Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Off Topic NAS enclosure buying advice

Hi Ronnie,

Season's Greetings to you & yours !

I get your logic. It's a very tricky area given that we are constantly being told we are moving to downloads for our entertainment needs. This assumes a logical process of library organization and backup that needs a lot of pre-visualisation and practical planning for the home.

When I see kids in my extended family they will never purchase CDs - they have zero interest. Downloads by track are the order of the day. MP3 libraries can survive on a laptop but, like anything, as things expand the backup solution is really what gives you the 'peace of mind'.

I like your idea too of a 'NAS Club' of mutual backing up. Well worth considering.

Best

~M~

I agree. Occasionally, I make optical backups of my NAS drive, for this reason.. Who knows when the next water pipe will break and take the whole thing out. It's not perfect, but at least it keeps me from having to start all over.

Verbatim 50GB 6X BD-R DL 10 Packs Spindle Disc

I would think that most peoples networks would be more of a limitation then this.

Aren't we all going to be keeping the music that we own (and the photos and video that we made) in some cloud or other (possibly iCloud) and then hoping that *they* have a proper back-up strategy (and hardened security etc etc)?

Or simply renting everything (from the same cloud?) so we don't own anything and back-ups are irrelevant (provided we pay the appropriate monthly fee)?

It may not appeal to thee and me but it seems to be the future. I'm reluctant to buy into it just yet but, as they say, it seems to be the direction of travel.

(Another) Duncan

IT Veteran & Sci-fi fan
The former makes me deeply sceptical about these things, whilst the latter wants them all to come true!

As one with a chronic mistrust of government, etc, the thought of only being able to get literature, music, etc only from the cloud is a day I don't look forward too. Certainly makes it a lot easier to rewrite history, events... if no one has a hard copy. Also, with more and more network providers charging "per bit", I think I try and keep as much as I can, on my own server.

For those who consider the Cloud to be an option for their Libraries consider the following excerpt from a recent article on Cloud Storage Pricing

To those that don't know, Amazon S3 are the largest single Storage Provider in the world and used by many multi-nationals for their Cloud Offerings.......including Microsoft and Apple

And that's for 5Tb........hardly enough for both Music and Movie Libraries........sure the prices will come down over time, but........

Cloud Storage has definite Upsides (e.g. Dropbox is a super service as long as you take the necessary security steps).......but it's not yet ready for Media Libraries IMHO

Two other significant issues to consider outside of the Storage Costs

a) With the Real World Upload Internet speeds that we deal with, how long would it take you to upload that same 5Tb........and how would your Internet Provider react??

b) In a Disaster Recovery situation, how long would it take you to recover that same 5Tb.........i.e. how long would it be before you had your Library restored at home???..........what about your Fair Use restrictions with your Internet Provider??.........most would not allow 5Tb to be downloaded in a Month, never mind a few days

What MAY be possible over time is a service similar to "iTunes Match", where your Library is matched as a Subset of the much larger iTunes Library............but will the Music companies ever allow that option with Lossless Music

Likewise, will they ever allow that with Bluray Quality Movies??

Summary: NAS type Storage Devices will be with us for quite some time to come

CPU/RAM will also affect performance of any background apps you have. I set up a QNAP TS10something for my parents for a Squeezebox and the performance of the Squeezebox server software was very poor. When it died suddenly I set them up a hands-off server based around Atom.

I used to use an old laptop under the stairs as a NAS. But now I've made it an additional task for the HTPC. The HTPC only uses 40W running so I just leave it on 24/7. It also runs an online backup client so is quietly uploading encrypted data at it's own pace. I also have another live copy of everything internally and also a delayed backup internally which is sometimes swapped for a delayed backup at another location. I reckon that should cover it.

Personally I wouldn't recommend any stripe based RAID (0, 5) for home use. It's too much risk and complexity. I know people who have lost data through RAID and I know people who have had NAS devices fail on them. If you have your data/backups in a standard format (FAT32/NTFS/ext2/[censored]/whatever) on a disc somewhere it's not hard to find a device to read it.

In terms of pricing the Amazon S3 based services are very expensive on a per-GB basis. There are a few providers who will do "unlimited" for a fixed reasonable fee. Some people claim to have multi-TB usage as part of this.

I've recently changed online backup provider. My new one allows you to populate your backup by sending them a hard drive of data for a fixed fee (~�150). Equally you can recover by requesting a hard drive be sent to you. These people are very focussed on the backup role, as opposed to the dropbox model which is more about sharing.

I've owned two readynas file servers, the original 4 bay had a sparc clone for CPU and was not really fast enough for speedy rsyncs and video transcoding. The CPU on a filer can be used with various server software to perform audio and video transcoding.

The current readynas filer uses a single or dual core intel atom processor, my 6 bay filer has much faster rsyncs from my Mac Pro and could handle more complex transcodes, if needed. Being based on the x86 arch simplifies the Linux kernel support for the readynas developers.

I will echo the sentiment that with the availability of 2/3Tb drives, raid 1 is probably plenty complex *unless* you are ripping BluRays or have a very, very large collection. Also, software Raid using ZFS with a 4 bay enclosure is a good alternative, I am currently beta testing tens complement.com port of ZFS. My macpro has plenty of CPU power and memory, it now just needs a build of MacOS lion that can "share" nonHFS+ filesystems.

FreeBSD also supports ZFS well, though no vendor runs FreeBSD out of the box, as far as I know.

Anyone else using this device? The spec on the Ultra 4 seems pretty good, particularly the dual-core processor and 1GB RAM. The Netgears also seem more geared up for consumer applications with built-in Squeezebox and iTunes servers.

I'm very pleased with the ReadyNAS Duo that I picked up a month or so back (running a single Samsung EcoGreen F2 1.5TB drive and backing up to a similar drive in my Linux Squeezebox server). Note that I am only serving up audio and photos at this point.

Are there any like-for-like throughput numbers available for the latest generation of prosumer NAS devices?

I am running the six bay readynas dual core and I am very satisfied with it. Crucially, it allows the ability to check the health of the raid file system on a regular basis, to possibly repair inconsistencies prior to a disk going bad and having the partition totally corrupt. ZFS is still the most powerful file system I have used for home use,amazingly powerful and robust.

Is this what you mean?