I was talking to an elderly friend the other day re a NAS of some sort for him but have never really got into them myself (generally building a file server of some sort instead).
He knows they might be a couple of quid (but still likes such gadgets) so I wondered if the panel could (personally ideally) recommend something that is known to be reliable / flexible / functional or maybe even makes / models to stay away from?
I think he would want the idea of some RAID (1 typically isn't it for the twin drive units?) and possibly any built in options to assist in client machine (mostly Windows) backups?
I think 2-4TB would be about right and ideally have the drives accessible on another system, should the NAS hardware ever fail?
I've had a DLINK DNS 320 for a while, I havn't been using it recently because I added an SSD and another big external drive to the desktop machine, and have been changing around my storage. It falls off the network occasionally but it does work as a server to make photos and videos accessible from a smart TV.
It seems to have disappeared today (but the networking between desktop and laptop has also gone flakey, and I havn't figured out what's wrong yet).
I have used lots of Netgear, also some QNAP, and Synology boxen.
The Netgear ones do the basics well, and are reasonably well supported with software etc.
The QNAP and Synology are higher end all singing and dancing options usually.
While they are cheap, I would keep clear of the Buffalo Link station models - the couple I tried I found rather limiting and unreliable. I have had colleagues report similar.
Most will support RAID of some form or another. The options you get will depend on the software and the number of drives supported. All can look like a windows share. Most can run server software for specific tasks like a plex server or web hosting etc. Many have a generational or snapshop capability that can sit on overwritten or deleted files for a period of time, and allow recovery of previous versions, which can be handy for backup jobs. Having said that, another off site backup is still to be recommended.
Most will use one of the linux varient file systems, but note that mounting the bare drives in a new system may not always be trivial. Especially if you use drive level encryption etc.
Having said that of the few dozen I have installed over the last decade or more, none have failed so far. Note even had a drive failure yet... (WD "Red" drives predominately)
For about 5 years I have been running a Synology DS411j 4 bay, with four 2TB Western Digital enterprise hard drives.
The drives were not cheap, but the advice is generally that for something which is likely to be running for extended periods, then cheap consumer disks are a false economy
This is configured as RAID 5 + spare, and reports a useable capacity of 3.63 TB.
Mirroring gives you protection against a drive failing. Choosing a NAS where you can extract the disks and insert them into a bog standard OS and access the data gives you protection against the NAS failing. They are both equally important. People often fail to consider the second point, and I've heard several tales of losing all your data that way, particularly from the first generation consumer NAS devices when they eventually fail after they are no longer available.
Personally, I build my own using HP microservers and ZFS. The disks can be read by a number of different OS's including Linux, FreeBSD, and all the Illumos distros. (There's a demo Windows port of ZFS too, but not yet ready for use, but might be up to recovering your data from ZFS disks.) FreeNAS would be the best choice to run on a ZFS NAS unless you are already intimately familiar with ZFS and one of the other OS's which supports it.
I quite like D-Link stuff. A mate gave me a Netgear (I think) NAS of some sort but you had to register it on their servers to even get it to work (even if you didn't want access from outside your LAN). I never really got on with it.
Ok.
Well, that's one of the goals (straight file server) but with the hope that we could also get him some sort of centralised / automatic backup. If not then at least he could run something on each client machine (3 x Windows and 1 x Linux so far) and push a backup to the file server.
Good luck with that (nothing worse than an intermittent fault).
Ah, the last two seem to be the names I have heard from those who have thrown reasonable money at these things. ;-)
Ok.
It's a name I know but can't think of anything I have ever used of these, outside a PCMCIA WiFi card possibly?
As you would hope.
Understood. Whilst my friend may be willing and able to come up with whatever funds are required to do what I think he might like, I'm also wary of not throwing his money away on something that doesn't at least tick all the core boxes (data resilience (RAID), automatic backup, ideally at the (Windows) system level and some extra space to dump stuff off his local machines).
Ok, that's important of course (also assumed).
The only service I believe would be important is some sort of centralised backup.
Yup, that was the sort of thing I mentioned as he does delete the wrong file now and again. ;-(
I believe he now has his photo collections on Google Photos and some stuff on Dropbox. I did provide him an external backup drive but without any of it being automated, it doesn't get done.
