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Our Syntology DS218j is about three years old. Served us well as a file share, Time Machine backup, company stuff backup etc. It has a pair of WD 3.2 gig drives currently mirrored. It's a bit slow and noisy (although the 'make less noise setting' has made a difference) but as it's really just a secure backup (we don't stream off it or anything), never been a problem.
Issue is all the video editing I'm doing now has filled it. Still got loads more to do and I'd very much like a local backup of the iMovie library(s), the MP4 4k renders and - maybe - the original files off the GoPro. We don't have a great internet connection currently so using GoPro cloud or some other service doesn't really work. All docs are in iCloud but company stuff (sage mainly) and video and some other stuff we don't want off the premises is on the NAS with no further backup.
It's only a 2 bay enclosure so I think my options are:
1) break the mirror and double the storage
2) Buy a bigger enclosure and add more drives
3) Buy a bigger enclosure with faster/bigger drives and migrate and/or have 2 NAS with split use
1) seems cheapest (and probably simplest in terms of data migration) but it worries me because this means my backup is not protected. 2) is easy but at a cost and I'm not sure buying lots more quite slow 3.2 gig drives is a good investment (not sure if I can put mismatched drives in and still have a raid config?) and 3) is the most expensive, going to be a pain to do migration but gives me most flexibility (also would allow me to run the Pi on the NAS)
Have I missed anything here?
Have I missed anything here?
4) Get rid of some stuff. I guarantee that there's stuff on there that you don't need any more.
If they're mirrored, can you not replace one drive at a time with a larger drive? My understanding is that the drive with data will be mirrored to the new drive, so after you've worked through them both, you'll have your existing data plus free space.
If they’re mirrored, can you not replace one drive at a time with a larger drive?
I did that with my original 2 bay, started with 2x3TB drives, then 2x6TB. Ended up putting the 2x3TB drives into a upgraded 4 bay with 2 more 3TB drives.
So now have a fast 4 bay drive that i stream from and a slower, older 2 bay with big drives for back ups etc.
(And playing with a cheapy 4 bay drive as well, as the 2 bay drive is nearly full.)
4) Get rid of some stuff. I guarantee that there’s stuff on there that you don’t need any more.
Yeah, i used to get rid of ~10% if i cleared out. Though, i'm up against it now. Nothing left to get rid of really, might save 100 GB across the ~10TB storage i'm using. Hardly worth it.
Thanks all. @mert that sounds like the way to go. I will check the mirror works with bigger drives, but a quick google suggests it will. I would like a more powerful/quickier chassis that I can run docker on and create spaces for Pi, etc. But it's not a priority. A couple of 6 TB drives would give me some breathing space.
I probably could tidy stuff up - for example do I really need to backup my documents as they are all on iCloud? Probably not but I'm just a bit paranoid about non local storage.
Right let's see what's available in terms of drives..
I've nothing constructive to add to this thread, but i find like many of the financial threads on here (pensions and the like), that I just start thinking is this something I've missed that i should be doing? But then I read OPs and I'm aware that these are words, and that they must "make sense" to people, but I read these and I see
"Well, I've double flummoxed my doowap drive and it badger-setted all over the maxi-flop, so that's that's probably fine but when I restart my french-pistol it's just seeing the single dowap, what I'm doing wrong?
Checking out Syntology compatibility list, it seems a pair of these would do the job: https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/38731-seagate-st6000ne000-2hdd/ - current ones spin at 7200 I think.
A further Q tho - are all spinny NAS drives much of a muchness? Or is it worth paying more for a premium brand? and if so which one!
🙂 @nickc - I feel the same when people try and explain MTB suspension to me 'well I tweaked the rebound doooble dangler and exorcised the funky grunion valve and now my mid stroke low speed compression blowoff is amazing'
I'm pretty convinced that the sole reason I'm not a world cup racer is that I've never understood how to exorcise my grunion valve.
Could you back up some of your older stuff to Amazon S3 to save space?
I’m pretty convinced that the sole reason I’m not a world cup racer is that I’ve never understood how to exorcise my grunion valve
You keep telling yourself that 🙂
Could you back up some of your older stuff to Amazon S3 to save space?
