NAS Strategy

[oldsmoboat]

Need a little help for automatic PC back ups. That is other than set up, no user intervention needed, Back ups happen on their own, hopefully at 2 AM.

3 PCs need to be backed up automatically.
On a home, wireless network
RAID 1 (probably 4TB X 2, maybe 8TB X 2)
Quiet as possible as the unit will sit in the entertainment console in a living room.
Less heat the better.
Appliance (small) sized.
Able to drag/drop files from Windows Explorer.
Remote access from the Internet.
Streaming to a DLNA device a plus but not needed.
Back up for Android tablets and phones?
Budget I'd like to say at or below $500 but would go up or down as needed. Not over $800.

Looking at this but the reviews are horrid: WD 8TB My Cloud Home Duo Personal Cloud Storage


I am probably missing something, advise appreciated.

[Robotron2k84]

Most everything you mention is available via packages for several Linux distributions. If it was me, I'd probably get a fanless NUC i3 and a multi-drive enclosure and roll my own, or use something like OpenMediaVault (http://www.openmediavault.org).

[the86d]

You could poke a hole in your router's firewall for an SSH tunnel, and use a Linux distro, or FreeNAS (BSD-BASED).
This IS bad, but I don't like monthly fees, and there is a risk, and DON'T use the default ports...
Anything Internet/Home Router connected has a risk... always.
To access data from outside your LAN/WLAN you will need a hole in the firewall, even if it is 3rd party application with an open port to their service.

I have access to all my files and such on my network via ssh tunneled RDP from anywhere with an internet pipe, but again, there is more of a risk.

With a good pipe, it's like I am home, except for streaming video, or audio, from anywhere.

[the86d]

There is always Drobo...

[MO-bound]

unRAID if you decide to roll your own NAS on your own hardware. Been using it for many years and couldn’t be happier. And don’t poke a hole in the firewall for remote access. Setup a VPN server instead. Either via your router if it supports it, or via an OpenVPN docker on unRAID. Spin up a CrashPlan or some other backup solution docker for backup.

[FF90]

DO some research on that model, WD had issues a few years back where the nas worked great over wired connection BUT would not work properly over wii-fi

[the86d]

unRAID if you decide to roll your own NAS on your own hardware. Been using it for many years and couldn’t be happier. And don’t poke a hole in the firewall for remote access. Setup a VPN server instead. Either via your router if it supports it, or via an OpenVPN docker on unRAID. Spin up a CrashPlan or some other backup solution docker for backup.

A VPN is still a hole poked...
Worse if on one of the default ports.

[NYT]

how much data do you need to backup and what is your strategy to back the backup? i guess we would need to know the importance of the data and how long you intend to retain it or if you just want to backup and shelve it, offline storage options, etc.

what i would recommend is a mixture of storage. my primary would be local backup, like that WD if you dont want to build your own file server. second level would be online backup like amazon drive, sync, or another cheap online solution. amazon drive for prime members doesnt count photos against your storage, meaning if you pay for the 1 TB plan ($60/yr) you can backup as many photos as you want. i think sync is $15/mo and you can backup 10 TB. third level would be tape stored at a bank or other offsite storage location.

i dont have anything of importance personally that i cannot afford to lose so i store most of my stuff on iron mountains secured cloud. costs are higher but they are one of the best cloud storage providers.

[Daze]

Synology NAS

I have used these in the past and been very happy with their reliability and support and features.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1364346-REG/synology_ds418_diskstation_4_bay_nas.html/?ap=y&gclid=Cj0KCQiA3IPgBRCAARIsABb-iGJ1NoA3HEQtiVJWqRcqobU-2v-3_3HQp5M4n6y7qzCmd0xd43toSQ8aApnwEALw_wcB&lsft=BI%3A514&smp=Y

[NYT]

yeah synology is far better than WD but they dont come populated with disks so they will run you a good amount of money more than a WD or small nas solution. by the time its outfitted, youre looking at $1k for the unit.

[oldsmoboat]

Nothing of any real importance such as business files for the back ups. Just PCs at home with some documents, pictures etc.

