Another question - how many drives to buy. Do you all buy extra drives for future replacement? I was thinking that it would be prudent to get 6 drives first to see if the whole thing works out and then maybe get another three to have an unused spare. My concern is that the exact drive model will be discontinued at some point. Are the NAS sensitive to different drives (assuming same capacity and general speed) or was that problem resolved years ago? Thanks.
Home NAS
- Thread starter LiamC
- Start date
Stereodude
Not really a
Mixing different drives is bound to have some impact. It may not be noticeable though. A newer drive is also likely to be faster, so it's probably not going to slow down the NAS.
ddrueding
Fixture
I prefer to keep the same drives in a unit (first round is all bought at the same time), but many have ended up with mixed drives (some even different capacities). I've never had any issue or measurable performance impact.
ddrueding
Fixture
I've used both with Synology units without issue. The latest was 12x 6TB WD Red.
I can only speak for the 4TB HGST NAS drives and to me they are fairly quiet. If my NAS is busy with IO I can hear the grumble of seeks that are happening but I don't hear the spin/whine from the drive.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
The Hitachi 4TB drives are distinctly louder than the Seagates but absent a solid basis for comparison, you'd never be able to tell. None of them are anything like the old 10k drives.
I've found the inverse to be true when comparing my 4TB HGST to my 3TB Seagate both in the same case in my desktop. I can heard I/O to the Seagate but can't to the HGST.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
They each have distinct noise floors, but the 4k7000s are definitely louder. Review sites I checked say they're all between 30 and 35dB with WD on the lower end and Hitachi on the upper. It may be a case where one noise is subjectively less agreeable than another (we had a similar disagreement over the acceptability of the CoolerMaster Hyper 212, I think).
It could also just be my ears are less susceptible (or more) to a range of sounds vs the others or maybe my case is better at silencing a certain range of sounds. The reality of answering Lunar about this topic is subjective from both of us. Only actual test measurements can be useful and even then it'll depend on his case or environment. When I put my system into its silent mode (stops all fans including GPUs) I can hear the Seagate drive seek whereas I can't on the HGST (when driving I/O). I don't detect whine from either drive given where my case is but I know they both make noise when the side panel is open and my ear is near them.
ddrueding
Fixture
One of the wonderful things about a NAS is that your storage can live elsewhere. I keep mine in the garage. It is fairly quiet until I start hitting it hard, then the grinding sound is noticeable.
This would only be about 6-8 feet away from me. Some drive in my main computer is making clunking/grinding sounds every 15 seconds, which is louder in the new case. I'm not sure if it is the 6TB Hitachi NAS or Seagates, but the former is more likely.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Not that it's going to be available forever, but this is a $50, 2-bay NAS from Lenovo that supports 4TB+ drives. Somebody here might be interested in such a thing.
Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
For those that are building your own NAS, are you aware of this little motherboard from ASRock? ( http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E3C224D4I-14S#Specifications )
Extended mini-ITX
Socket 1150, i3/i5/i7/Xeon E3
upto 32GB DDR3 RAM
LSI 2308 controller + Intel C224 southbridge. (Up to 12 drives).
Dual LAN.
IPMI via AST controller...
Extended mini-ITX
Socket 1150, i3/i5/i7/Xeon E3
upto 32GB DDR3 RAM
LSI 2308 controller + Intel C224 southbridge. (Up to 12 drives).
Dual LAN.
IPMI via AST controller...
Spec-wise it's very very similar to my supermicro MBD-X10SL7-F-O that runs my current nas.
http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=N82E16813182821
Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
At work we've been looking for mini-ITX motherboards with onboard SAS, and opions are very limited. The nice thing about the ASRock board, is both the SATA and SAS ports exported via 8087 mini-SAS connectors, allowing easy connection to hot-swap bays...
I was researching the idea of buying all the same drive recently (zfs) and the consensus was that this a bad idea as:
* Recent failure analysis seems to point to localised failures in HDD - i.e. some drives in a particular batch may be more error prone that the failure rates in a drive family. Obviously if you get get a bad batch you can hose your entire NAS
* HDD geometries are similar enough these days for mix-n-match arrays to have little performance downsides. You also negate or reduce the likelyhood of the above failure point. The caveat is that some manufacturers cripple consumer level firmware, or make trade-offs, that don't make them good candidates for arrays.
* You cannot mix 512 byte and 4K byte sector drives without performance impacts. A corner case is that I have a mirrored zfs pool with two 512 byte sector drives in one mirror and two 4K sector drives in the other mirror. Both mirrors form a pool without any noticeable performance issue.
