My Newbie Experience Getting Into NAS

[drrich2]

Appreciate everyone's input on RAID; don't think I'd heard of any version between 1 and 5.

Someone recommended getting a UPS for power outages; it's my understanding the batteries in them may occasionally need replacing over time. I don't know just which models support that well, how much it costs, how long the interval is likely to be before that's needed or how often people just buy a new one instead. Another of those 'wander off into the weeds' topics, but one that might be helpful if anybody has some insight. UGreen makes one for its NAS; there are some brands I don't know the relative merits of (I'd Google reviews, check Wirecutter, etc.).

Also worth noting (didn’t see it or may have missed it) Synology kicks you to their drives on their newer models whereas UGREEN doesn’t.

Someone mentioned they stopped doing that on HDDs; if I understood correctly, they may still do it on NVMe's (check if that's important).

I use openZFS on my raid - the usual learn the open source approach and modify to suit your needs, I think your approach is less work than the openZFS approach

I hope people who went the DIY will post details of their setups and what the learning curve was like. It feels odd discussing it in Mac forum, since Macs are famous in part for intuitive ease-of-use and NAS are...perhaps I might say 'diamonds in the rough,' in that you have to do some 'mining' to get into it?

As for Thunderbolt, I couldn't imagine having a NAS in the same room as me; they are noisy! I keep mine in the storage area of the basement.

The noise thing is hard to convey even in YouTube reviews, to the point I've seen NASCompares use an instrument to measure decibels in a review.

I'm told lower capacity HDDs are quieter than the really big ones, but what about this - if someone had 2 12-terabyte HDDs and another had 4 6-terabyte HDDs, which would be noisier? Of course, the 1st would probably be in RAID 1 with 12 terabytes usable space, the later RAID 5 with 18-terabytes usable space.

The discs in the QNAP are Western Digital RED so they are quiet in a home environment and built to run continuously for very long periods - 1703 days of being powered on according to the current stats and no abnormal sectors.

Are they quiet like in would be no bother sitting beside your Mac and display, or more like okay sitting elsewhere in the room?

How noisy a NAS with HDDs would be was something I couldn't get a good feel for.

 

[mk313]

Someone recommended getting a UPS for power outages; it's my understanding the batteries in them may occasionally need replacing over time. I don't know just which models support that well, how much it costs, how long the interval is likely to be before that's needed or how often people just buy a new one instead. Another of those 'wander off into the weeds' topics, but one that might be helpful if anybody has some insight. UGreen makes one for its NAS; there are some brands I don't know the relative merits of (I'd Google reviews, check Wirecutter, etc.).

I know absolutely nothing about NAS's. I did get a synology last year to do time capsule backups. After a power failure corrupted the backups & made me start over, I purchased this UPS:

APC UPS Battery Backup and Surge Protector, 600VA/330 Watts Backup Battery Power Supply, BE600M1 Back-UPS with USB Charger Port​

Got it off amazon & it gets great reviews. The thing I liked best about it is it came with a cable that I could plug into my synology & now sinology mono tires the battery life remaining on the UPS & does a shut down it it starts to get close to running out of power.

I have had a UPS for a long time in my office (not for the NAS, but just for my internet & router, so I can keep working if the power goes out). They've always been APC brand and they've always worked well. The first one didn't have a replaceable battery, which is really the only fault I could find with any of the ones I've had. APC's have been solid, but make sure to get one with a replaceable battery.

 

[throAU]

Yes, it's a pity that none of the NAS vendor OSs use ZFS (no, QNAP's QuTS Hero doesn't use real ZFS).

ZFS is great, but honestly, bit-rot it protects from isn’t such a big deal if you do backups properly because you constantly have multiple copies to restore from if you DO encounter an issue in a file. Even ZFS won’t protect you against all failure modes (e.g., house fire), so you need multiple copies anyway.

As a priority: Worry less about what individual copy of your data is stored on and more about how many copies you have, where they are, and what different failure scenarios they protect against.

The big scenarios (that each wipe out different types of backup) being: drive failure, human error, malware, account compromise or something catastrophic like theft or house fire (where you may lose both your backup and your device if they’re in the same place!).

