Advice needed please

[clausey]

Hi

I'm looking to purchase my 1st NAS for home use. I basically want to store all my music, movies, photos and work documents in a centralised location and to be able to access these from anywhere in the house and also over the internet whilst at work if needed.

I need to be able to stream my movies to my xbox and also my entire music library to my new wireless sonos music system.

The issue I'm struggling with at the moment is whether or not i actually need a raid set up. My thinking is, as the data is so important to me once it's on there, and even if i had say a 4x disk raid 5 setup and my house was burnt down or i was burgled and the box was stolen then obviously I've lost everything. So wouldn't I be better off just buying 2x 1 disk nas's and having them at separate locations?

As i understand it a raid system would give me better read/write performance but as it's only myself and that's going to be accessing this data do i really need a raid setup or is there something I'm missing as to what else it will give me?


What is the general setup for a basic home nas anyway? is it worth me getting a 2 bay raid 1 setup and then have that backed up at my parents house.


Sorry if it's a little muddled but i'm starting to confuse myself as to what i actually need

any advice at all would be much appreciated.

 

[stevech]

Another scheme is to get a 1 drive (1 bay) NAS and use an external USB or eSATA drive to backup. "RAID is not a backup", they say; it's there to protect from drive failures. Backup across the Internet is s-l-o-w to a fault.

 

[thiggins]

You might read through this to understand the options.
How To Buy a NAS - The Short(er) Version - Updated 2011 .

As stevech said, RAID is not backup. Never store data you don't want to use on a single device. At minimum, you need data backed up on a separate device, better if that device is at a different physical location, or at least stored there.

 

[Generic George]

Hi

I'm looking to purchase my 1st NAS for home use. I basically want to store all my music, movies, photos and work documents in a centralised location and to be able to access these from anywhere in the house and also over the internet whilst at work if needed.

I need to be able to stream my movies to my xbox and also my entire music library to my new wireless sonos music system.

Most NAS will do the streaming, though you'll want to check to see if it supports DLNA, which can make things simpler. Most from the big boys (Synology, QNAP, Netgear) will do all of this, the lower priced ones from second tier vendors may or may not. But the Xbox (or PS3) do make pretty good media streamers in any case.

The issue I'm struggling with at the moment is whether or not i actually need a raid set up. My thinking is, as the data is so important to me once it's on there, and even if i had say a 4x disk raid 5 setup and my house was burnt down or i was burgled and the box was stolen then obviously I've lost everything. So wouldn't I be better off just buying 2x 1 disk nas's and having them at separate locations?

Well you clearly understand the issues in loosing data. The more distributed and separated your data storage is, the more secure you are against any single point of failure. But you then start running into issues of complexity, inconvenience and cost. I think for your purposes, a 2 bay NAS raid 1 and an external drive or two of sufficient size to back up the NAS, which would be only the size of a single disk any way, would be sufficiently redundant. Without getting too horribly complicated and expensive.

Though the recent floods in Thailand have caused HD prices to go through the roof. So you probably won't see them dropping down to recent levels until after christmas at the earliest.

As i understand it a raid system would give me better read/write performance but as it's only myself and that's going to be accessing this data do i really need a raid setup or is there something I'm missing as to what else it will give me?

A lot of the larger drives today can pretty much put out the max throughput you would be able to get on a gigabit ethernet network (real world around 100 MB/sec). So raid is not necessary for performance purposes for the most part. Though RAID would help if you had many machines trying to access it simultaneously, since the multiple disks can handle multiple requests better than a single drive.

In any case, the limiting factor on the performance of the NAS is typically the hardware in the NAS (processor/memory/network connections). So a $500 2 bay NAS is likely to be able to hit the gigabit ethernet limitations where as a $350 4 bay nas would not.

What is the general setup for a basic home nas anyway? is it worth me getting a 2 bay raid 1 setup and then have that backed up at my parents house.

I strongly prefer at least a 2 bay NAS since you can run it RAID 1 which does give you a decent measure of security against a disk dying on you. RAID is not backup, but RAID 1 is pretty close.

 

[clausey]

Many Thanks for the replies guys. I think a raid 5 4 bay nas could be overkill for my needs but seen as I'm leaning towards a QNAP device i see i could get a TS-419P II 4bay with lesser power cpu and less ram or go for the 2 drive TS-239 Pro II+ Turbo NAS with the 1.6ghz cpu and 1gb ram.

Not much price difference between the two of them, so i suppose my next question is, would the better cpu and more ram be that much more beneficial for streaming my HD movies to the xbox or can the lesser cpu and ram perform this task easily anyway?

what do you think i would be better going for, bearing in mind future expansion etc..

Also is there another make i could be better off looking into, i have also looked at the synology and readynas systems but i just leant towards to QNAP from what I've read about the 3 makes.

 

[teknojnky]

netgear recently announced their new duo/nv+ version 2

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5071/netgears-marvell-based-readynas-nv-v2-review

keep in mind that while these devices are more powerful than their predecessors, they are not as powerful or feature rich as the more expensive ultra/pro lines.

Nor are they compatible with existing addons, so any existing addons will have to be compatible with, and ported over to the marvell architecture, assuming the addon creater has the time/experience to do so if its compatible in the first place.

but, they are very inexpensive pricepoints.

 

[stevech]

On the subject of gigabit ethernet in home gear... moving big video files around my LAN, with fast PCs, runs about 80megabytes/sec = 640Mbps. AMD3800 to a mini-ITX AMD E350, both with generic SATA drives. Of course, speeds with numerous smaller files is far less (1/5th) that speed.

I did create one test of memory to memory data streaming - no disk I/O, and on fast PCs, I achieved 800+mbps. I think the Windows IP stack overhead is the constraint in this atypical use case (no disk I/O).

 

[Generic George]

Not much price difference between the two of them, so i suppose my next question is, would the better cpu and more ram be that much more beneficial for streaming my HD movies to the xbox or can the lesser cpu and ram perform this task easily anyway?

The 419+ will probably do something around 65 MB/sec, the 239+ around 90+ MB/sec. So you can see the effect the faster processor and more ram has.

If all you will be doing is streaming to the x-box. Either will do that with sufficient speed.

Where it gets more complicated is if you are asking the NAS to do anything else. A lot of people use them for downloading torrents for example and that + watching videos + serving files, might well tax the capabilities of the less powerful box. The more powerful 4/5 bay boxes also tend to have dual core processors which are inherently better at dealing with multiple tasks.

Transcoding video files is one task that chokes essentially any consumer level NAS however.

With regards to expandability, one possibility is to get the Synology 710+ or 712+, which can use an external 5 bay esata box for greater storage.

But we already have 4 tb drives and 5tb drives are just around the corner, given that Seagate is already selling 1tb platter HDDs. So all they need to do is stick 5 of them into one of their existing 4tb (800 mb/platter) drives and you've got a 5 tb drive. So simply buying some larger HDD is also a plausible strategy.

On the subject of gigabit ethernet in home gear... moving big video files around my LAN, with fast PCs, runs about 80megabytes/sec = 640Mbps. AMD3800 to a mini-ITX AMD E350, both with generic SATA drives. Of course, speeds with numerous smaller files is far less (1/5th) that speed.

I did create one test of memory to memory data streaming - no disk I/O, and on fast PCs, I achieved 800+mbps. I think the Windows IP stack overhead is the constraint in this atypical use case (no disk I/O).

The ethernet controller/drivers also strongly factors into things. At my job when testing throughput on the nas we use. We found that the throughput varied significantly between computers. They were all fairly powerful machines, so it was clearly not a case of insufficient processing power and they were all running windows 7 with presumably the same IP stack.