tranceaddict84
Occasional Visitor
Hey all,
I'm moving into a new place shortly and I want to finally get a proper NAS [ie. not just a USB hard drive hanging off my router]. I have been looking at the following:
Synology DS412+
Thecus n4800 -- I like the built-in mini UPS functionality.
QNAP 459 Pro+
We've just got a 10-bay rackmount Synology NAS at work and it's fantastic - I'm totally sold on the DSM software - so I'd quite like to get a Synology box for home as well.
I had pretty much decided on the DS412+, but despite it being much more expensive, part of me is drawn to the 5-bay DS1512+. I'm planning to fill it with 4TB drives and the additional usable capacity provided by a fifth drive is appealing. I've read the SNB reviews of both and I'm also somewhat put off by the DS412+ being described as plasticky and cheap feeling rather than the all-metal DS1512+.
So a couple of questions that affect my choice:
RAID 5 vs RAID 6 [vs RAID 10] -- I've read a few things recently about how RAID 5 is now basically worse than useless [worse than a 16TB stripe
] due to the chance of unrecoverable read errors increasing with volume size. In the event of a disk failure and rebuild, a 16TB volume is pretty much guaranteed to encounter a URE somewhere on one of the 'healthy' disks, throwing a spanner into the rebuild operation and rendering the whole volume unusable and your data likely lost.
Using a 5-bay NAS means I can use RAID 6, esentially negating this risk by providing a second set of parity data, meaning encountering two UREs on the same block is monumentally unlikely. 5x4TB will give me a 12TB usable volume, the same as using RAID 5 with 4 disks. I feel this would be the ideal capacity for my current needs and future growth.
Or should I forget the whole parity thing and just get a 4-bay box, stick it in RAID 10 and manage with 8TB [a 6-bay NAS and 6 drives is out of my budget, unfortunately]?
And something somewhat related that I hope is OK to stick here rather than starting two threads:
I'm planning to run cat6 through my walls and put multiple LAN points in all the rooms, all running back to a switch hidden in a cupboard somewhere near where the ISP fiber comes in. I'm looking to get a fairly cheap and compact, unmanaged gigabit switch, ideally 16 port (TP-Link do one for £70 that looks pretty decent).
As all these high-end NAS have dual GBE with link aggregation (802.3ad) support I'd quite like a switch that supports 802.3ad so I can use link aggregation on my NAS. Does such a thing exist at a consumer-grade level? The only 802.3ad supporting switches I can find are full on rackmount L2 managed enterprise jobs, SFP ports and all, starting at around £250.
Cheers,
I'm moving into a new place shortly and I want to finally get a proper NAS [ie. not just a USB hard drive hanging off my router]. I have been looking at the following:
Synology DS412+
Thecus n4800 -- I like the built-in mini UPS functionality.
QNAP 459 Pro+
We've just got a 10-bay rackmount Synology NAS at work and it's fantastic - I'm totally sold on the DSM software - so I'd quite like to get a Synology box for home as well.
I had pretty much decided on the DS412+, but despite it being much more expensive, part of me is drawn to the 5-bay DS1512+. I'm planning to fill it with 4TB drives and the additional usable capacity provided by a fifth drive is appealing. I've read the SNB reviews of both and I'm also somewhat put off by the DS412+ being described as plasticky and cheap feeling rather than the all-metal DS1512+.
So a couple of questions that affect my choice:
RAID 5 vs RAID 6 [vs RAID 10] -- I've read a few things recently about how RAID 5 is now basically worse than useless [worse than a 16TB stripe
] due to the chance of unrecoverable read errors increasing with volume size. In the event of a disk failure and rebuild, a 16TB volume is pretty much guaranteed to encounter a URE somewhere on one of the 'healthy' disks, throwing a spanner into the rebuild operation and rendering the whole volume unusable and your data likely lost. Using a 5-bay NAS means I can use RAID 6, esentially negating this risk by providing a second set of parity data, meaning encountering two UREs on the same block is monumentally unlikely. 5x4TB will give me a 12TB usable volume, the same as using RAID 5 with 4 disks. I feel this would be the ideal capacity for my current needs and future growth.
Or should I forget the whole parity thing and just get a 4-bay box, stick it in RAID 10 and manage with 8TB [a 6-bay NAS and 6 drives is out of my budget, unfortunately]?
And something somewhat related that I hope is OK to stick here rather than starting two threads:
I'm planning to run cat6 through my walls and put multiple LAN points in all the rooms, all running back to a switch hidden in a cupboard somewhere near where the ISP fiber comes in. I'm looking to get a fairly cheap and compact, unmanaged gigabit switch, ideally 16 port (TP-Link do one for £70 that looks pretty decent).
As all these high-end NAS have dual GBE with link aggregation (802.3ad) support I'd quite like a switch that supports 802.3ad so I can use link aggregation on my NAS. Does such a thing exist at a consumer-grade level? The only 802.3ad supporting switches I can find are full on rackmount L2 managed enterprise jobs, SFP ports and all, starting at around £250.
Cheers,
