LinkBack URL
About LinkBacksLooks nice, imagining it's costs a bit more than £70Originally Posted by Apex
Looks nice, imagining it's costs a bit more than £70
I'd argue that, at least most of the time, cost is high up the selection criteria list in the consumer market. Sure, there are 'mney no object' consumers, but I think they're a minority of a minority of a minority, when it comes to consumer NAS. One reason is, as you suggested, they would go for something like that rack, not a 'consumer' NAS in the first place. Even I just about start to drft into that, with a 4-bay SME-type NAS and four 12TB WD Ultrastor drives. Do I need that? Realistically, probably not. It's a bit overkill .... but only by maybe a few hundred quid. Having a second one as a backup target and, worst case, ready replacement even more so. And I'd bet a pretty large chunk of the market for 'consumer' grade NAS boxes wouldn't go anywhere near the cost of those two, and probably not even one of them.
As for 20TB drives .... well, yes, again subject to cost, and to the old 'eggs in one basket' issue. I did the calculations and felt I got better 'bang per buck' from four 12's .... though yup, each extra drive introduces an additional point of failure. Hence the backup 'target' and a tiered backup for the backup.
Of course, the calculations are entirely different in business, and especially enterprise spaces where, okay, cost comes into it sooner or later but is a fair bit further down the list of criteria, as is the way 'cost' is viewed. As the Americans would say, that's a different ball game but I was talking about what features are likely to be popular, hence in demand, on 'consumer' NAS's.
Noise on enterprise drives? It's .... subjective. Yes, enterprise drives are noisier. My Ultrastars are subjectively (and, from tests, measurably) noisier than 'desktop' drives but, faster, and in theory, more reliable too.
I must admit the noise thing bothered me quite a lot when I was deciding what to get. By my actual experience is that, at least these enterprise drives make a noise that is .... hard to describe .... it's kinda dull, it's a dull clonk not an irritating scratchy noise many drives make. I stuck the drive about 4 feet from my chair in the lounge for setting up, with the intention of moving it to a rack in the garage once ready. That was about a year ago and I've yet to bother. Can I hear it? Yup, and the NAS fans too. Does it bother me (or the wife)? Not really. Mostly, we just tune it out as humans do with so many sensory inputs. In a quiet bedroom when you're trying to get to sleep? I'm not so sure about that but it's surprising what the brain can classify as "irrelevant, ignore" once it gets used to it.
The noise is therefore not an issue for me.
I'm not saying there isn't a market for 2.5" drive support. Just that in the consumer NAS segment it's probablly so small that I'm not surprised manufacturers just don't really bother. A niche in a niche.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
I've had a Synology DS213 for about 7 years now, & in terms of performance, it hasn't skipped a beat. There are however two aspects of Syology's products that really annoy me though. Firstly, their lower-end consumer NAS's still don't support 2.5Gbit ethernet. I mean, 2.5Gbit has been pretty much the standard ethernet speed on motherboards for years at this point. Qnap have offered consumer NAS's with 2.5Gbit ethernet for ages, but Synology don't (as far as I'm aware) support it on their lower-end consumer products.
The other annoyance is that Synology - in their infinite wisdom - don't support HDDs larger than 8TB on the DS213. Of course, their newer models do support much larger HDDs, and I really don't believe it would cost them a huge amount to add support for larger drives, but they don't. Or rather they won't. Of course the only conclusion is that they want me to buy their most recent offering...which I won't. Oh and I almost forgot, I no longer get the most up to date version of DSM, either.
It cost less then the DS1815+ i got before but yeah not cheap even today.Looks nice, imagining it's costs a bit more than £70
DSM 7 seems like a backward step from the 6.x branch and its why i havn't moved to it.I've had a Synology DS213 for about 7 years now, & in terms of performance, it hasn't skipped a beat. There are however two aspects of Syology's products that really annoy me though. Firstly, their lower-end consumer NAS's still don't support 2.5Gbit ethernet. I mean, 2.5Gbit has been pretty much the standard ethernet speed on motherboards for years at this point. Qnap have offered consumer NAS's with 2.5Gbit ethernet for ages, but Synology don't (as far as I'm aware) support it on their lower-end consumer products.
