were the drives that would typically be failing now have been specific 'NAS / Server' drives or just 'drives' (FWIW etc)?

Like, the drives that came in the TeraStation I was given were 'just' Seagate Barracudas and I think they were 'just' general purpose hard drives?

I had one (of a friends) go within a couple of hours ... which didn't help my learning of 'how to set up a Synology NAS' very much. ;-(

The replacement went in and made much more sense of the whole setup procedure. ;-)

Whilst I can't say I favoured Synology's OS over OMV, I might give Xpenology a look in case it does things we need 'better'?

Cheers, T i m

[Pancho]

I just put mine in a cupboard. I expect someone will do a case to hold an Pi + SSD soon, now the Pi has proper gigabit Ethernet.

Shuttle is nice but expensive.

No, but the Pi 4 has USB 3.

Added security from theft/fire if it is out of the way. Another basket to put the eggs in.

Just a Smaba share on Raspbian (well Hypriot actually = Debian very similar to Raspbian Lite. I only used Hypriot as the Docker install was problematic on the initial release of Raspbian Buster. It's fixed now, and I would use Raspbian Lite if I reinstall).

I was unaware, good to know, thx.

But my spinner HDDs are noisy so whatever I put them in will be noisy. The actual Core2Duo fan + case isn't particularly noisy. I also have a cupboard to put it in. The real pisser is it doesn't have wake on lan.

I also have an ultra small ZBox CI323 nano, looks nice, it works ok as a router (130Mb/s OpenVPN tunnel) but is a bit shit for anything else, although now you mention it it would make a good NAS.

[Pancho]

They do. Kingston SA400S37/240G SSD A400 locally on the Pi4 gives

300MB/s read, 200 MB/s write.

From a windows machine I get 115 MB/s for sequential read and write.

[Bob Eager]

The only thing that's ever failed is a couple of PSUs, and that wasn't their fault. I fitted optical drives to the machines, and the power adaptors I'd used failed catastrophically and killed the PSU. New PSUs aren't cheap from HP, but they are just ITX PSUs, of which I had a few.

FreeBSD, with geom/gmirror.

As I said, spare machine (they were cheap enough). And I always go for dual (RAID-1) drives - and they even give a small edge in performance over the single drive.

I have honestly never heard of that happening with geom/gmirror. This is software RAID in the OS. Hardware RAID I consider problematical (not least if you can't get exactly the same controller if that fails).

The first failure was a bog standard Seagate. It came with one of the early microservers so I just used it.

The second failure was a WD Red, obviously something wrong because of the quick failure. Some of my early drives are still in there, and they are WD Blue, but most are now Red ones.

The Red ones have a three year warranty (think Blue are one year) but they don't go 'deaf' for more than a few seconds if they have trouble reading a sector - much better when the disk is in an array.

I just checked, and one pair of the Reds has done about 55,000 hours (pretty well continously). Another is at 47,000 and then it ranges down through 25,000 - to 3,500 for the newest pair (I upgraded capacity).

I have a total of seven machines running with FreeBSD geom/gmirror.

Also running one Windows machine with a mirrored pair - using the standard Windows mirroring.

[T i m]

<snip>

That would be nice.

Not so bad s/h. ;-)

True but I was thinking more the drive (bay) itself if only USB2.

Quite.

Ok thanks.

Hmm, 'Docker', seen mention of it many times but wasn't sure what it was. So, that would make it easier to get access to files stored on a NAS from the outside world ... using the likes of ownCloud possibly?

<snip>

Maybe I'm lucky that I can't hear any of mine. ;-) That said, maybe because they were chosen (or happen to be, as in this Mac Mini) laptop drives in well damped enclosures / mounts? Even the 4TB external laptop drive on my OMV RPi2B NAS is virtually silent and that's currently by our bed. ;-)

I prefer to have such machines out in the open to ensure they get a reasonable airflow?

That's an advantage of having something that is so low power that it can just sleep.

The other day I was copying a large (Ex BD) video file to the OMV Shuttle whilst streaming another from the OMV it to another PC and the CUP utilisation was hardly registering, suggesting even the lowly Atom could cope with such roles with ease.

