Re: Cheap NAS

[DanceswithUnix]

Continuing the closed NAS thread outside the classifieds section...

This is one of the reasons I still don't bother with one of these half arsed consumer grade NASes. Your data loss (and security) just isn't seen as much of a problem to them.

Yeah, you may have detected some indecision there.

We have an old dual bay consumer QNAP that was bought when the company was a two person start up. It is dying, and not so much from old age but because there is a power control FET on the backplane for disc 2 that is dodgy so when the NAS gets a bit warm it cuts power to that drive and runs degraded. There is a long support forum thread on this, as it seems a common thing for those FETs to fry. That's pretty bad, specially when our QNAP has only ever had SSDs plugged in so very low power being passed.

For our light use, that's actually not as bad as it sounds. The thing is heavily backed up, we wouldn't lose much if it failed. and I think that's part of my problem. I could spend days trying to find a better NAS, and that is a loss to the company of my time. Buying a new 4 bay unit where hopefully they fixed the problem by now makes the problem go away and also allows us to expand the storage which we will likely need at some point.

it seems odd for all the huge range that QNAP do that they still have 3.5in drive bays, when a dinky little 2.5in quad bay would be far better. It seems odd in an era of U.2 drives to still be thinking in terms of spinning rust.

[Jonj1611]

Sorry meant to continue that thread but got distracted

[Saracen999]

...

it seems odd for all the huge range that QNAP do that they still have 3.5in drive bays, when a dinky little 2.5in quad bay would be far better. It seems odd in an era of U.2 drives to still be thinking in terms of spinning rust.

Dunno about that. I am, of course, hypothesising.

QNAP do do 2.5" drives, but I'm not sure about in the consumer range, or in 4-bay. There is a bigger one, and some mixed units. My hypothesis is that it's about who would use which, for what. I'd guess that in the small and consumer grade units, they believe that options in capacity would be more in demand than 2.5" form factor. 3.5" form factor gives what ... up to about 20TB per drive, and bigger due soon. Even a small 2-drive unit could give 20TB mirrored, or 40TB with the increased risk of no RAID (with the implied extra care in backing up carefully). I had considered a 2-bay unit as a backup for my main 4-bay unit, and that increased backup was an acceptable risk as there's an additional level of USB backup. I haven't acted on it and am more likely to just use another 4-bay.

Anyway, the point is that I suspect 2.5" form factor in very small drives are perceived as a niche within a market segment that is already limited (i.e. most consumers probably won''t go as far s a NAS for several reasons, including complexity of setup and operation and, of course, sheer cost). That section of the consumer market willing to go for a NAS, and that even know they exist, is likely to be more interested in maximising capacity that reducing form factor. Go up a notch to SMA type units and capacity is even more important, along with better RAID than mirroring, and even other facilities like SSD cacheing, higher than 1GB LAN ports and, of course, software provided in the NAS.

TL/DR = in the 2-bay consumer sector, capacity from 3.5" is probably seen to be (correctly, IMHO) more relevant than the smaller drive form factor.

[Rob_B]

It's the price for me though, if I went with a NAS I'd likely use the 1TB WD green I already have and add another for sub £40, to do that even with SATA SSDs (assuming I again already had one) then I'd be looking at maybe £100? Multiply that by the size a 'power' user needs and the market surely knows we're maybe not ready for solid state only yet?

[Jonj1611]

Do SSD's wear quicker in a NAS? I am talking consumer grade.

[Saracen999]

I'd think a large part of that is what you do with the NAS?

I mean, if it's largely a file store with big files, then a lot less wear than constant high volumes of small read/write ops like some kind of transaction server.

Also .... horses for courses. Get the right SSDs just like it's a good idea to get the right HDs for the use you have in mind (general purpose, high speed, extra durability/MTBF, video/surveillance, etc).

[badass]

Continuing the closed NAS thread outside the classifieds section...



Yeah, you may have detected some indecision there.

We have an old dual bay consumer QNAP that was bought when the company was a two person start up. It is dying, and not so much from old age but because there is a power control FET on the backplane for disc 2 that is dodgy so when the NAS gets a bit warm it cuts power to that drive and runs degraded. There is a long support forum thread on this, as it seems a common thing for those FETs to fry. That's pretty bad, specially when our QNAP has only ever had SSDs plugged in so very low power being passed.

