Re: Re: Dead NAS...
By: Gamgee to poindexter FORTRAN on Thu Sep 12 2024 07:53 am

I don't know enough about this to offer a meaningful recommendation, but
I do know enough to believe that the terms "decent" and "inexpensive"
are mutually exclusive on this topic. ;-)

As far as canned solutions go, I have to agree. An out-of-the-box commercial solution for storage is quite expensive.

I have seen some NAS boxes aimed at tiny businesses with good manuals and tons of features starting at 450 bucks, drives not included. I can't vouch for them because I have never tried them. My boss has one of those at home. I might ask him tomorrow.

For moderate use I think finding a second hand server and stuffing it with drives is a better idea. It takes a whole lot of room in comparison, but it is also easier to support past EOL and you can use it for more things than a NAS appliance.


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Hello Arelor!

As far as canned solutions go, I have to agree. An out-of-
the-box commercial solution for storage is quite expensive.

I have seen some NAS boxes aimed at tiny businesses with
good manuals and tons of features starting at 450 bucks,
drives not included. I can't vouch for them because I have
never tried them. My boss has one of those at home. I might
ask him tomorrow.

There are quite a few under $500 *with* the disks included at
the 'zon.

This one looks good, but it doesn't seem clear if the disks are
included.

https://www.amazon.ca/Synology-DiskStation-II-QuadCore- 2xGigabit/dp/B01EG1RLBY

( ..although I've heard that Synology machines are hard to use
with one's own choice of software)

These with disks included look good too:


https://www.amazon.ca/BUFFALO-LinkStation-Private-Included-LS220D1202/dp/B08DZS265Q/


https://www.amazon.ca/BUFFALO-LinkStation-Private-Included-LS220D1202/dp/B08V5L1X1C/


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Ogg wrote to Arelor <=-

As far as canned solutions go, I have to agree. An out-of-
the-box commercial solution for storage is quite expensive.

You're paying for convenience and features. And, they're buying lock-in
with their features and convenience.

I picked up a Synology NAS a couple of years ago for around $100. It
was long in the tooth by the time I got it. I had a handful of 2TB
drives laying around from an older machine that had a mirror array,
plus a couple of external drives I'd used for backup. Put them in the
drive and worked for a couple of years.

The chassis died recently, and I could have built a new system from
scratch and used TrueNAS, but instead I had some gift cards burning a
hole in my pocket and I bought a new chassis. Put the drives in, booted
it up, it recognized the drives, all of the settings, and the array and
I was back in business in about 10 minutes.

I have seen some NAS boxes aimed at tiny businesses with
good manuals and tons of features starting at 450 bucks,
drives not included. I can't vouch for them because I have
never tried them. My boss has one of those at home. I might
ask him tomorrow.

I started out consulting setting up businesses with Microsoft Small
Business Server; with a Synology NAS, out of the box, you could set up
AV scanning, file sharing, mail, chat, calendaring and a bunch of other
tools.

Unfortunately, nowadays, I think you'd be better off with Google
Workspace, but if you wanted to keep your data off grid, this would be attractive.

This one looks good, but it doesn't seem clear if the disks are
included.

https://www.amazon.ca/Synology-DiskStation-II-QuadCore- 2xGigabit/dp/B01EG1RLBY

Based on the price, I'm guessing no drives.

( ..although I've heard that Synology machines are hard to use
with one's own choice of software)

I've not seen anything like that, but without more info I couldn't
comment.

These with disks included look good too:

https://www.amazon.ca/BUFFALO-LinkStation-Private-Included-LS220D1202/dp /B08DZS265Q/

https://www.amazon.ca/BUFFALO-LinkStation-Private-Included-LS220D1202/dp /B08V5L1X1C/

Bear in mind that with those Buffalo systems (and other 2-bay systems with drives) they are two drive systems, the 12TB system is probably 2x6TB.
You'd want to mirror the drives to provide redundancy, but that halves
the effective space.

I do like Buffalo - they used to include a "friendly" version of DD-WRT
on their routers instead of developing their own firmware, and made it
easy to flash the full version on them. I used them for a small office
network back in the 2010s.




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Re: Dead NAS...
By: Ogg to Arelor on Mon Sep 16 2024 11:39 pm

There are quite a few under $500 *with* the disks included at
the 'zon.

Yeah, but the question there is whether they can compete with the other ones.

I doubt the synology you linked has drives included. Besides, that is a 2 bay model and I was thinking of 4+ bays models. I have a bunch of 2 bay NAS units myself but none of them costed more than 100 bucks each. They were old crappy EOLed units when bought, but you get the idea.

I can't talk about the Synology. Word in the street is that Synology is the Apple of the NAS world.

I have an old Bufflo LinkStation which is supposedly a superior unit to the LS220 you linked. It is fine for a budget unit but you are going to bring it to its knees if you try to apply heavy load on it. I use it for storing backups.


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Hello Arelor!

I can't talk about the Synology. Word in the street is that
Synology is the Apple of the NAS world.

You're the 2nd person that has mentioned such a thing to me.
So.. it's best to stay away from Synology boxes if the hope is
to install DIY NAS software?

