Replacment for old single drive NAS

[Dan Davis]

Hi all!

I have an old Buffalo LinkStation LS-XHL 1TB like the one here, had it for ~5 years now. It's attached to an external 1TB USB 3.0 drive for backups via the USB 2.0 port. It's old enough now that it's making noises it didn't make in the past. Probably just a fan going out. In any case, I think it's time to 'upgrade'.

My use case is primarily backups of two laptops, my desktop PC, and archiving of important files and pictures (tax returns, old email archives, photos, some music, etc).

Note - I care not for streaming DNLC media, the cloud, etc. I turn everything off except file sharing and ftp.

With all that said, my main concern is backup speed from the NAS to the attached USB drive. With my current setup it takes about 15-20 hours for a full backup to complete, and at that rate if I triple the amount of data over time it will wind up taking ~2-3 days to complete a backup.

Based on the charts here my first choice is the QNAP TS-112P Turbo BYOD single drive NAS. It looks to be about 3-4x faster on backups than my old Linkstation. The idea is to put a 3 TB drive in the NAS, and replace my backup USB drive with an identical 3TB drive.

A couple of questions though. Are there any dual-drive setups that will allow using the 2nd drive as a backup target? Not RAID 1, something safer, and a lot faster than USB? It would be great if I could backup say, a 2 TB drive, in 2 or 3 hours.

Also on these new NAS labelled drives. I get the TLER timeout thing with RAID. But I keep seeing people rec things like WD Red and Seagate NAS drives for even single drive NAS usages. This doesn't make sense to me in a single drive NAS setup. Is there something I'm missing?


Thanks!

 

[stevech]

I recommend a 2 bay Synology or QNAP.
As to your question: Yes. You can elect non-RAID in a 2 bay. Each is a separate file system, separate volume. One can be the full/incremental backup of the other - all, or selected VIP folders.

That's how I've used my DS212 for several years. I chose no-RAID because of the risk of human error or file system corruption on the main drive. With any form of RAID, and one volume, there is no recovery from these unless you have external media doing a multi-version backup of files. The DS212 I have also comes with "Time Backup", which puts the last n months of file versions on a backup that I put on the 2nd volume. That's saved my buns too - undoing my error that honks up a file.

Mine has 2x3TB WD Red @$89ea. Some say these drive's main attribute is a better warranty. I've had other drives in the NAS in the past. Never say the error you mention.

Plus a USB3 drive for extra backup out of thieves' sight.

 

[Dan Davis]

I recommend a 2 bay Synology or QNAP.
As to your question: Yes. You can elect non-RAID in a 2 bay. Each is a separate file system, separate volume. One can be the full/incremental backup of the other - all, or selected VIP folders.

That's how I've used my DS212 for several years. I chose no-RAID because of the risk of human error or file system corruption on the main drive. With any form of RAID, and one volume, there is no recovery from these unless you have external media doing a multi-version backup of files. The DS212 I have also comes with "Time Backup", which puts the last n months of file versions on a backup that I put on the 2nd volume. That's saved my buns too - undoing my error that honks up a file.

Mine has 2x3TB WD Red @$89ea. Some say these drive's main attribute is a better warranty. I've had other drives in the NAS in the past. Never say the error you mention.

Plus a USB3 drive for extra backup out of thieves' sight.

Thanks stevech. I didn't realize they had time backup ability, one of the things I miss from using OS X ('time machine'). Also the ability to configure separate volumes is good.

Is the backup to the internal drive is much faster than to an external one? Also, any risk to having the backup and the primary volume on the same controller? I suppose an external USB drive is also on the same controller too though. I'm not sure how that works out in real life. If I get a 2 drive setup, I'd prefer not to have an external backup drive.

Oh and the error, and TLER capability, you won't see it. It just makes a drive that is in RAID time out and report a CRC error / relocate a bad block in a shorter time span, whereas consumer drives 'retry' many more times. It is useful in RAID setups so that the RAID controller does not time out first and 'offline' the offending drive (which it will do if the drives timeout is longer than the RAID controller will tolerate a drive not responding). I have seen that happen at work when someone put consumer grade drives into a raid array. I don't see it being of benefit on a non-raid array though.

 

[stevech]

time Backup in Synology's DSM is an add-on plugin from Synology. Most people overlook it.
Yes, drive-to-drive transfer rates in general are faster between the SATA based internals. USB3 is slower due to overhead. It's especially slower if you leave the USB drive in NTFS format and do not reformat it as ext4 (NAS-native).

I used to reformat to ext4. But with Time Backup w/versions, and with the genearl backup utility, speeds to the external NTFS are much slower - the first backup of 1TB or so took 10 hours or so via USB3 to a slow 2.5 in. drive. But incrementals thereafter are of course faster (less data).

 

[sfx2000]

Even over AFP - first backups are slow - incrementals are better...

FWIW - time machine builds hundreds/thousands of soft links for the updates - so it's good to take a snapshot once in a while...

TimeMachine on a local disk is fairly safe - but even on a TimeCapsule, need to have a separate backup - Carbon Copy Cloner/SuperDuper perhaps as an image...

