+BudMan MVC Posted October 2, 2013 MVC Share Posted October 2, 2013 Maybe a bit off topic - but asking about a nas for raid 5, and then discussing need or lack of raid 5 seems related to me.. So your 9TB is for future use? How long do you think these disks are going to last? You do understand that tmrw those disks are cheaper, and the next day even cheaper still.. It is a waste of money to put in space that will not be used fairly soon. And if not all the data on those disks is "critical" why waste time with space with parity for them? This is why a pool of disks that can be made up of different sizes and expanded by just adding more disks makes more sense dollar wise. You put in say 2x1TB today -- if you have 1TB of data -- this gives you room, gives you the ability to duplicate "critical" files over 2 disks.. Now say in a year, or 6 months you need some breathing room.. You add a 2 or 3TB disk.. Or a 4TB disk whichever is better bang for the buck then. If you run out of slots you can always remove one of the small disks from the pool and put in a bigger disk. This cycles your disks through so your not running on 4 5 year old disks and now out of space.. With no way to actually expand without new hardware. My little N40L where my nas OS is actually a VM I was using 3 disks 2TB, 2x750.. Getting a bit low space, and the 750 were both older disks from other systems that were over 4 years old. And starting to show signs in smart - so got a new 3TB and pulled them both.. So now have 2+3 of space, with a free slot.. And the ability to use 3 more slots plus if needed esata, etc.. So I have quite a few years of expansion available.. Maybe I will put in a 4TB in the free slot in say year or so. Then if need be that 2TB will be getting up there in age so pull it and put in a 4 TB.. This spreads out your purchase of disks, giving you more bang for your buck in storage as the they are cheaper every day for larger sizes. The nases your looking at might support this feature? Not sure - if not its a few dollars worth of software.. But hey your happy with doing things how they were done 10 years ago.. And it works for you - so I will shut up now. El Marto 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
riahc3 Posted October 2, 2013 Author Share Posted October 2, 2013 Maybe a bit off topic - but asking about a nas for raid 5, and then discussing need or lack of raid 5 seems related to me.. So your 9TB is for future use? How long do you think these disks are going to last? You do understand that tmrw those disks are cheaper, and the next day even cheaper still.. It is a waste of money to put in space that will not be used fairly soon. And if not all the data on those disks is "critical" why waste time with space with parity for them? This is why a pool of disks that can be made up of different sizes and expanded by just adding more disks makes more sense dollar wise. You put in say 2x1TB today -- if you have 1TB of data -- this gives you room, gives you the ability to duplicate "critical" files over 2 disks.. Now say in a year, or 6 months you need some breathing room.. You add a 2 or 3TB disk.. Or a 4TB disk whichever is better bang for the buck then. If you run out of slots you can always remove one of the small disks from the pool and put in a bigger disk. This cycles your disks through so your not running on 4 5 year old disks and now out of space.. With no way to actually expand without new hardware. My little N40L where my nas OS is actually a VM I was using 3 disks 2TB, 2x750.. Getting a bit low space, and the 750 were both older disks from other systems that were over 4 years old. And starting to show signs in smart - so got a new 3TB and pulled them both.. So now have 2+3 of space, with a free slot.. And the ability to use 3 more slots plus if needed esata, etc.. So I have quite a few years of expansion available.. Maybe I will put in a 4TB in the free slot in say year or so. Then if need be that 2TB will be getting up there in age so pull it and put in a 4 TB.. This spreads out your purchase of disks, giving you more bang for your buck in storage as the they are cheaper every day for larger sizes. The nases your looking at might support this feature? Not sure - if not its a few dollars worth of software.. But hey your happy with doing things how they were done 10 years ago.. And it works for you - so I will shut up now. Budman, Thank you for the explaination but I am only looking for a 4 bay NAS compatible with RAID5 :) Nothing else. Thank you for your opinion and input. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RottGutt Posted October 3, 2013 Share Posted October 3, 2013 P.S.- forget about Raid if you get the a Synology NAS. Use the SHR option instead. All the features of Raid, plus some nice extras: http://www.synology.com/support/tutorials_show.php?q_id=492 Tim philcruicks 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philcruicks Posted October 4, 2013 Share Posted October 4, 2013 P.S.- forget about Raid if you get the a Synology NAS. Use the SHR option instead. All the features of Raid, plus some nice extras: http://www.synology.com/support/tutorials_show.php?q_id=492 Tim Completely agree, not sure if Q-NAP have a version of this, so may be another + point in favour of Synology. Especially usefull if you have different sized drives. check the RAID calculator for examples. http://www.synology.com/support/RAID_calculator.php Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