The other annoyance is that Synology - in their infinite wisdom - don't support HDDs larger than 8TB on the DS213. Of course, their newer models do support much larger HDDs, and I really don't believe it would cost them a huge amount to add support for larger drives, but they don't. Or rather they won't. Of course the only conclusion is that they want me to buy their most recent offering...which I won't. Oh and I almost forgot, I no longer get the most up to date version of DSM, either.
That's a lot of pr0n
But yes, at high capacities 3.5in makes sense for now. Although I remember when 5.25in was the norm for big drives.
My parents could do with a small NAS to back up their photos etc. I believe my dad backs this stuff up with a USB drive, but it is occasional enough that I've had to do data recovery for them in the past. So, if you look for cheap drives... well Scan this morning have a 2.5in 500GB enterprise 24/7 rated drive for £16. That would allow for a 3 drive raid 5 array with a total of 1TB of storage for £48, with the disks taking up less physical volume than a single 3.5in drive. Now that in my mind is *very* consumer friendly as that unit can be tiny as well as low cost.
1TB drives are about the same cost for 2.5 as 3.5 inch, then 3.5in gets significantly cheaper at 2TB.
I'll take your word for that.That's a lot of pr0n
...
However, if you're looking to digitise your library of several thousand DVD films, TV boxed sets and a whole shedload of family and holiday video, built up since portable video cameras had a separate recorder the size (and weight) of a couple of house bricks, and I do not miss lugging that around the planet in the slightest, it's surprising how fast you can eat a measly 20TB.
I still have a couple, including an old Miniscribe 330MB doorstop, that was £1500. And yeah, Megabytes. Come to that, I've still got a few of my really old programs on decks of punch and even optical mark cards. It also wasn't only "big" drives (which in itself was a very subjective term) - my first 10MB and 20MB Seagate drives were too.But yes, at high capacities 3.5in makes sense for now. Although I remember when 5.25in was the norm for big drives.
I recently watched LTT's Anthony and Linus waxing lyrical about computer tech in the 90's as 'quaint' and feeling they needed to explain overhead projectors and transparencies (which they probably did need to do) and it made me feel soooo old. Then they commented about how it used to be one computer per classroom. Awww, cute. My school was very advanced, computing wise (because the vast majority had no computing capability at all). We had, get this, a teletype connected to the local Polytechnic (which occupied buildings that used to be part of my school) and were had a direct connection via a 300 baud acoustic coupler. I could load jobs up via a paper tape (punch tape) reader on the teletype and run them, live, on the mainframe. Other schools were lucky if they had a card punch and could get jobs batch processed overnight. Even programmable calculators were rare, never mind a computer per classroom. It was SO cute watching two thirty-somethings remembering the good old days of tech.
When I think about £1500 drives being a few hundred MB, and then consider how much today's "big" drives cost (way less than £1500) it makes me realise just how far, and fast, we've come. I doubt my parents generation knew the word "computer" for their first couple of decades. What would someone from 1922 make of today's world? Much of it would seem like magic. Imagine a laptop and mobile-phone video camera in 1822? It isn't that long ago in terms of time, but a completely different world in how we lived. Hell, it isn't that long since the first european explorers discoved the new world, and it tok weeks on a ship to get there and yet these days? Breakfast in London, lunch in New York. Or Tokyo (well, dinner).
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
Read caches tend to get a lot more writes than the underlying storage. I assume that the NASes use a Last in first out mechanism in which case every write is written to the SSD and additionally quite a lot of the reads also get written to them.
"In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."
Would it be a LIFO type access for a device with random access, as a cache? Seems weird if so, but I dunno.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
Do they? I got the impression that Linux caching layers know about how SSDs work and are careful to use them in a way that isn't wearing, and they know to avoid caching the big linear reads that HDDs are already good at.
Apparently QNAP use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dm-cache, I assumed they would just use the popular bcache so I learnt something today.
I have no idea why I wrote LIFO there TBH. It makes no sense at all! I meant Least recently used - i.e. the oldest blocks to have been accessed are replaced by any block requested but not in the cache.
EDIT - and I would also expect some kind of SSD/HDD aware "not caching stuff HDD's are good at" however even with that, there's a lot of writes to a cache SSD.
"In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