Maybe. Or to one drive as we have 1TB as part of our business package. But the problem is I would quite like access to the video files (doing stuff for work now) and everything takes sooooooo long on our 5mbit/sec upload. I tried uploading some GoPro stuff and it calculated it would take 8 days. So I left it but it failed every time.
Fibre next year. Hopefully. Still we've been promised that for the last 5!
Think my drives are all NAS specific. 5400 rpm ish, the data transfer is generally not needed in a rush, and it's not for gaming/processing. Just video (4k) streams. And they seem to fulfill that without issue.
Saves power and are (allegedly) more reliable. Anything i need highspeed processing for goes on a desktop or laptop with large SSD/M2 drives.
Beyond a certain point, i don't think there's any point in buying ultra expensive ones for a NAS, but by the same token, no name rubbish from amazon is probably high risk.
Most of mine are WD red or similar (Seagate IIRC)
I've expanded my Synology by pulling a drive, replace with a bigger one, let it return to healthy and then pull/replace the other. Takes a while but worked fine.
If you don't already have a backup then first step would be getting a big external disk and backing it up over USB.
If your storage needs are growing though I'd definitely consider a new chassis and drives - maybe keep the old for things like time machine backups and do the more demanding stuff on the new one.
If you don’t already have a backup then first step would be getting a big external disk and backing it up over USB.
So could I do that using one of the 'new' 6TB drives if I can find a way to power it outside of the chassis? Otherwise not sure what I'd be back the current 3TB onto! Or do I just buy a cheap USB drive with say 5TB capacity? They are only £100 and I have used them in the past as backup of backups (company accounts, etc) stored in a fireproof safe.
If your storage needs are growing though I’d definitely consider a new chassis and drives
Defo longer term. Whatever I do I'll stick with Syntology. Took me about 2 years to learn how to use/manage it and not going to go through that again on QNAP or some other vendor!
This https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/41585-synology-ds920-16tb-siw/?gclid=CjwKCAiA9qKbBhAzEiwAS4yeDSrR8oUKtZeDIONkKfMLV4BgyxqFDdnrSGc7kyxicCIFm4D9j5NhIhoCaFgQAvD_BwE was the one I've been looking at. 4 bay, 16 TB, far more efficient use of disks.
As simon suggested, would then just use current one as TM target and new one for everything else.
Stop and consider for a moment, what do you need a NAS for. Do multiple people access it? Is read performance a concern? Is write performance a concern?
Splitting the mirror would double your capacity but double (JBOD) or quadruple (RAID 0) the risk. If it really is "just" a backup then a drive failure shouldn't really matter because you have the data elsewhere. Is that the case? Would a failure be a catastrophe or a gallic shrug?
Is the best solution for your use case maybe more local storage?
If they’re mirrored, can you not replace one drive at a time with a larger drive? My understanding is that the drive with data will be mirrored to the new drive, so after you’ve worked through them both, you’ll have your existing data plus free space.
You can absolutely do this with 'proper' RAID, I've done it numerous times in servers. Swap a drive, wait for the array to rebuild; swap the other and wait again; then repartition the drives to use the extra space. Whether you'd get away with it on a domestic NAS I wouldn't like to say; you probably would?
Oh, and,
If you do replace the drives, they're greater than 1TB and you've nothing better to do with them than stick then in a drawer, I'll have them. (-: I'm desperate for storage and broke.
Stop and consider for a moment, what do you need a NAS for. Do multiple people access it? Is read performance a concern? Is write performance a concern?
Two of us access it. Sometimes three (one remotely). Read performance isn't a big issue. Obviously as we allow remote access (and I don't currently have a fixed IP address so I can't build a 'proper' DMZ) we want a box that is secure and robust. We could switch to a cloud service (and we're in the process of moving SAGE there at the mo) and it'd probably be fine. But there's something about having secure, robust on site storage I can't get away from!
When we get fibre, the plan is to get a 90 gig sync connection and then my guess is any share we use would migrate to the cloud. I'd still like copies of all the videos/podcasts stuff I'm starting to do for work locally tho.
If we just go for new drivers @cougar, sure you can have the ole ones. I just "found" a spare 4TB drive so that means I can do a USB backup. Which having looked at the current WD Red drives (which spin at 5400RPM) might be a good thing. The idea you can mirror to a different make/different speed drive is making my head hurt!