Hmm, that was my fear ... and without also buying some spare / matching hardware ...
Understood (we wouldn't be).
Ok, well that's a good point John, not that 'lick' should come into all this. ;-)
Excellent.
I did read somewhere the suggestion that given the components in most drives are the same, the MTBF would be the same and so the extra cost of these 'special' drives is just to do with the length of the warranty, not the MTBF of the drives themselves?
Thinking on all these if / but's / gotchas reminds me why I have built my own servers and how they do most of what I've highlighted and possibly at a similar cost to a dedicated NAS. The only issue would be the added complexity of running an additional 'PC / Server' for this particular chap (as you can guess who would actually be looking after it).
It seem to come back (from my comfort factor if anything) of an old copy of Windows Home Server running on a little (Atom) box with a couple of big drives, as I know it can do the backups, the drives can be mounted in any PC and read and the hardware replaced easily.
It's just that along with finding an old copy of WHS, muggings is going to have to built / configure / install it ...
So, which boxes have you personally been running (or supplying / installing / managing) please John than have run for years ... ?
Cheers, T i m
p.s. I think two of my neighbours have Nass'es, one a QNAP and one Synology. I think the QNAP one was a bit sensitive to heat and he ended up having to put it somewhere particularly cool to stop it falling over all the time? ;-(
So, can it provide a centralise (Windows) backup solution do you know dennis (via some app or addon possibly), to save just running it as a file server and having to install some client side backup utility?
Quite. Another reason why I like the Windows Home Server solution as even if the drive are running folder duplication (ensuring a folder is duplicated over two drives), it can all be access on anything that can read NTFS (supposedly anyway).
This would be by personally preferred solution Andrew but I was really hoping for an appliance type solution in this case.
OK, that's good ...
Noted.
I am also running OMV on a RPi2 and a 3TB external laptop drive (sort of an experiment) and whilst it's been running for quite a while (untouched), I have so far never really got to grips with the whole user / sharing / rights / authentication thing (same with the likes of FreeNAS). I mean, I've sort of got it working but never really worked out which of the numerous clicks and reboots made it work. I looks / suggests that it should be very simple [1] but ... ;-(
On my WHS, you select the user, which of the 3 rights a user has (R/ RW / None) and it's done (and works).
Maybe before I recommend my friend a dedicated NAS I'll have a look at a free NAS solution and ZFS as I have plenty of PC hardware I could do with getting rid of. ;-)
Cheers, T i m
[1] As most of my PC's are (primarily) running Windows I also have to add SAMBA sharing and I think that adds to the complication?
I can't really comment, but as I've now had my 5 years, it is pretty academic.
I use Macrium Reflect 7 Home Edition
formatting link
You can have a 30 day free trial.
Previously I had used Acronis, but it had a number of fundamental shortcomings, which the company showed no signs of addressing in subsequent releases, and needed frequent manual intervention.
Reflect has been reasonably OK, and is very configurable. I have it set up to email me confirmations of each backup. It does occasionally appear to crash windows, which is annoying, but tolerable.
FWIW my Synology DS210J (old now and unavailable) has only let me down once, with a fan failure a few months ago. Easily remedied by sticking in a new fan.
Ok, over what sort of time period OOI (you might have bought it second hand and only had it on 2 months (although the implication was that you have had it from new and so on for a long time as it's now obsolete etc))? ;-)
Yup. I'd treat fans as consumables and why the only one in my server is one in the PSU case (the PSU itself is external).
They also don't go 'deaf' for more than a short length of time (unlike the other colours) so are unlikely to drop out of a RAID array if they spend time retrying a transfer.
For a backup that is a mirror I don't see the point of Raid 1. You will automatically have 2 copies. If you have files only stored on the NAS then Raid 1 is a necessity.
I have a rather ancient D-Link DNS-323s and use VeraCrypt as a means of stopping anyone else reading the file rather than use permissions. This might not be ideal for your friend, but it seems to improve the backup speed of small files by an order of magnitude.
I also use FreeFileSync to create the backup which has the options of versioning rather than overwriting files.
I have thought of using a Raspberry Pi and use this with large USB drives. There are Pi applications for this.
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