riahc3 Posted October 4, 2013 Author Share Posted October 4, 2013 P.S.- forget about Raid if you get the a Synology NAS. Use the SHR option instead. All the features of Raid, plus some nice extras: http://www.synology.com/support/tutorials_show.php?q_id=492 Tim Completely agree, not sure if Q-NAP have a version of this, so may be another + point in favour of Synology. Especially usefull if you have different sized drives. check the RAID calculator for examples. http://www.synology.com/support/RAID_calculator.php Hello, Im not too into "non standard RAID levels". Plus, the calculator marks no difference between space and protected space when using SHR vs RAID5. Thank you Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philcruicks Posted October 4, 2013 Share Posted October 4, 2013 Hello, Im not too into "non standard RAID levels". Plus, the calculator marks no difference between space and protected space when using SHR vs RAID5. Thank you Depends on your drive setup like I said, I have 3x3TB and 1x2TB, put that in the calc with SHR and RAID5 and you'll see a difference. Though like I've said before I'm actually using WS2012 which has Storage Spaces, again works very similar to SHR, means you can add and remove drives at will and thin provision space for future upgrades. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
riahc3 Posted October 4, 2013 Author Share Posted October 4, 2013 Depends on your drive setup like I said, I have 3x3TB and 1x2TB, put that in the calc with SHR and RAID5 and you'll see a difference. Though like I've said before I'm actually using WS2012 which has Storage Spaces, again works very similar to SHR, means you can add and remove drives at will and thin provision space for future upgrades. Hello, My drive setup is 4x3TB. I just thought of a dead end: I cant break a current 4x3TB RAID5, transfer all the data into 1x3TB and then use that with the other 3 to make a new RAID5 on the NAS; Once the RAID5 starts to get initialized, it destroyes all data on the drive. Im not sure if the possible is doable Degrade the RAID5 removing one of the disks Make 2x1.5TB partitions on that disk Copy all data from the degraded RAID5 to partiion 1 of that disk. Make 2x1.5TB partitions on the other three disks Make a RAID5 4x1.5TB on the NAS only touching partition 2 of each disk (wasting 4.5TB) Expand the RAID5 to occupy everything. Quick idea, maybe I did not think it completely thru. Thank you Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philcruicks Posted October 4, 2013 Share Posted October 4, 2013 That to my knowledge is one of the main problems with RAID, once its set its set, you can;t expand, thats the advantage of SHR and systems like it. though I think there are some ways to expand RAID, just not sure if the synology box supports it (no real need since they have SHR). OCE (Online Capacity Expansion) and/or RAID expansion which allows you to add disks to the array. is what your looking for...else you;d have to use SHR. I'm also assuming you have a small enough amount of data to fit it onto the 1.5TB partition your planning on creating...which again also begs the question (possibly brought up by bud man earlier) as to why you have 9TB of storage for less than 1.5TB of data...I'm mean there's future proof and overkill. But either way with SHR or similar you would have to do that: pull 1 drive to degrade the array. put in new box transfer data. add the 3 from the old to the new turn the 3 into an array copy data from 1 to array. add 1 to array. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
riahc3 Posted October 4, 2013 Author Share Posted October 4, 2013 That to my knowledge is one of the main problems with RAID, once its set its set, you can;t expand, thats the advantage of SHR and systems like it. though I think there are some ways to expand RAID, just not sure if the synology box supports it (no real need since they have SHR). OCE (Online Capacity Expansion) and/or RAID expansion which allows you to add disks to the array. is what your looking for...else you;d have to use SHR. I'm also assuming you have a small enough amount of data to fit it onto the 1.5TB partition your planning on creating...which again also begs the question (possibly brought up by bud man earlier) as to why you have 9TB of storage for less than 1.5TB of data...I'm mean there's future proof and overkill. But either way with SHR or similar you would have to do that: pull 1 drive to degrade the array. put in new box transfer data. add the 3 from the old to the new turn the 3 into an array copy data from 1 to array. add 1 to array. Hello, That could work :) Pull 1 3TB from the array and make it degraded. Copy from the degraded RAID5 to the 1 3TB. Move the 3 3TB to the NAS (breaking the RAID5 officially) Make a RAID5 out of those 3 3TB disks. Copy from the 1 3TB to the 3*3TB RAID5 Add that 1 3TB to the 3*3TB RAID5 making it a 4*3TB RAID5 I think that can be done with no data loss, right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted October 4, 2013 MVC Share Posted October 4, 2013 "I think that can be done with no data loss, right?" Yeah if one of your drives don't fail while your degraded, or your controller, etc. But if using new tech.. You can move disks of different sizes in and out of your storage pool.. Without worry of loss of the whole array. Never in a "degraded" state, etc.. Yeah but you keep chugging along with your 25 year old raid 5 tech.. On disks of sizes they could not even imagine back when raid was first thought of.. Now that disks are bigger and faster and more data, different types of data to be