If it really is “just” a backup then a drive failure shouldn’t really matter
some other stuff we don’t want off the premises is on the NAS with no further backup.
If there is no backup (i.e. the only version of a file is on the NAS) then DO NOT break the mirror. You know what they say about mirrors and bad luck.
Whether you’d get away with it on a domestic NAS I wouldn’t like to say; you probably would?
One (possibly 2?) of the newer NAS i've got will even do hot swapping of drives. (I'm old school, so i don't.)
None of them *won't* rebuild a RAID array or mirrored drive automatically.
One is about 8 years old and was discontinued when i got it on sale, the other two are 3 and 5 years old and still current.
some other stuff we don’t want off the premises is on the NAS with no further backup.
Yeah, i've got private stuff that i don't want offsite.
It's still backed up (one copy on the NAS, one on a portable HDD that i update infrequently)
Assuming there are no "issues" with the current setup, i would be:
Pulling one drive, replacing it with a much bigger one.
Letting it mirror
Replacing the other one
And the boxing up one of the pulled drives onto a shelf, as is with all the stuff still on it.
maybe send the other to a relative to put on a shelf in case your house burns down with your drives and backup drives in it.
Always keep a backup of the backups.
Hmmm, turns out none of my NAS are still current. 😀
Ah well, all had updates to software this week!
@olly - sound advice. I just looked at the config and the backup via USB is really good, I've set it up dump all the files off the drives when my cheap 5TB external drive connects. I known our NAS isn't really a full backup if you delete a file that you don't have an original copy for.
Learned that lesson the hard way. Having sync'd / shared files is brilliant for us. Until an idiot deletes the only copy!
Stop and consider for a moment, what do you need a NAS for. Do multiple people access it? Is read performance a concern? Is write performance a concern?
...
Is the best solution for your use case maybe more local storage?
I would echo this. A NAS is a pretty expensive and not ultimately the most efficient solution for home data storage. I have a basic one for films and music, for round the house access by multiple devices such as telly, iPad, etc, but all my files are stored on a 2 disc RAID 1 set in a cheapo enclose I bought online. I only switch it on when I need access to stuff, so it's not always on, burning unnecessary energy and wearing out the drives. USB-3* connection, so quicker and more reliable than transferring data than over wi-fi, and faster (almost 5Gbps) than ethernet (assuming Gigabit ethernet on most machines). A NAS needs to be connected either to a router to enable wireless access of course.
*My iMac also has Thunderbolt/USB4, so even faster at 40Gbps, but such enclosures are very rare, and very expensive. Not a lot of use unless you need super fast data transfer. If you've been used to wifi data speeds, then USB 3 will seem lightning quick.
So yes. My main issues with NAS have been dropped/shonky connections. Need to Turn It Off Then Back On Again™ once a month on average. That's why I much prefer a simple USB attacked storage device.
Aye.
IF I needed attached storage, I'd stick an SSD up the USB3 port on my router. But my use case isn't anyone else's.
... will even do hot swapping of drives. (I’m old school, so i don’t.)
Pulling drives is a great trick until you have a brainfart and pull the other one. A place I once worked for had a Major Service Outage because they sent a Tech to swap a drive in a RAID1 stack in a SQL server and he pulled the one with the green light rather than the red. How we laughed. Eventually.
Oh, and,
Half a mirror stuck on a shelf Just In Case is not a reliable witness. Ask me how I know. 😁
RAID comes a huge degree of chicanery. Take a RAID1 (mirrored) enclosure, pull both drives. Stick one in the opposite bay. Stick another in a different enclosure. What's going to happen? Will your data live? Where do you suppose the stack configuration is held? If your answer is anything other than "I'm not sure" then you're either an expert or a fool.
Heaving drives out of an array is a great tool in your arsenal and I have - successfully - used it as disaster mitigation in a crisis. But it's a bold move and by christ I wouldn't want to rely on it.
I’d stick an SSD up the USB3 port on my router
But you're still limited to wifi speeds, no? Hence all the nice speed of the SSD ad USB 3 is wasted?
I’m desperate for storage and broke.