* Recent failure analysis seems to point to localised failures in HDD - i.e. some drives in a particular batch may be more error prone that the failure rates in a drive family. Obviously if you get get a bad batch you can hose your entire NAS
* HDD geometries are similar enough these days for mix-n-match arrays to have little performance downsides. You also negate or reduce the likelyhood of the above failure point. The caveat is that some manufacturers cripple consumer level firmware, or make trade-offs, that don't make them good candidates for arrays.
* You cannot mix 512 byte and 4K byte sector drives without performance impacts. A corner case is that I have a mirrored zfs pool with two 512 byte sector drives in one mirror and two 4K sector drives in the other mirror. Both mirrors form a pool without any noticeable performance issue.
sechs
Storage? I am Storage!
Since when has having all identical drives been a must for a RAID array?
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
There are two conflicting bits of conventional wisdom. One is that you want different sorts of drives to prevent manufacturing or firmware defects from hosing an array. The other, which stems back to the days of EXTREMELY picky hardware controllers, is that if there's even a slight size/geometry mismatch between drives, an array won't reinitialize on a replacement drive.
I had the latter problem on late 90s era hardware and I'm fairly certain I've seen Microsoft recommendations for identical drives even in Server 2012 documentation, though software RAID tends to be MUCH more tolerant of small drive differences than 20 year old SCSI controllers.
I had the latter problem on late 90s era hardware and I'm fairly certain I've seen Microsoft recommendations for identical drives even in Server 2012 documentation, though software RAID tends to be MUCH more tolerant of small drive differences than 20 year old SCSI controllers.
Based on feedback I've split out part of the discussion related specifically to Infiniband and other networking into a new thread located here...
Just an observation. I was using an Athlon X2 260 on an Asrock MATX 780 something board and this setup would lose a disk connected to a highpoint controller weekly. Occasional errors fixed by a resilver as well.
I changed the board over to a P67 + i5 2400 and there has only been one dropout in more than a year.
And hello all
I changed the board over to a P67 + i5 2400 and there has only been one dropout in more than a year.
And hello all
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
The new QNAP TS-1277 1600-16G almost has Mooner's name printed on it. It has been designed to answer his needs.
2299$, so it's not that expensive for what it is.
2299$, so it's not that expensive for what it is.
ddrueding
Fixture
Of course something interesting arrives 2 days after I place an order.
Synology DS1817+
16GB RAM Kit
4x X540-T2 10Gb NICs
6x 10TB ST10000VN0004
2x Samsung 850 Pro
1x Netgear 16-port 10Gb switch
Won't even arrive until tomorrow.
Synology DS1817+
16GB RAM Kit
4x X540-T2 10Gb NICs
6x 10TB ST10000VN0004
2x Samsung 850 Pro
1x Netgear 16-port 10Gb switch
Won't even arrive until tomorrow.
DrunkenBastard
Storage is cool
Interesting thing here is the ability to run a gpu in one of the pcie slots. Plus cpus that arent going to die out prematurely.
It might be a good choice, but the 8+4 configuration is not ideal for larger NAS. The 6+2 bay is far too small for the price.
I suppose there is a trend toward the SSD cache, but does both read and write use RAID 1 (4 SSD)? I question the reliability of that.
I wonder how noisy that switch is. I could not find any that were not 1U and unusable for the home environment.
ddrueding
Fixture
Indeed. This switch is loud (I have some already). For this application it doesn't matter. I'd love to have a 6-8 port fanless 10GbE switch.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
ddrueding
Fixture
Thanks for that Coug.
If you have a 10 GbE swtich, connected to a gigabit router directing traffic, will the computers that area connected to the switch be able to talk to each other at 10 GbE speeds as long as they have 10 GbE adapter cards and are connected with Cat-6 cabling?
In short, yes. The systems connected to that switch that do not need their traffic routed outside of the local switch should all communicated at 10Gb.
I should add, this is exactly how my home network is configured except that I'm using a 1Gb switch. One of the ports on the 1Gb switch is connected to my router. All traffic within my house uses up to 1Gb.
The https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/performance#5_10bayDS1817 was recently announced and has 10GbE with higher STR than the + for some reason. The DS1817 uses the Armada CPU, so maybe there are less IOPs.
Stereodude
Not really a
I'm paying a little attention to 10G switches with SFP+ ports, but that's about it.
ddrueding
Fixture
My inital config won't include a switch at all. The 10GbE card in the computer and the NAS will each have two ports. One of each will to go the normal 1GbE switch. The other will connect the two directly. These will have IPs in a different range. You may need to change the interface metric to get them to prioritize the faster link.
ddrueding
Fixture
I haven't installed the 10Gb NIC in my PC yet. Maybe later today I'll have some numbers for you.