stored.. You might want to look into what is actually current.. Like what they call SHR.. Or drive pooling, unraid is another method. All of these types of storage can give you parity and or replication of your data on multiple spindles with the flexibility of moving disks in and out of the storage of varied sizes and speeds. One of the advantages of my pool is I can pull any disk out of the pool and stick it any other machine and os that can read ntfs and access my files just fine.. So if the OS/Hardware crashed that was maintaining the storage I have no need of same raid controller to access my data - just plug it into anything and I have direct access to my files with their actual directory names and file names, etc. One disk at a time if need be.. Or as I recently did -- move my disks to a new VM, and installed the pooling software and shazam my pool was back without having to do anything other than connecting the drives - the software saw there was a pool on these disks and recreated it. Storage pool could be made up of pata, sata, estata, usb connected disks as well. If you actually look -- you will find there have been many advances since the creation of raid 5 ;) philcruicks 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Fahim S. MVC Posted October 4, 2013 MVC Share Posted October 4, 2013 The number of cases there are of disks or arrays failing during a rebuild is astounding - then all your data is gone, not just the parity and rebuild ain't happening. Luckily sensible people/organisations also pay for a backup appliance of some description to counteract this, but it costs $$$$$. A platform architect at my work place was saying just the other day that the days of RAID and 'big arrays' are gone. Just not practical on disks more than 250GB, forget 4TB. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
riahc3 Posted October 4, 2013 Author Share Posted October 4, 2013 Hello, Im just looking for a NAS. Nothing else. Not asking any other thing :) If you wish, I can make another thread and we can talk about to RAID5 or not to RAID5.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted October 6, 2013 MVC Share Posted October 6, 2013 Don't you already have your Nas choices? Toss a coin - the price I show here is only a few dollars apart for those two. $499-519 To be honest not sure where you came up with ts-421 - I show multiple product numbers that all seem to meet your raid 5 requirement plus more.. http://www.qnap.com/useng/compare.php?lang=en-us&sn=862&cp=1&pro=18383,18382,3888,3887 412, 419P II, 420 and your 421 I show as low 359, 479 and 429 for the 420 while the 421 is most exp 499 To me the 412 would is more cost effective - you make no mention of usb 3 requirements, so why pay for it if not using.. You have clearly stated your 4x3TB with no mention of external disk drives or devices that make use of usb3 over 2. Its a nas serving up files -- do you need more ram, or an lcd? I would think the 412 would be better choice - it supports all the same raid levels, yes your 5. Has 2 gig nics - just missing stuff you have made no mention of needing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
riahc3 Posted October 7, 2013 Author Share Posted October 7, 2013 Don't you already have your Nas choices? Toss a coin - the price I show here is only a few dollars apart for those two. $499-519 To be honest not sure where you came up with ts-421 - I show multiple product numbers that all seem to meet your raid 5 requirement plus more.. http://www.qnap.com/useng/compare.php?lang=en-us&sn=862&cp=1&pro=18383,18382,3888,3887 412, 419P II, 420 and your 421 I show as low 359, 479 and 429 for the 420 while the 421 is most exp 499 To me the 412 would is more cost effective - you make no mention of usb 3 requirements, so why pay for it if not using.. You have clearly stated your 4x3TB with no mention of external disk drives or devices that make use of usb3 over 2. Its a nas serving up files -- do you need more ram, or an lcd? I would think the 412 would be better choice - it supports all the same raid levels, yes your 5. Has 2 gig nics - just missing stuff you have made no mention of needing. Hello, The TS-412 you mentioned is at 323 ?...obviously cheaper. Currently I dont need anything else from the NAS BUT......there are features intresting in the future. The most obvious one is USB3. Yes, it has a eSATA port but there are obviously more standard USB devices out there. Also , I should have made it clearer as what I implied didnt get across. I apoligize for that as it is my fault for not wording it exactly and not stating it in a explicit manner. My backups are done to a external drive. I currently do not have a USB2 enclosure but I would buy one for this. Also, WOL....This one I may not understand correctly. From what I know, these NAS, if they lose power, have a setting to power on again when power is recovered. This make WOL pretty much useless to me as I would put it on that setting. Now thats what I know. I might be wrong. My room wouldnt like a LCD screen :laugh: Sleeping with that much be a nightmare (although I imagine there is SOME WAY to turn it off) My "minimum system requirements" is gigabit 4bay RAID5 NAS. The thing is that we always know that meeting the "minimum system requirements" isnt enough or isnt the is desired. Just for some price comparing as well: TS-412 is at 323 ? TS-419 P II is at 448 ? TS-420 is at 399 ? TS-421 is at 490 ? Thank you Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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