I'd love some super fast SSDs to replace the noisy HDDs. Trouble is, I have 2x8Tb, and 2x4Tb drives. That's quite a lot of money already, at current storage prices. I dread to think what it would cost to switch...
But you’re still limited to wifi speeds, no? Hence all the nice speed of the SSD ad USB 3 is wasted?
I take your point but, you could say the same of a NAS.
I’d love some super fast SSDs to replace the noisy HDDs. Trouble is, I have 2x8Tb, and 2x4Tb drives.
My entire life is on 2x 1TB spinnydisks. I really should practice what I preach and sort out backups. I have a backup drive at my mum's for stuff that's actually irreplaceable but it's, I don't even know offhand, 500GB?
That said, it's in my office so noise isn't an issue. If I'm streaming from it then I'll be watching from downstairs rather than having it thrashing away under the telly.
I'd have a read of the below, as far as I'm aware you need a minimum of three discs to perform a rebuild.
https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/help/DSM/StorageManager/storage_pool_what_is_raid?version=7
Also if you upgrade the NAS you might not be able to use the old disc in the new NAS without reformatting them.
Think I'd get an external drive and back the data up.
Insert new discs and perform a restore.
Use the external drive for a USB external backup.
Main back up to idrive you can usually find an offer for $9.99 a year.
Other option is a bigger NAS with more drives but that comes at a cost.
I just have a single 7TB drive which is backed up to idrive, saves costs.
Thanks all and esp for that article @highpeakrider
We do have a gigabit connection out the back of our Orbi mesh wireless boxes. Transfer rates have never been that good even when I plugged the Mac and the NAS into the same Orbi (4 ports on each). I mean it was better than via wifi but nowhere near advertised speed. Not a massive issue tho, I want secure/on site/robust rather than fast.
I'm defo NOT doing the mirror thing without a USB backup to an external drive. I know it should work, but I've lost more data than I should have by trying to do the easy thing!
On a tangential note, we used to be able to swap massive line cards on old Infotron Mux's back in the 1990s. Hot swap they said then just close the rail for the power. One datacenter fire later 🙂
I’d have a read of the below, as far as I’m aware you need a minimum of three discs to perform a rebuild.
That's interesting but complicated. Does anyone want a RAID crash course / overview? (There's little point me typing mansplaining paragraphs if not.)
I’m defo NOT doing the mirror thing without a USB backup to an external drive. I know it should work, but I’ve lost more data than I should have by trying to do the easy thing!
A wise decision IMHO.
I'm happy to have some RAID knowledge in an easy to digest format. I kind of remember something about RAID striping. I know 1:1 is a mirror and (maybe) 5 is 'the best', no idea what happened to 2, 3 and 4 🙂
6 is better than 5, hot spares rule.
Drives from different build batches are good, from different manufacturers better.
Always keep a backup.
Read as always keep an offsite backup.
Alex
Full MemberI’m happy to have some RAID knowledge in an easy to digest format. I kind of remember something about RAID striping. I know 1:1 is a mirror and (maybe) 5 is ‘the best’, no idea what happened to 2, 3 and 4 🙂
Only 1/10 and 5/6 are really relevant now.
RAID 1 is mirror - 50% wasted space, you can lose either disk and still be okay.
RAID 10 is mirror + stripe which gives (much) better performance. Basically two pairs of mirrored disks with the data interleaved. You can lose either disk out of each pair, but no more than that.
RAID 5 is distributed parity - lower wasted space. Files are spread over multiple discs + a checksum on the final one, so losing one disk is no problem. If you lose two then you lose all the data.
RAID 6 is same as 5 but two copies of parity bits - lower wasted space than mirror, more wasted than RAID 5 but better resiliance than either. So you can lose two disks and still be okay, if you lose 3 you lose all the data.
eta and RAID 0 but that's only for performance, not resilience
eta2 i didn't see cougars post, feel free to correct any glaring errors 🙂
@cougar 🤷🏻♂️ I might have some old NAS drives of various capacity that I have no use for. I’ll check if my memory of this is real and tell you what I have.