For our light use, that's actually not as bad as it sounds. The thing is heavily backed up, we wouldn't lose much if it failed. and I think that's part of my problem. I could spend days trying to find a better NAS, and that is a loss to the company of my time. Buying a new 4 bay unit where hopefully they fixed the problem by now makes the problem go away and also allows us to expand the storage which we will likely need at some point.

it seems odd for all the huge range that QNAP do that they still have 3.5in drive bays, when a dinky little 2.5in quad bay would be far better. It seems odd in an era of U.2 drives to still be thinking in terms of spinning rust.

Yeah - It's all about the right tools for the job. I can't fault any of your logic and would probably do the same myself. Should your company grow some more that's probably where you will need to start looking into a "proper" IT setup. I have actually worked for a company where I specified that a "cheapo consumer grade NAS" was the right tool for the job. It was used as an "IT Tools Store" and online archive for some staff - i.e. data that would have been archived to tape and deleted but might be occasionally accessed was there. It was either that or spend about £20k on a low end enterprise grade storage solution.

[badass]

Do SSD's wear quicker in a NAS? I am talking consumer grade.

I believe Some NAS's can use them as a read cache in which case they will wear quicker. Assuming they are caching for much larger storage that's frequently accessed. Otherwise I doubt there will be much of a meaningful difference.

[Apex]

@Rob_B (from the other thread)

It's a qnap TS-459 Pro+ with 4 2Tb WD RE Drives in - WD2003FYYS

[Jonj1611]

That's a nice NAS mate. Wish I had got it, the eBay bloke is buggering me around! Such is life lol

[Apex]

I believe Some NAS's can use them as a read cache in which case they will wear quicker. Assuming they are caching for much larger storage that's frequently accessed. Otherwise I doubt there will be much of a meaningful difference.

Depends on the type of SSD in use, a read cache doesn't cause issues for NAND, its when it comes to writing to that same NAND that the wear is created.

[Apex]

That's a nice NAS mate. Wish I had got it, the eBay bloke is buggering me around! Such is life lol

Running or was running QTS 4.2.6 - its been used has a backup target from my main NAS for stuff i just could not afford to have go bang at the time, now surplus to requirement.

There is in the back of my head is a worry over this NAS unit(s), with off the shelf bits if something goes wrong we can replace the hardware cheaply, these NAS units, you are SOL if outside of warrantee for a lot of the problems.

[Jonj1611]

I had read that before, something about if it goes wrong it its either expensive repair or scrap

[Apex]

More worried about the DS1815+ then the QNap (not seen many folks say they have had issues with that)

If i could just stop being a pack rat with all this data i could free myself of the need but i don't trust cloud storage one bit to keep MY data away from folks.

[Jonj1611]

I use cloud storage with icloud but if any of that gets lost I have backups of that but I couldn't ever upload something to cloud storage and not have it elsewhere as well. Just too many question marks over it imo

[DanceswithUnix]

TL/DR = in the 2-bay consumer sector, capacity from 3.5" is probably seen to be (correctly, IMHO) more relevant than the smaller drive form factor.

That seems to be the repeated truth, I'm just not sure it holds water any more. You can get a big single 3.5inch HDD, but that disk is 4 times the volume of a 2.5in drive so in the enterprise storage space where rack density and performance are important the switch to 2.5in gave more storage per slot in the rack and spread the load across more drives hence improving performance. The switch to U.2 is ott for most people, but you can get adaptors that should be really cheap if made in volume to allow the use of consumer NVMe drives in a standard U.2 slot: https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-co.../dp/B073W65QX6

Then there's the whole issue of noise from spinning rust, specially most of the NAS rated ones.

If money were no object, then I would be going for something like: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/giga...x-25-u2-hot-sw

Do SSD's wear quicker in a NAS? I am talking consumer grade.

That completely depends on your use case. Our NAS doesn't get that much written to it, so the SSDs in there get a far easier life than if they were in a Windows PC. Well, apart from the occasional raid rebuild because the stupid backplane dropped drive 2 out again, grrr