Cheers, T i m

p.s. I've just noticed / downloading the image for OMV4 for the Pi4. ;-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

In my time in IT, seagate, fujistu, IBM and western digital have all been 'the drives to have' and 'the drives to avoid'

Certain technologies proved good and some bad. What was written on the case is orthogonal to what is inside.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I have just one linux based server.

All of the jobs it does *could* be done better by dedicated boxes, but then I would have 15 dedicated boxes instead of one massive linux server with mirrored discs.

[T i m]

The worst example of that I witnessed is someone using a very cheap Molex to SATA power adapter take out a brand new and very large (expensive) capacity HDD. 5 and 12V crossed over. ;-(

Handy.

Ok, thanks.

Understood.

That's good then.

I have heard of a bug in a commercial RAID box that recovered the replacement (blank) drive over the rest of the array. I have also used a few HW RAID mobos with mirrored drives (Intel RAID controllers if I remember correctly) and they were always throwing up error messages and having issues. It was suggested that software RAID was even less predictable / reliable?

Ok.

It will be interesting to hear how they fair over time.

Sure. Do I remember correctly that some drives / controllers could actually ensure all spindles in an array were kept in sync?

Interesting, thanks.

Cool!

Ok. OOI, how many have ever failed in use and how well did they handle the failure (did they just 'carry on as hoped / expected')?

How do you back that lot up or are some backups of the others?

Cheers, T i m

[Bob Eager]

In this case they worked loose, overheated, the plastic melted and shorted the power!

That was the firewall system. Took less than 20 minutes to change over (it only runs on a USB stick).

[Bob Eager]

Some are up top over 50,000 hours (the Red ones).

I would imagine so, as some RAID requires that (I think).

Two. Carried on as they should and emailed me the details.

Some back up others (on different floors of the house). Some to DVD (using heavy ECC, see below). Important stuff goes offsite in storage (10 miles away) and also on

DVD ECC is via dvdisaster. I did a test; wrote a DVD with ECC then used a Swiss Army knife to make random cuts and scrapes (took enough away that you could see through it). It was recovered perfectly.

[dennis]

I get 512MB/s write and 516MB/s read from a Samsung 860 sata drive in a USB caddy.

Somewhat faster from the WD NVME drive in a USB caddy (only problem is the caddy is too small so the drive can't stay in there).

That's a windows laptop.

[Brian Reay]

True. I tend to look at it from the size/convenience angle. Others may have a different take.

As I see the NAS as background function, I don't want to expend time etc on it.

The NAS contains data held elsewhere in most cases- eg on local PCs or, in the case of media, the 'mobile' NAS. Plus, if a disk fails, the data is 'safe' due to the RAID.

If the Box fails, at worst I pop the disks in a new unit. A few days downtime isn't crucial.

Remember, this is a home system- not a business.

The 218+ I assume as it is black.

The 119 one is white.

The disk mounting in the 218+ is much neater, they slide in. No taking the unit apart (unless you count a cover with drops of all too easily).

The 119 is disk mounting is easy enough but not as neat as the 218+.

Dunno, I'd have to look at the specs.

Hmm, certainly in NAS boxes it has always been the drives I've had fail. I've replaced several drives in 'duff' boxes and given them a new life.

You can plug a USB into the Synology. The 218+ has 2 ports. Not sure about the 119 I'd have to look (it is in the mh).

You forget, I know what you look like. Do YOU wear a paper bag ;-)

Windows- I can't run Windows SW easily.

(Not anti Windows, just don't use it.)

[Vir Campestris]

Reading to the end of the thread I didn't see anyone mention the Backblaze surveys:

They have damn good stats on some drive types.

Andy

[T i m]

Thanks for that Andy. ;-)

I've had a good read but I'm not sure what I can take from it?

By that I mean like many things there isn't really any way you can sure that version E of something *will* inherit the good characteristics of version D or that it's baby brother is even the result of the same parents!

Like badged displays where it's not worth a company making say sub 23" screens so they just rebadge someone else's (for better or worse).

At least with a (cheaper) 'white label' drive you know you could get anything and it could be something good or not. It's frustrating spending more on something that is supposed to be from a 'good' stable only to find out that it's not (or is the black sheep of the family).