Apologies if I missed some stuff already mentioned in the thread but assuming you can’t clear out old data or want to increase capacity while maintaining data redundancy (which is not a backup!!), I’d suggest a 4 bay Synology NAS as you are used to those so minimal relearning. Add the drives you have with 2 of the biggest drives you can afford (I’ve had decent luck with current model Seagate IronWolf drives), using all 4 drives in the new NAS, setup SHR (Synology hybrid raid), which is a fairly common implementation of raid5 in Linux circles these days, you use 3 of the drives for data and the 4th drive is a parity drive which is used to rebuild data that might be lost to a failed drive. The beauty of SHR or any of the other similar implementations is that you can use drives if any size together as long as the parity drive is at least as large as the biggest drive in the array.
#EDIT : oh and another advantage is that in the future I’d you need more storage you just swap out the smallest drive in the array for a bigger one (no bigger than the parity drive though) and the drive will be incorporated into the array, all the data will be rebuilt from the parity drive and you carry on with extra storage. The only issue is after however long you need drives larger than the parity at which point you need to rebuild the entire thing or move the drives to a bigger NAS that you can just add more drives to, hence why you buy the biggest drives you can afford now to miximise the length of time the parity drive works.
Thanks muchly for the offer of hardware donations. Appreciated, I'm kinda stuck.
RAID wise, OK. I'll try not to re-tread what others have said. There's a shedload of different RAID levels but at a consumer level you're looking at 0, 1 and 5.
RAID 1 is the easiest to explain, it's mirroring. You take two drives and write the same data to both. Write speed performance is high because it's easy, read speed is high because you've got two sources to read from. A catastrophic failure of a single drive doesn't matter because you've got the same data in two places. What does matter is malware infection or something like failure of the enclosure. But that's true of any RAID solution. Array rebuild time is relatively rapid because again it's easy; how fast can you stuff data across the backplane? But the massive downside to RAID 1 is cost because you're paying for storage twice over.
RAID 5 is n+1 drives. You need a minimum of three drives and your storage capacity is, well, n-1 so with say three 2TB disks you'd have 4TB. With seven you'd have 12TB. Read speed is rapid, write speed isn't great because it's computationally hard work. Rebuild time after a failure is an arse. For years RAID 5 was (situationally) the preferred way to build servers, but as disk capacities and array sizes have increased rebuild time is becoming increasingly prohibitive. It's considerably cheaper than RAID 1 *if* you can take the hit on being vulnerable for a protracted period following a failure. (For a home backup solution I probably would, for a production storage server not on your nelly. A rebuild of a sizeable RAID 5 array is in the order of days or worse.)
RAID 0 is taking a bunch of disks and slapping one dirty great partition across all of them. Look at that 0. There is zero redundancy, zero resiliency. Worse, you've increased the risk because a failure of a single drive will collapse the entire array, the more disks the greater the likelihood of failure. There is a time and a place for this but generally you probably don't want it. JBOD - "just a bunch of disks" - is likely a better option than RAID 0.
There's others. The intervening numbers are long obsolete. RAID 6 is like RAID 5 but can take a hit on losing two disks in a stack instead of one (and I think is largely proprietary tech). RAID 10 is variously RAID 0 on top of RAID 1 or the other way around, relevant in corporate deployments but probably not so much when you're backing up your CD collection.
TL;DR:
RAID 1, probably best, expensive.
RAID 0, almost certainly terrible, cheap.
RAID 5, somewhere in the middle, probably the best compromise unless you've got a stack of massive drives and high availability is a concern.
[disclaimer to Techs: this is a huge oversimplification I know, I'm trying to make it accessible]
setup SHR (Synology hybrid raid), which is a fairly common implementation of raid5 in Linux circles these days, you use 3 of the drives for data and the 4th drive is a parity drive which is used to rebuild data that might be lost to a failed drive.
I know nothing about SHR, never heard of it until you mentioned it. But RAID 5 doesn't have a parity drive, rather parity is striped across the array. A dedicated parity disk in an array was... RAID 4? 3? 🤷♂️ One of the dead ones.
It sounds like you’re 2 away from the rule of 3, so first set up local USB and cloud backups. Synology C2 isn’t bad value. Then just do 1) unless you need disk redundancy, which I may have missed. But I’d say for most people, if you’re spending £100s on TBs of storage hardware, you might as well use it all. Is it that bad/slow to swap out a broken drive and restore from backup?
