NAS

LunarMist

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So which is a very good one with 8 bays, Synchology, Qnap, or what?
 

ddrueding

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I'm interested as well. I haven't seen the usual tech sites do write-ups on them.

Edit: I'm looking to saturate a single GbE port.
 

LunarMist

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I was hoping to use two ports with bondo or teaming, or whatever they call it nowadays.
 

CougTek

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I'll suggest the Synology DS1812+. Synology's "+" products never disappoint. But it will cost you a bit more than a thousand bucks. If you don't mind having a bigger box, dropping the hot-swap feature and configuring the OS yourself, then it's more economical to assemble a computer with a mid-tower case and install the OS and shares manually. If you don't want to bother or don't want to make the size/features sacrifices I wrote, then lighten your wallet.
 

sdbardwick

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Those drives must be cheaper somewhere else (unless you really want 5400 RPM drives); Fry's B&M and online has the 7200 RPM version for $249.
Crap, missed the fine print: 1 per customer (or 8 trips through the checkout line...).

Here's the ad, if anyone is interested.
 
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sdbardwick

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The egg has them for $299, but I won't buy non-retail drives from any online source (the only people I ever saw pack less-than-a-case HDDs correctly was Hypermicro [but they seem to have turned into a liquidator]).
 

LunarMist

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I'm leaning more toward the Qnap 859+ or the 869. The Synchology has a bad history of dying with blue light of death or something like that.
 

Mercutio

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I've found Synology devices to be a good, stable option for network storage. I've been dealing with them for a couple years without any real issues.
 

LunarMist

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So how difficult are they to configure for basic RAID 6 and use two Ports? What kind of throughput do you get with only one port?
 

ddrueding

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I suspect the two ports are going to be tricky. Normally that involves some configuration on your switch as well. I was thinking of routing it directly to my main machine via two crossover cables and a dual port GbE Intel NIC, but the speed on the thing (250-300MB/s) doesn't really warrant that.
 

LunarMist

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Yes, I meant directly to the dual Intel. If it is possible to achieve 150-200MB/s, that is a major improvement over ~100.
Then the second, backup, NAS could be connected to the GbE switch and even the whoreless.
 

ddrueding

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Yes, I meant directly to the dual Intel. If it is possible to achieve 150-200MB/s, that is a major improvement over ~100.
Then the second, backup, NAS could be connected to the GbE switch and even the whoreless.

My backup NAS is at another location connected via VPN. I'm still looking for a simple "replicate efficiently" setting/program. It seems you either get:

1. Support for large file systems (10+ TB)
2. Efficient/smart network utilization
3. Ease of configuration

If you look really hard, in certain circumstances, you can get two of those.
 

Mercutio

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Yes, I meant directly to the dual Intel. If it is possible to achieve 150-200MB/s, that is a major improvement over ~100.
Then the second, backup, NAS could be connected to the GbE switch and even the whoreless.

You need the equipment on both sides to support 802.3ax, which is a feature you're pretty much only going to find on a managed switch. I think there are some configuration options for that on Intel NICs with PROset installed but since I don't have anything with a dual NIC running Windows I can't check that right now.

You never want anything that's bottlenecked by bandwidth to happen over whoreless. Whoreless connections are slow, no matter what the specs say. When you need bandwidth, make sure there are lots of whores. The highest quality whores you can find.
 

LunarMist

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You never want anything that's bottlenecked by bandwidth to happen over whoreless. Whoreless connections are slow, no matter what the specs say. When you need bandwidth, make sure there are lots of whores. The highest quality whores you can find.

:rofl: I surely don't have enough money for that parallel interface.
 

ddrueding

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Filled a Synology 1812+ with 3TB Seagates I had sitting around (7200RPM). Allowed it to create the default array, which it states as "Synology Hybrid RAID with 1 disk of fault-tolerance). Connected with a single NIC to a GbE switch and I'm getting 99MB/s writes to the array. Not bad at all.
 

Mercutio

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Basically the Synology RAID is as I recall a variant on RAID4. So there's one disk dedicated to parity information. Since Parity isn't calculated for all writes, only for the parity disk, it's going to be faster than RAID5.
 

Stereodude

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Basically the Synology RAID is as I recall a variant on RAID4. So there's one disk dedicated to parity information. Since Parity isn't calculated for all writes, only for the parity disk, it's going to be faster than RAID5.
Isn't RAID4 slower then RAID5? The parity disk is a bottleneck and the same amount of math is done for both.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Never mind. I was thinking of somebody else's weirdo quasi-proprietary RAID deal anyway.
I've been reading white papers on everybody's different tech for doing this while I look for something to do with my stack of WD20EADSs and it's kind of all blurred together.
 

LunarMist

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Filled a Synology 1812+ with 3TB Seagates I had sitting around (7200RPM). Allowed it to create the default array, which it states as "Synology Hybrid RAID with 1 disk of fault-tolerance). Connected with a single NIC to a GbE switch and I'm getting 99MB/s writes to the array. Not bad at all.
Can you use the dual port NIC?
 

ddrueding

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I haven't tried that yet. Currently throwing a much-needed backup of some stuff on there. I have a quad-port GbE Intel NIC that I plan on using for that purpose.
 
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