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Is RAID mirroring on a 2HD NAS worthwhile?

It has happened to me twice in my office. It turns out that disks from the same batch fail together, maybe power issues or their internal firmware bugs.
The single point of failure of the drive controller and OS driver is also still there

This will show you why HGST is my only choice: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2020/

I recently bought a 2.5” 1TB HGST Travelstar to use as a portable drive. THE portable drive for me. Above 1TB you want a 3.5” drive...
 
This will show you why HGST is my only choice: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2020/

I recently bought a 2.5” 1TB HGST Travelstar to use as a portable drive. THE portable drive for me. Above 1TB you want a 3.5” drive...
Those drives in the Backblaze and other Cloud vendor surveys are Enterprise grade disks, not what a home user is gonna typically buy, they are built to be more robust/cooler/prepared for a specific role with custom firmware.

Western Digital own HG aka Hitachi these days, bought them out 8 years ago, aftermath of the Thailand floods. A 4TB HGST MegaScale was over £200 and a normal 4TB was £120 ish when they were current.

If you want quality/reliability differentiation go by the warranty, generally it'll be 1, 2, 3 or 5 years, it varies by country and roughly goes home/consumer 2 years, business 3 years, nas/enterprise 5 years.

An exception is the Samsung 850 Pro - Ten year warranty https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/support/warranty/
 
Is FreeNAS roon compatible?
Dunno, it’s linux underneath, it’s respected for the filing system it uses called ZFS. We use it as a data tank and for pc backups/veam but i see it mentioned on geek and av forums, mainly as a dvd/blu rip library.

The micro servers were deployed with WHS alongside SBS back in the day to backup 10 PC’s. They are no longer used so we’re repurposing with freenas or giving them away.

ROON
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-core-on-freenas-11-2/62686
 
We have a QNAP HS-251+ in our flat, with a pair of 4TB drives inside. It's certainly quiet, and we've had no issues (yet) in four years of use. It does get warm, though, and the 2GB limit is a pain nowadays - I can't run Linn's Kazoo Server as it grabs all the available memory and then a chunk of virtual memory.

Mick
 
Re 2gb memory linit: I was able to upgrade my Synology 4 disk 415+ NAS to 8gb by changing it myself. I checked that it would work and the NAS recognises the extra memory. . I run 4 x 2tb WD Red drives in a RAID mirror. I also back-up to two older Synology Disk Stations.
 
Re 2gb memory linit: I was able to upgrade my Synology 4 disk NAS to 8gb by changing it myself. I checked that it would work and the NAS recognises the extra memory. . I run 4 x 2tb WD Red drives in a RAID mirror. I also back-up to two older Synology Disk Stations.
Problem with the hS 251 is the ram is soldered not slotted. Generally you can upgrade a decent NAS with 2 slots to 8GB and often 16GB even if the specs say 8 max.
 
@Amber Audio, do you know if its possible to purpose each SSD in my TS-251+ IE, run them both as individual drives, say disk 1 for music and disk 2 for Video?

I'm seriously considering getting 2x 2TB SSDs as they're only £220 each ATM.

I have my NAS setup as PLEX for movies (plexpass), Roon (lifetime sub) and Asset UPNP server.
 
I use OPenMediaVault. If i can use it anyone can. Create a USB media of it, stick it in a pc that can take 4 or more harddrives and install. I install to an ssd but its not really necessery to do that. The install drive I think is only for OMV so cannot be used as storage. attach other drives via sata internally and bring on line, I can walk anyone through it if they want.

And yes roon runs just fine on it, follow roons instructions for installing on linux. My roon server works like this.

I must confess my server is a tadge over kill for the requirement, but then I am a geek. I set one up for a mate in a dell optiplex with a core i5 and 8 gigs and roon server runs really well.

Like any server though, keep it out of the hifi room :)
 
..Best solution for music library, which changes slowly in any case, is a physically separate backup, ideally offsite or in the cloud...
I do this, a caddy drive kept in my drawer at work. Modern drives are so big that this is all that you need.
I should really have a second snapshot kept somewhere else, so that at no time all the data is at home.
I use Unison to synchronise the files and spot the changes
 
@Amber Audio, do you know if its possible to purpose each SSD in my TS-251+ IE, run them both as individual drives, say disk 1 for music and disk 2 for Video?

I'm seriously considering getting 2x 2TB SSDs as they're only £220 each ATM.

I have my NAS setup as PLEX for movies (plexpass), Roon (lifetime sub) and Asset UPNP server.
You'd go for two Single Disk Volumes - to be sure physically add them 1 a time and test. Avoid JBOD and RAID0.

Assume it'll work OK - I've never deployed a HS and I'm partial to RAID configs, it runs same QTS 4 as others so should be fine.
 
I use a QNAP TS-251+ with 2 2 TB disks in RAID 1, but also backup 3-2-1, three backup copies, of which one is offsite. RAID is not really needed for me, because my data is just some gigs company data but lots of static music files...the backups I do automatically and daily covers for disk crashes.
 
RAID is for systems where down time costs big money, just not worth the effort at home
If you do have a RAID array, make sure that you have spare drives of the same type.
 
RAID is for systems where down time costs big money, just not worth the effort at home
If you do have a RAID array, make sure that you have spare drives of the same type.
Don't forget RAID 0. I use it to increase read/write HD performance - almost double. Possibly the only real use of RAID for home use if your mobo supports it.

RAID was originally designed for mainframes that had large arrays of disks and when one failed you could hot swap it for a new disk that was automatically rebuilt on the fly. Its an availability service and as has been said not a backup. I'm out of date having been retired for 10 years but back then backups were made daily to tape and sent off to another site for safe keeping.

Cheers,

DV
 
Disk I/O is not an issue for audio or even encoded video these days.
Indeed! In fact I discovered that my Linux system uses almost 2GB of disk cache so for files under this size my HD's are faster than SSD! Its only when I am manipulating huge arrays of data when playing with computer/deep learning training.

Maybe also a help for video editing films and HD photo editing but I haven't gone down that route yet.

Cheers,

DV
 
It will save you the time restoring the files on a single NAS disk, though. No guarantee that a restore will be totally painless.
 


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