Some questions i have about NAS's and home servers

[$nWo$_Frank Castle]

Hello there bright and knowledgeable people from LTT forms.

 

im pondering about building a nas or server for my storage at home. i myself am a photographer and i would like a place to offload my raw files and .bmgs. 

I have been watching videos and reading topics about personal servers, and i have been really looking into doing this, at the moment my computer has enough storage with some ext HDDs to hold my photos i would just like to have back ups of my back ups which i always get told to do. 

only problem is i have little understanding into building a server let alone configure it. so my questions are to you people are;

 

1. Is it viable for my position.

2.Which would be the best for cost.
3.What is there general life time,before; hardware failure etc

4. What's the general rule of thumbs surrounding these builds

 

Look forward to your replies and have a good day

 

[79wjd]

1. yes

2. It depends on how much storage/functionality you need. A prebuilt NAS may be a good choice for you.

3. Generally a long time -- hard drives are the only components that are likely to fail and they generally fail immediately or after years of use. 

4. Ummmm, know what you want ahead of time/think about future expandability/use and account for it? Don't cheap out and get bad/cheap hardware.

[$nWo$_Frank Castle]

Just now, djdwosk97 said:

2. It depends on how much storage/functionality you need. A prebuilt NAS may be a good choice for you.

3. Generally a long time -- hard drives are the only components that are likely to fail and they generally fail immediately or after years of use. 

 

So there are companies that pre build them? have you or has anyone had any experience with them? 

From what i have seen and read, people use the wd reds. now if i were to build i would try to get them but other type still work fine just more likely to have problems in their later life? 

[Jarsky]

What sort of budget do you have in mind?

How much storage are you after - are you going to be storing the raw images?

 

1. It's definately nice to have a dedicated storage system.

2. It depends how big you want to go - often the prebuilt NAS systems are the best value for a basic 2-4 disk storage solution and they came with management software

3. Lifetime would be the same as any computer - but the disk configurations can make a big difference to the reliability

4. You need to decide on what parameters you need to fullfill to make the best decision at the start, its very very difficult to migrate between solutions.

 

Also keep in mind that a NAS with parity or RAID mirroring will provide redundancy, but as the cliche goes, redundancy is no replacement for a backup.

RAID is designed to keep data online through failures, not to provide a platform to recover from data loss. Always have backups of stuff you cant afford to lose

[79wjd]

6 minutes ago, $nWo$_Frank Castle said:

So there are companies that pre build them? have you or has anyone had any experience with them? 

From what i have seen and read, people use the wd reds. now if i were to build i would try to get them but other type still work fine just more likely to have problems in their later life? 

A prebuilt NAS -- something like a Western Digital My Cloud is basically just a hard drive on your network. There are also more configurable/expandable options from Synology and Western Digital. Generally I would recommend a prebuilt for someone who just wants to backup data easily to another device and have access to it from anywhere on the network. (the one caveat here is that redundancy isn't much of an option on prebuilt boxes due to cost, and the more expensive prebuilts that have redundancy options are generally more expensive than a custom build would cost).

 

A custom built NAS is more complicated but also far more expandable/upgradable. So it depends what it is that you specifically want. If you want something you can plug it and will work, then go with a MyCloud, if you want something that you can tinker with and configure and add drives as you please, then build something on your own.

 

WD Reds are designed for NAS use (24/7 operation) and have support for TLER which prevents a drive from being dropped from a RAID array in the event of a drive error (which is something you want if you plan on running any form of RAID).

 

[$nWo$_Frank Castle]

2 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

What sort of budget do you have in mind?

How much storage are you after - are you going to be storing the raw images?

 

 

i would say somewhere in the area of £500 

yes it would ideally have the raw file and perhaps another backup.

[KuJoe]

11 minutes ago, $nWo$_Frank Castle said:

1. Is it viable for my position.

2.Which would be the best for cost.
3.What is there general life time,before; hardware failure etc

4. What's the general rule of thumbs surrounding these builds

1) Yes, all of my friends who do any type of image/video work have a NAS for their projects (and the ones who make a living of it also store additional backups).

2) Synology is my favorite, I have 2 of them and they run a few hundred dollars depending on how many bays you want (I personally just use a 1 bay NAS, then run a nightly backup to a USB drive).

3) I've had my Synology DS110j for 6 years without any hardware failure.

4) If you get something like a Synology of QNAP NAS, you set it up via the GUI and you're off to the races. I personally use Synology's Cloud Station to replicate folders across all of my PCs so my important data is always available and always synced up to the latest revision.

[79wjd]

4 minutes ago, $nWo$_Frank Castle said:

i would say somewhere in the area of £500 

yes it would ideally have the raw file and perhaps another backup.

Would you want to use the NAS for anything other than backups? 

 

i.e. would you potentially stream media for it (like transcoded 1080p video), or..

[$nWo$_Frank Castle]

1 minute ago, djdwosk97 said:

A prebuilt NAS -- something like a Western Digital My Cloud is basically just a hard drive on your network. There are also more configurable/expandable options from Synology and Western Digital. Generally I would recommend a prebuilt for someone who just wants to backup data easily to another device and have access to it from anywhere on the network. 

 

A custom built NAS is more complicated but also far more expandable.