It's like the drives in my old WHS are probably 10+ years old now (I thought they were Hitachi but WHS device manager tells me they are

500GB Samsung HM501II's):

So I'd love to replace them with 3 x 1TB Samsung drives of the same build / design as the existing but what are the chances of finding such a thing?

Cheers, T i m

[Pancho]

I use this USB 3 Its only £5.99.

[T i m]

Yeah, I have them and those with the additional power connector to support desktop drives but I was talking of those external drives I have already got that were only USB2.

I also have the 'dock' type, handy for holding the drive safely.

When most things only had USB2, there wasn't any point buying USB3 drives / enclosures as initially they were quite a bit more expensive.

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

What are the chances etc. ;-(

It's handy to be able to do that eh. I try to take images of my RPi things, once they are running, I try to store them on a different server though. ;-)

I think you can backup the config on many commercial NAS boxes (I think I saw the option on the TeraStation, Synology and on OMV) and that makes the replacement of the hardware easier.

It would be an interesting experiment (for me anyway <g>) to see if you could transpose the system config backup file on OMV running on a RPi on PC version. One of the things I like about OMV is that it doesn't seem to get the admin / user involved with the hardware on any platform. The exception is on one of the Shuttle models that didn't seem 100% compatible with my LAN and you had to disable the autospeed detection on the underlying Linux or it wouldn't being the link up. ;-(

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Any idea what the MTBF is on those drives Bob?

Yeah. When I was playing with it in my CNI / Netware 3.x days I think there was a flying lead you had to join somewhere to make that happen. Like WOL sometimes need a flying cable.

Excellent. ;-)

Sounds like you have most eventualities covered Bob (depending the height above sea level of all locations and their hardness against an EMP). ;-)

Wow, that sounds like the old 'Tomorrows World' demo of optical media with jam or something. ;-)

I have a BDRW in a couple of machines and I wondered if the media was any less reliable long term than say DVDR's? 50GB is quite a bit more than even 9GB.

If money was no object, I would love to fill the TeraStation I was given with (4x) WD RED 2TB (maximum size allowed) drives and have 6TB available with a single drive fault tolerance.[1]

The only other thing is I would then need to back up 6TB ... (easy if money was no object of course). ;-)

The 'problem' with that particular solution is that it was pulling over 40W when running (with 4 x Seagate's, Red's might have been lower power) and 17W when idle (and was still quite warm when sleeping).

Cheers, T i m

[1] Mate says he has another (empty) TeraStation somewhere that I could have and I might feel happier actually using such ITRW, knowing I had some spare hardware to fall back on once I had committed to the drives.

[dennis]

I don't run NAS drives in my synology boxes. They don't spin continuously so I use desktop drives and they are fine. WD green in the one. I forget what's in the other.

I did have an early fail on one drive but they replaced it with a bigger one under warranty without any hassle.

[T i m]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2019 12:26:50 +0100, "dennis@home" [e-mail] wrote: <snip>

Interesting.

How do we know if they are (or will be) as fine as specific NAS / Server drives though? I'm not just talking warranty protection here but the real world long term reliability of such things?

I wonder how much of the spinning thing is supposed to be 'the point' with NAS drives though (even though I generally get drives to spin down).

eg, The marketing blurb seems to suggest that NAS drives are (compared with desktop drives presumably) 'low power, low noise and low heat', as those are things that might otherwise be issues. However, I'm not sure just how many drives fail because the man spindle bearing or motor fails, rather than the media itself or the electronics?

So, do the drives get powered down when they spin down?

Ok.

Ok.

Sure, you are bound to get some infant mortality with these things (all part of the 'Bathtub' MTBF graph) so it can be more down to how the manufacturers / suppliers then deal with that that's the issue.

In the old days (and possibly pre SMART), when one installed a HDD in say a server you would note it's published MTBF and put it's potential life span in your diary and be ready to replace it before that time.

With SMART and redundancy, it seems people (server farms) just wait for them to fail and then swap them out?

How do you manage your Windows PC backups to the Synology boxes Den? Mine should arrive tomorrow but I'd still be interested to learn what tools to use and how?

Daughter has a Windows laptop and desktop she would like 'automatically' backed up plus possibly a central store of (copy in many cases) photos, so she can use / access them easier?

The NAS itself would also be backed up somehow (not sure how yet).

Cheers, T i m