 

[stevech]

Even over AFP - first backups are slow - incrementals are better...

FWIW - time machine builds hundreds/thousands of soft links for the updates - so it's good to take a snapshot once in a while...

TimeMachine on a local disk is fairly safe - but even on a TimeCapsule, need to have a separate backup - Carbon Copy Cloner/SuperDuper perhaps as an image...

The "Time Backup" for Synology does the same for soft-links. If you setup a once-per-day time backup, there will be a top folder for each day, filled with soft-links for unchanged files. Odd, but it works very reliably and all these file system tricks are hidden via the Time Backup program's neat user interface - where you slide among days and weeks with a mouse.

I've contemplated my next NAS being QNAP just for drill (though the one I have is quite adequate). But QNAP's versioning backup is like Google Drive - you have copy to or store all files to be versioned in a specific folder - rather than in their their natural place. Synology's Time Backup doesn't have that concept... with it, you just tell Time Backup what folders to include and no intermediate special one is needed. But then, I've never used a QNAP with this feature enabled, so maybe I'm mistaken. But that's what I read in the user manual.

 

[sfx2000]

WRT Time Machine... better off doing standard backup and a clone from time to time...

Time Machine is kinda nice until it goes wrong - even on Apple HW, much less 3rd parties

 

[stevech]

I've been using Synology's time backup for several years. No reliability issues.
As far as I know, this is the only way to keep the last x months versions of selected folders' files. Not everything of course.
My time backup has slowly grown to about 800MB.
Many times, I've gone in there and viewed the last 10 versions of a certain file (software source usually) to see what I did, historically. Same for spreadsheets of financial data.

Works well.

I do drive imaging and keep the last 3. But that's a short time period as compared to the Time Backup versions.

There's also Centered System's "Second Copy" program. It too versions selected folders' files. Easy to use. I've used it for many years too, but it runs on a PC, not the NAS.

 

[Dan Davis]

Thanks guys. I wound up ordering a DS115j. Yeah it's the simple to configure model with just a single drive, not many professional reviews but the one I did find was very positive (here). Also had great user reviews at every retailer I found, vs Netgear and Buffalo which always seemed to have middling user reviews. The main negative for me is the lack of a USB 3.0 port, but I think it will still be far faster on the 2.0 than my current Linkstation. Also the $170 price for a 2TB model preconfigured seems pretty much impossible to beat at this performance level. It'll be interesting to see how it does against my 5 year old NAS in my impromptu benchmarks

 

[Dan Davis]

Thought I would follow up on this quickly.

The DS115j was able to do a backup to a USB connected drive in about 8 1/2 hours. Doing full backup with the old ~2010 Linkstation LS-XHL was taking over 24 hours, like ~30hrs. Also went from ~4-7MB/s wireless 130Mbit file transfers on the old linkstation to ~11MB/s, which I think is limited by my wireless speed right now (using an Apple Airport Extreme gen 4 from 2009 and TP-link WN822N USB adapter). Also the old LS-XHL would disconnect shares sometimes when transferring really large (>10gig) files; it wouldn't lose the connection that was doing the transfer, just other connections would go away. The DS115j so far has been rock solid.

Overall it seems to be about 3-4x faster, excepting the wireless lan limiting transfers. To be fair, I think the old 1TB drive in the linkstation is on the blink. There was one large backup file that would crash the linkstation when attempting to x-fer, so I had to skip it. Not a big deal, I just made a new backup to the DS115j.

I haven't played with the myriad of applications very much. DSM looks pretty impressive, but it will take time to learn.

Next upgrade is a 1200AC or better AP/Router and a new AC class wireless adapter for the PC, next weekend

 

[coxhaus]

I recommend a 2 bay Synology or QNAP.
As to your question: Yes. You can elect non-RAID in a 2 bay. Each is a separate file system, separate volume. One can be the full/incremental backup of the other - all, or selected VIP folders.

That's how I've used my DS212 for several years. I chose no-RAID because of the risk of human error or file system corruption on the main drive. With any form of RAID, and one volume, there is no recovery from these unless you have external media doing a multi-version backup of files. The DS212 I have also comes with "Time Backup", which puts the last n months of file versions on a backup that I put on the 2nd volume. That's saved my buns too - undoing my error that honks up a file.

Mine has 2x3TB WD Red @$89ea. Some say these drive's main attribute is a better warranty. I've had other drives in the NAS in the past. Never say the error you mention.

Plus a USB3 drive for extra backup out of thieves' sight.

Have you ever pulled one of these drives to see if you can read it? I would think it would not work with windows since it is not a windows format. What OS will read the drive?

 

[stevech]

yes, I have freeware for Windows that mounts as a drive letter and reads any ext4 drive. I could have formatted the 2nd drive as NTFS but the write speed is poor, under a Linux based NAS (or other).

 

[sfx2000]

Can't speak for other vendors, but QNAP is pretty much standard Linux EXT4 (and uses mdadm for raid set management) - from what I've read on the internet, Synology is very similar at the FS level...

There are third party tools that can work with EXT3/EXT4 on the Windows desktop, along with raidset configured with mdadm.

 

[Shabbir Rao]

+1 for QNAP