 

WD Reds are designed for NAS use (24/7 operation) and have support for TLER which prevents a drive from being dropped from a RAID array in the event of a drive error (which is something you want if you plan on running any form of RAID).

pardon my ignorance but, is that wd my cloud over the internet? cause my area has terrible ups and downs. making storage on clouds hard. 

[Mohenjo]

Just now, $nWo$_Frank Castle said:

i would say somewhere in the area of £500 

yes it would ideally have the raw file and perhaps another backup.

well around there i would suggest getting a g3220 or something and 8gb of ram along with 8TB. let me put something together 

[RedWulf]

Just as a general glance, there are ALOT of pre built nas. But since you have the external drivess and this is for personal use only I assume; you could pick up a tb or 2hdd and rig up a cheap $300-400 pc then add those externals and you should be good for a few years. The hdds will probably fail first but thats years away and a wd red will last til you feel the need to upgrade. plus custom is fun

[79wjd]

4 minutes ago, $nWo$_Frank Castle said:

pardon my ignorance but, is that wd my cloud over the internet? cause my area has terrible ups and downs. making storage on clouds hard. 

No, it's a local box you would buy and install (plug in) on your network. 

[RedWulf]

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/swqxnQ

this might suite your needs, $406 and has 4tb of storage

[$nWo$_Frank Castle]

2 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

1) Yes, all of my friends who do any type of image/video work have a NAS for their projects (and the ones who make a living of it also store additional backups).

2) Synology is my favorite, I have 2 of them and they run a few hundred dollars depending on how many bays you want (I personally just use a 1 bay NAS, then run a nightly backup to a USB drive).

3) I've had my Synology DS110j for 6 years without any hardware failure.

4) If you get something like a Synology of QNAP NAS, you set it up via the GUI and you're off to the races. I personally use Synology's Cloud Station to replicate folders across all of my PCs so my important data is always available and always synced up to the latest revision.

thanks for that. its nice to see some numbers from someone running a pre build! 

[$nWo$_Frank Castle]

2 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

No, it's a local box you would buy and install (plug in) on your network. 

thanks for that, just thought i would fire the questions and put my fool's cap on! 

[KuJoe]

Another thing to take into account is power usage, if you pay for your own electricity than do you really want to pay >$10 a month in electricity just for backups (building your own NAS can easily run this much in power/cooling)? My Synology NAS costs me $13.83 per year in electricity and is more quiet than some of my external hard drives.

[$nWo$_Frank Castle]

1 minute ago, RedWulf said:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/swqxnQ

this might suite your needs, $406 and has 4tb of storage

i will look into that then along side the pre builds and decide what's the best for my possition. Thanks

 

[$nWo$_Frank Castle]

Just now, KuJoe said:

Another thing to take into account is power usage, if you pay for your own electricity than do you really want to pay >$10 a month in electricity just for backups? My Synology NAS costs me $13.83 per year in electricity and is more quiet than some of my external hard drives.

Thanks for that i forgot to think of that! 

[RedWulf]

Just now, KuJoe said:

Another thing to take into account is power usage, if you pay for your own electricity than do you really want to pay >$10 a month in electricity just for backups? My Synology NAS costs me $13.83 per year in electricity and is more quiet than some of my external hard drives.

well an nas is more than typical back up and custom nas is far more capable 

[79wjd]

8 minutes ago, RedWulf said:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/swqxnQ

this might suite your needs, $406 and has 4tb of storage

There's no reason to go with something that antiquated when something like a Haswell Pentium based system would be cheaper to buy and to run. 

 

4 minutes ago, $nWo$_Frank Castle said:

Thanks for that i forgot to think of that! 

To elaborate on that, a custom built NAS would probably run you about $100~ a year, but you also gain more functionality (which may be irrelevant to you).

[KuJoe]

Just now, RedWulf said:

well an nas is more than typical back up and custom nas is far more capable 

But all he wants to do is host files, no point in building an overkill NAS for that.

[Mohenjo]

5 minutes ago, $nWo$_Frank Castle said:

i would say somewhere in the area of £500 

yes it would ideally have the raw file and perhaps another backup.

 

Just now, $nWo$_Frank Castle said:

i will look into that then along side the pre builds and decide what's the best for my possition. Thanks

 

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/Jy4Fcf

 

This gives you 8tb of storage. If you buy a prebuilt NAS i recommend getting WD reds

[RedWulf]

a

Just now, KuJoe said:

But all he wants to do is host files, no point in building an overkill NAS for that.

true, actually an old cheap pc with a cheap hdd could work if he uses windows or sambashare

[$nWo$_Frank Castle]

1 minute ago, djdwosk97 said:

There's no reason to go with something that antiquated when something like a Haswell Pentium based system would be cheaper to buy and to run. 

 

To elaborate on that, a custom built NAS would probably run you about $100~ a year, but you also gain more functionality (which may be irrelevant to you).

ahh thanks for that! i was hoping someone could elaborate that for me! 

[Mohenjo]

Just now, $nWo$_Frank Castle said:

ahh thanks for that! i was hoping someone could elaborate that for me! 

If you are looking for a cheap High capacity NAS (since all you seem to really need is storage) i would recommend just picking this up 

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/D-Link-ShareCenter-Network-Storage-Enclosure/dp/B008HNRD4I/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1456336493&sr=8-3&keywords=NAS

 

You could go for the 4tb if you dont need 8. But this well under your budget