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Is RAID mirroring on a 2HD NAS worthwhile?

uncl_nigel

uncl_nigel

pfm Member
I need to sort out my file storage and having looked at the costs have a few questions.

I need 4Tb of storage for the music.

I am thinking of using a 2 disc NAS (to keep th e noise down as it has to be in the hifi room).

- If I have an external disc of appropriate size for automatic backup, are there any advantages to having two 4Tb discs mirroring each other?

- Or could I just install a small SSD to take the Roon core off the Mac and one big SSD for the music?

- Has anyone used the SILENT QNAP models (the ones without fans)? If so any problems with disc longevity?
 
I have a 2 bay QNAP TS-251+ with 8GB RAM and 2x 1TB Sandisk ultra II SSDs. It's in the the listen room, and connected to the HiFi via 1m USB cable (roonserver installed on the NAS)
It has a fan but it runs at 1000rpm in operation 99% of the time. The fan does a speed check on boot-up but once it settles down its totally silent.
2TB SSDs are £250-300 each now so you could built a 4TB SSD NAS for under £1K. Im going to upgrade my SSDs to 2x 2TB sometime soon.

I don't use raid BTW, i use a USB drive to back up too which i do every-time i add/modify/delete more than a handful of albums. The HDD is them put away in a safe place.
 
I use RAID 1 mirroring on our 2 disk Synology. In addition, I spend 7€ or so a month for Google drive (several TB) and have the Synology run a nightly job to send deltas to the cloud. It's pretty great to have any music I rip on my Mac automatically end up on 2 local HDs as well as cloud. We do a similar arrangement for our photos, except that we upload them to Google drive first (often while traveling) and then they get pulled down to the NAS with a nightly job.

SSD might be a good option as CK mentioned, especially if the NAS will be in the listening space. Our spinning disks make some thunking sounds when the NAS is woken by the streamer. But you can always have the NAS be somewhere else (e.g. a closet, basement, office, etc.) and then spinning disks could work.
 
I have two WD 2TB drives mirrored in my QNAP, the other month noticed red light, one drive had failed, so ordered another, hot swapped and let it rebuild over night. I also back up to a USB HD.... So I would always mirror, much easier if anything fails.
 
The purpose of a RAID Mirror is continuity, if a disk fails everything can carry on as normal and you would need to be very unlucky for the other disk to fail before you get a chance to buy and fit a replacement.

For home use it's more of a convenience/luxury as it adds expense and you only get to use 50% of the TB's you've purchased. I run RAID because I don't want the hassle of sitting down to play tunes and a disk failure knocking out the evening. It also means you'll have to restore from a USB backup disk or the Cloud which is slow, inconvenient and a PITA.

NAS boxes aimed at small business/home use are pretty quiet these days and the one CK uses is almost silent. Most of the noise comes from the hard disk mechanisms, SSD's rule that out so even a normal NAS with SSD's is unlikely to be heard in your music room.

You can just drop your USB backup disk in the mix to play music from but then your Server will need to index it and that can mean it takes a long time for your playlists and album artwork to show up.
 
Cereal Killer said:
Or if you have Qobuz etc, use that till your local files are recompiled on a new drive.
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Well sure, the point was that it depends how much you mind inconvenience and faff, I mind it a lot so I pay for the extra disk, everyone else can make their own decision, what often seems to confuse people looking for their first NAS is the difference between Backup and RAID.

Sales & marketing is guilty of painting a picture that a NAS is a backup device and dead easy to use for a novice. RAID1 mirror has 2 disks, one sort of copying the other, so it must be a backup.
 
I have used a QNAP HS 210 (silent, fanless) for about 6 years. I have two mirrored 2Tb WD drives in it. It has run flawlessly since new, so strongly recommended.
 
AndrewG said:
I have used a QNAP HS 210 (silent, fanless) for about 6 years. I have two mirrored 2Tb WD drives in it. It has run flawlessly since new, so strongly recommended.
Click to expand...
The new version is HS-251+ and is still fan-less, 1 reason I didn't get one was the 2GB Ram limit - soldered on so no way to upgrade, like some Apple stuff. Good box for under a telly though.
 
Not had hands on one of them yet 453DX? Bit spendy be well north of a grand. Thought we'd got one to deploy but the client went for a 453B instead, done a few of them and they are solid/fast boxes.
 
RAID is not necessary. It is not a backup solution, it is to offer redundancy in data intensive environments. RAID 1 instead of 0 is not a backup solution either, if you accidentally delete or overwrite files, all drives are affected.

I would buy a 3.5” USB 3 enclosure, a 2TB HGST drive, and thus have a true backup with a very reliable drive of my choice. I personally use eSATA instead of USB, but not so common these days.
 
Yomanze said:
...which will get you a full silent Mini ITX PC rig and change (£100s) to spare, offering way more power and versatility as a storage / server solution.
Click to expand...
Loads of options, the new HP Micro Server Gen 10 Plus is a real nice box, has quad NICS and low profile form factor. Depends what you're after. The old HP Micro Servers N40/54 are peanuts now used, bang FreeNAS on and you're cooking.
 
Amber Audio said:
The purpose of a RAID Mirror is continuity, if a disk fails everything can carry on as normal and you would need to be very unlucky for the other disk to fail before you get a chance to buy and fit a replacement.
Click to expand...
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
 
I have two near-identical NASs. One for operational duties, the other as a backup target.

If the first one fails, the second one can take over its media duties within a few minutes, and its file server function for the PCs within half an hour or so.

Both are twin-drive RAID1, but as said before, RAID in a home situation is not very useful.
 
Setting up a nas on see a dell optiplex is quite straight forward giving you a way more powerful device for wayyyy less money than a qnap.

Just sayin.
 
RAID is all about keeping a system up in the event of disc failure, it isn’t a backup solution - in fact, as others have pointed out, it can (catastrophically) propagate a deletion or error. Best solution for music library, which changes slowly in any case, is a physically separate backup, ideally offsite or in the cloud. If you can’t do that, stash it somewhere else in your house, not connected to the mains. If there’s a database associated with your music player make sure you back that up too, and consider keeping it in the cloud. Dropbox, onedrive, google .. all good. Or just get a Qobuz subscription.

ps. And think about your whole computing system. If all your computers/phones/tablets/NAS drives were stolen or destroyed right now, could you recover?
 
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