I have an old Bufflo LinkStation which is supposedly a
superior unit to the LS220 you linked. It is fine for a
budget unit but you are going to bring it to its knees if
you try to apply heavy load on it. I use it for storing
backups.

A two-bay would be good enough for me to start with. And 4TB
(2 x 8TB, RAID 1) would be plenty. I too primarily just need
to store clone-images and basic backups.


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Re: Dead NAS...
By: Ogg to Arelor on Wed Sep 18 2024 06:54 pm

I can't talk about the Synology. Word in the street is that
Synology is the Apple of the NAS world.

You're the 2nd person that has mentioned such a thing to me.
So.. it's best to stay away from Synology boxes if the hope is
to install DIY NAS software?

I am only mentioning what I have heard. I don't have hands-on experience with Synology.

If your hope is to install your own NAS software then I guess it is because you are after specfic features, at which point I am sure you will be better off building your own machine from parts.

If you are still running on a low budget but want some custom NAS software, I think the Asustor NAS manufacturer goes as far as publishing tutorials for replacing the factory firmware with third-party Operating Systems. Bonus points because the hardware is competitively priced.

Personally, I think if you are buying low end you can't justify the time it takes to replace the factory OS.

A two-bay would be good enough for me to start with. And 4TB
(2 x 8TB, RAID 1) would be plenty. I too primarily just need
to store clone-images and basic backups.

Most people would be fine with that, but keep in mind a NAS is more than two drives in an enclosure. They have a CPU, network card and RAM memory. If those aren't strong enough you can overpower the machine if you abuse it.

My Link Station 500 (on paper, more powerful than the LS220 you linked) is quite fine on regular use. Then one day you need to upload 3TB of data in small files using a script and FTP. It will take 4 days for such a NAS to accept and store all that many files because the hardware can't take them faster, and I have seen the machine drop connections because it became resource starved.

Which is fine, because it is a low budget model from 2015.

I mean, if you plan to upload and download a couple of files every now and then, a low specs Buffalo is perfectly fine. Still, if you are going the cheapo road I find D-Link's DNS-320L is a bit more reliable under heavy load and last time I checked it had a comparable price.

None of these models I am discussing are still supported. Ensure they are not Internet reachable. I place all this stuff in isolated VLANs so they don't get to talk to the Internet directly.


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Arelor wrote to Ogg <=-

I can't talk about the Synology. Word in the street is that Synology is the Apple of the NAS world.

I don't know if I'd go that far. They are starting to want to shut down
third party drive support in favor of their enterprise-class drives, but
that's easily remediated.

(Although, I'm using old desktop drives and all of them came up as "supported" under the new chassis I bought.)

Synology has their own ecosystem of apps, like storage, video sharing, collaboration, chat and a mail server - but also support third party
F/OSS apps (I'm looking through the list and I see Transmission,
RabbitMQ, SyncThing, Home Assistant, Git and others.)



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Ogg wrote to Arelor <=-

Hello Arelor!

I can't talk about the Synology. Word in the street is that
Synology is the Apple of the NAS world.

You're the 2nd person that has mentioned such a thing to me.
So.. it's best to stay away from Synology boxes if the hope is
to install DIY NAS software?

In that case, yes. You can't easily just install another NAS OS on the
hardware without tweaking the boot environment. It's possible, but I
haven't tried it and the instructions looked daunting.




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Arelor wrote to Ogg <=-

If your hope is to install your own NAS software then I guess it is because you are after specfic features, at which point I am sure you
will be better off building your own machine from parts.

One machine I like a lot that looks cheap in the used market is the HP
Proliant MicroServer - some of the older ones are cheap, they have AMD
CPUs and a couple of easily-accessible drive bays.

A two-bay would be good enough for me to start with. And 4TB
(2 x 8TB, RAID 1) would be plenty. I too primarily just need
to store clone-images and basic backups.

An off-lease business PC with two drive bays might do the trick? Some of
the Dell Optiplex 90X0 systems come with RAID on the motherboard,
otherwise PCI-x RAID SATA cards are pretty cheap.



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On 18 Sep 2024, Ogg said the following...

Hello Arelor!

I can't talk about the Synology. Word in the street is that
Synology is the Apple of the NAS world.

You're the 2nd person that has mentioned such a thing to me.
So.. it's best to stay away from Synology boxes if the hope is
to install DIY NAS software?

I have an old Bufflo LinkStation which is supposedly a
superior unit to the LS220 you linked. It is fine for a
budget unit but you are going to bring it to its knees if
you try to apply heavy load on it. I use it for storing
backups.

A two-bay would be good enough for me to start with. And 4TB
(2 x 8TB, RAID 1) would be plenty. I too primarily just need
to store clone-images and basic backups.