I might try it as a media server but I might not. I don't like watching movies more than once but the wife and grandkids do.

[NYT]

Nothing of any real importance such as business files for the back ups. Just PCs at home with some documents, pictures etc.

I might try it as a media server but I might not. I don't like watching movies more than once but the wife and grandkids do.

ok, then i would prob just use a cheap nas or the new wireless routers can accept external hard drives. you can get a 3 TB drive from costco for about $150 and then use that as a nas if your wireless router supports it.

i would backup your photos to amazon drive.

[Robotron2k84]

A VPN is still a hole poked...
Worse if on one of the default ports.

Yes, but it tunnels instead of bridging traffic, which means you can apply routing restrictions based on pool IP, as well it requires strong cryptography to even make a connection, much more secure than an SSH tunnel, given that the traffic is often UDP and not detectable on a port scan without knowing the handshake.

yeah synology is far better than WD but they dont come populated with disks so they will run you a good amount of money more than a WD or small nas solution. by the time its outfitted, youre looking at $1k for the unit.

Synology used to use the lowest-end Celerons in their enclosures, that makes it nearly impossible to run RAID5/6 of any sufficient size as rebuild times are measured in days. If you do get one of these enclosures, and some are NOT cheap, don't expect particularly good RAID performance without a dedicated parity controller.

ok, then i would prob just use a cheap nas or the new wireless routers can accept external hard drives. you can get a 3 TB drive from costco for about $150 and then use that as a nas if your wireless router supports it.

i would backup your photos to amazon drive.

Same issue as above. Even the best routers have only 2-4 1Ghz cores, and that limits SMB performance to around 10MB/S, far below AC WiFi speeds. If you are going to do storage, don't skimp on CPU.

[NYT]

Yes, but it tunnels instead of bridging traffic, which means you can apply routing restrictions based on pool IP, as well it requires strong cryptography to even make a connection, much more secure than an SSH tunnel, given that the traffic is often UDP and not detectable on a port scan without knowing the handshake.



Synology used to use the lowest-end Celerons in their enclosures, that makes it nearly impossible to run RAID5/6 of any sufficient size as rebuild times are measured in days. If you do get one of these enclosures, and some are NOT cheap, don't expect particularly good RAID performance without a dedicated parity controller.



Same issue as above. Even the best routers have only 2-4 1Ghz cores, and that limits SMB performance to around 10MB/S, far below AC WiFi speeds. If you are going to do storage, don't skimp on CPU.

Not sure what you mean. The scsi controller card stores the raid config as do the drives. The only thing that the cpu is doing in these enclosers is serving up the data. Rebuild time is slow due to size and speed of disk.

Synology has always been a good option for SMB.

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

[Robotron2k84]

So the issue(s) with Synology are several-fold.

First, using a relatively slow CPU hurts network performance as link aggregation and checksumming are done in software on the Linux networking stack. Even with 4x GigE Full Duplex connections link aggregated, the low-end Synologies can barely maintain 100 MB/s on RAID0, via the aggregate. You might think this was due to the balancing algorithm and you'd be wrong. I have personal experience with troubleshooting LAG groups with their hardware.

Next, a slow CPU hinders SMB performance that is done with SAMBA (smbd). The Synology is really a supped up router, and runs BusyBox (with all its inherent security problems), as its userland and therefore uClib as its runtime. Let's just say that uClib is unsafe thread-wise and that further reduces performance.

In addition, there is no RAID controller on the low-end units. It's just a SAS or SATA backplane on a single PCI lane. Therefore, when making a RAID5/6(0) set, parity generation across spindles is done on the CPU. if there was a caching RAID controller, this would be a fast setup as the CPUs on RAID cards are optimized for parity generation. Not so much with software Linux RAID, via MD. Each rebuild needs to use the host CPU 50-70% to rebuild the data. This is limited by core architecture as a single faster core is better suited than slower multiple cores. This further reduces performance as all of the other competing software processes vie for CPU time.

All in all, these units are built well, but ultimately underpowered for the link speeds and drive throughputs that should be supported.

Their upscale units use Xeon 6-core CPUs and hardware RAID for just these reasons. And have prices to match.