For most normies, time machine with two disks is a great start. Encrypt them both and keep the passwords in your password manager. Keep one disk at home and one somewhere else. Swap them once a month or so.

If you get into setting up a NAS, i’d still suggest using that for your primary backup over WIFI via time machine or some other 100% automatic method (because everybody is lazy and automatic just makes it painless) and then have a second copy either in icloud or a second time machine disk via external drive that you store at work or somewhere else.

Doing the above things i have zero concerns about losing data, ever. If any single device dies, gets stolen or catches fire, i have other copies in other locations. If my machine gets malware and the malware wipes out everything my machine is connected to, i still have a drive that was disconnected in a different physical location, and 30 days of version history in iCloud (and BackBlaze).

Once you’ve figured out how many copies and where to put them, then determine which physical storage mechanisms are the best fit for you (cloud, NAS, external drives, etc. - or a mix) based on price, technical ability, laziness, etc.




But yes, great write up OP!

 

[TheHareBear]

Appreciate everyone's input on RAID; don't think I'd heard of any version between 1 and 5.

Someone recommended getting a UPS for power outages; it's my understanding the batteries in them may occasionally need replacing over time. I don't know just which models support that well, how much it costs, how long the interval is likely to be before that's needed or how often people just buy a new one instead. Another of those 'wander off into the weeds' topics, but one that might be helpful if anybody has some insight. UGreen makes one for its NAS; there are some brands I don't know the relative merits of (I'd Google reviews, check Wirecutter, etc.).


Someone mentioned they stopped doing that on HDDs; if I understood correctly, they may still do it on NVMe's (check if that's important).


I hope people who went the DIY will post details of their setups and what the learning curve was like. It feels odd discussing it in Mac forum, since Macs are famous in part for intuitive ease-of-use and NAS are...perhaps I might say 'diamonds in the rough,' in that you have to do some 'mining' to get into it?


The noise thing is hard to convey even in YouTube reviews, to the point I've seen NASCompares use an instrument to measure decibels in a review.

I'm told lower capacity HDDs are quieter than the really big ones, but what about this - if someone had 2 12-terabyte HDDs and another had 4 6-terabyte HDDs, which would be noisier? Of course, the 1st would probably be in RAID 1 with 12 terabytes usable space, the later RAID 5 with 18-terabytes usable space.


Are they quiet like in would be no bother sitting beside your Mac and display, or more like okay sitting elsewhere in the room?

How noisy a NAS with HDDs would be was something I couldn't get a good feel for.

Elsewhere in the room would be better. They are pretty quiet but not silent so it’s going to be personal preference rather than how to deal with some noisy thing. Mine doubles as a Plex server and is in the same room as the TV and I’ve never thought about moving it elsewhere.

They are nowhere near as noisy as SCSI discs I’ve had in the past.

Andrew

 

[TheHareBear]

Elsewhere in the room would be better. They are pretty quiet but not silent so it’s going to be personal preference rather than how to deal with some noisy thing. Mine doubles as a Plex server and is in the same room as the TV and I’ve never thought about moving it elsewhere.

I did choose the WD RED deliberately as quieter discs and they are 4 x 3.something gig as that was cost effective when buying them a few years ago.

They are nowhere near as noisy as SCSI discs I’ve had in the past.

Andrew

 

[keksikuningas]

Maybe a weekend? Only because unraid has much more functionality than I expected. I initially just wanted bulk storage, but I found myself setting up Jellyfin for media streaming and a bunch of other utilities.



I bought a NAS case from Newegg - they have a ton of options for this sort of thing. From there I just went down to Micro Center for an ITX motherboard, a cheap ryzen APU, memory, cache SSD, and a pair of 12TB drives. I specifically went with Unraid so that I could add drives to the storage pool later of need be - not simple to do with something like ZFS, as I understand it.

I definitely see the appeal of an off-the-shelf solution, but I enjoy the build and testing and all that nerdy stuff.

what motherboard did you get and how many SATA and M.2 slots on it?