I love Synology, my opinion is they have the best OS that runs a NAS, their OS is a bit tough to change to something else, and as someone mentioned they are moving towards making you use their enterprise HD's. My opinion is if you want to be able to use any HD, be able to change the OS to something else, then Terramaster, and UGreen are the way to go. I own a Synology, and a Terramaster 2 Bay which I will soon be getting a 4bay unit. The Terramaster to change the OS was as simple as opening it up pulling out a USB thumbdrive, installing a new one.What I did was install a 512TB nVME drive pulled the thumbdrive, put proxmox on a new thumbdrive, booted from it, and installed Proxmox on the nVME drive. Upon bootup after that I installed Xpenology in Proxmox, the great thing about this method is you can install anything you want testing different OS' until you decide which one you want to run. I ran TrueNAS for about a week, I ran Unraid, Open Media Vault, all at the same time actually. I finally settled on Xpenology until I got a retired Surveilance machine which had a better Hardware setup. I will soon retire that machine and move over to the 4Bay Terramaster.

Sorry for rambling.

Gonna plug my Synology Fanboy son here if you are interested in NAS software, hardware etc. check out my son's Youtube channel, Wundertech, and on the web www.wundertech.net he has a lot of useful info on his website and his video's explain a lot also...


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Hello Bucko!

Sorry for rambling.

It is interesting to read about what other people settle with
and why.

Gonna plug my Synology Fanboy son here if you are interested in NAS software, hardware etc. check out my son's Youtube channel, Wundertech,
and on the web www.wundertech.net he has a lot of useful info on his website and his video's explain a lot also...

Yup.. quite a plug! :D But that's ok. I don't really need
10GbE networking. My interest is just to have a good place to
confidently dump backups on a regular basis and to store large
media files. I don't need a NAS to "serve" multimedia.

Interesting comment about ECC memory.


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Bucko wrote to Ogg <=-

I love Synology, my opinion is they have the best OS that runs a NAS, their OS is a bit tough to change to something else, and as someone mentioned they are moving towards making you use their enterprise HD's.
My opinion is if you want to be able to use any HD, be able to change
the OS to something else, then Terramaster, and UGreen are the way to
go.

There is a way to add most drives to the whitelist on Synology.
Surprising that all of my Seagate and WD desktop 2TB drives are
recognized and supported in the newest DSM. Some of those drives are 5+
years old!


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My NAS is a Synology DS1010+, modded to think it's a DS1511+ and running DSM 6.2. The LAN lights and power lights blink, but no drive lights, and it doesn't respond to SSH, ping, or Synology assistant.

<cut>

Otherwise, any suggestions as to what's a decent, inexpensive NAS to support 12-14TB? I don't need containers or an app ecosystem, although it'd be nice. NFS, SMB and DLNA, mostly.

My 6.2 Synology drive (4 bays) was also more dying in spring time, but one of my disks inside it too. I lost half of my RAID and as a part of recovery I purchased new 7.x based Synology with 6 bays. I purchased two larger disks (14TB Iron Wolf each) and set another RAID. Moved all data to new NAS and reinstalled everything with full reformat, check of the disks...

The old still serves me, but I don't trust it so I put there only temporary data I don't want to keep on my computers. I purchased more HDD to new Synology and now I'm happy with 28TB of fully RAID 10 storage and newest platform. Old Synology was with me for about 10 years already.. that's good ROI. I hope new one will serve me well for similar timeframe too.

-h1

... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

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The old still serves me, but I don't trust it so I put there only temporar data I don't want to keep on my computers. I purchased more HDD to new Syn and now I'm happy with 28TB of fully RAID 10 storage and newest platform. Synology was with me for about 10 years already.. that's good ROI. I hope one will serve me well for similar timeframe too.

I went through 2 of Synology DS1621+ in half a year. From NEW!

My third one is running stable for 2 years now. But it sure dented my trust in Synology. I actually still feel it can give up on me every moment, was even contemplating to add a backup same version which runs as a slave with the same data.

But I think I will upgrade to a newer one next year. And buy two at once to make the backup plan work. Wanted a hardware transcoding CPU since Im running Plex.

Lets see how I feel about it next year with the new line-up :P.

oP!

... There is an exception to every rule, except this one.

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I went through 2 of Synology DS1621+ in half a year. From NEW!

Reall?! Wow, that's suprising. They are pretty good NAS units over all.

When it went bad, what did you loose, just the NAS? Meaning all you had to do is move your HD's over.

What does the recovery process look like?

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I went through 2 of Synology DS1621+ in half a year. From NEW!

Reall?! Wow, that's suprising. They are pretty good NAS units over all.

Yes, I think I was majorly unlucky. Especially seeing the third model is performing awesome.

When it went bad, what did you loose, just the NAS? Meaning all you had to ni> is move your HD's over.

Only the NAS, no data loss at all. The downtime was annoying though because all my stuff runs on the dockers. Torrent, Plex, Mystic etc, so I was down for a week until the new unit came in.

The service initially wanted me to sent in the defective unit and check it before issueing the new model. I had to fight for receiving the new unit beforehand.

What does the recovery process look like?

Recovery was very easy, had to put in a fresh disk in the new NAS and started it to update the firmware. Then I swapped drives and it run like sunshine (at least for a bit). Same method for the third version.

oP!

... The dog ate my .REP packet

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