Also can someone explain how to drop out the lowers and make the buttery smooth compression curve more or less linear?
Well I did write a long post here but got a 403 error when I submitted it.
So to summarise - look at zfs-based NAS systems...it's awesome!
A further Q tho – are all spinny NAS drives much of a muchness?
As long as they are on the compatibility list I think you are good. I've had both Seagate and Western digital disks fail on me. There doesn't seem to be one that is more reliable than the other
Is it that bad/slow to swap out a broken drive and restore from backup?
Yes, if you are doing something like video editing then you could lose your work since your last backup. Even worse if you copy all your raw materials from an SD card and wiped it before the backup was complete you will have lost your data. It's just that much safer with RAID. I've had a good number of drives fail over the years, you can pretty much guarantee it will happen
I’d have a read of the below, as far as I’m aware you need a minimum of three discs to perform a rebuild
Not sure I follow why if it's an existing RAID-1 you're just expanding?
Large capacity cheap hard disks have an inherent risk when it comes to data storage but given the OP is planning to get a fibre connection soon and use cloud-based storage I think the suggestion others have made just to swap out the existing drives one at a time with larger disks makes the most sense (especially as current performance doesn't sound like it's an issue).
Have you set a hard limit on the share that you are using for time machine? If not you might find that the majority of your storage has gone to that. My DS220 4TB NAS was starting to look full and I was considering the disk upgrade, but I had a look at the sizes of all my shares where that was almost 2TB of time machine backups, oops. So a clear out and a limit on the size of that share, and I'm good to postpone that upgrade a while longer.
I just checked my box of old drives in the cellar:
Seagate barracuda 3TB
Hitachi 1TB
WD caviar 500GB
WD caviar 500GB
Hitachi LS1000 + enclosure 1TB x2
HGST touro desk dx3 4TB
Excellent. How many of them don't you want? 😁
I can definitely make use of the first and the last. I don't like Seagate but beggars and choosers and all that.
Some very useful advice and discussion on here. Thanks all.
@russell96 - current nas is pretty old/low performance CPU so it can only run EXT4 file system. That doesn't allow you to set quotas on shared folders like Time Machine. If I knew what I was doing when I set it up I'd have created a separate storage pool, but I'm not doing that now!
If the nas is that old & the plan is to migrate to a newer 4+ bay soon, might it not be better to get that nas now & plan a staged migration rather than increase the data footprint that you’ll have to migrate again in a few weeks-months?
You could then look at options to use the old nas as a simple backup jbod array if that helps
Oh yeah,
look at zfs-based NAS systems…it’s awesome!
I looked at ZFS a few years back, with a view to replacing a storage server that had fried its PSU. FreeNAS or OpenNAS or something? Maybe. It looked fantastic but it was massively RAM-hungry and I wasn't even remotely in the ballpark with the hardware I had to hand.
I think SHR is (or certainly was) the standard recommended by Synology. My ancient DS413j (still going strong after nearly 10 years) uses this, but no idea about partity drives etc?
Mine has 9tb of useable space across 4 disks (2 3tb and 2 4tb), using SHR.
(I also back up important stuff to an external HDD permanently plugged into the the synology, a separate 6tb ext HDD that is only switched on to back up to and check, plus various cloud services, which are more for convenience really, albeit offsite which helps.)
There's a 'creative space' near me that has a bar where I sometimes go for a drink. Sat there one evening, and a group come out and start loading a bunch of film making gear into a van. Part of it was a trolley with a stack of computery looking stuff on it. I asked one of the guys loading it what it was, and he told me it was a Raid 10 array they'd been using for shooting and editing. About a couple of dozen or more SDDs, 4Tb each apparently. Fast! Possibly a little overkill for most domestic use though.
How many of them don’t you want?
all of them. They’ve sat in that same box for at least a year. Longer for some of them.
I’ll need to scrub them I think - several just came out of a NAS at the time.
Well after much head scratching, gone for a 4 bay. Our current NAS decided to power itself off yesterday (probably in a fit of pique) just after I'd backed most of it up to an external disk! Probably a one off but decided we'll get a new one, use that for sharing/local backup/confidential stuff. Also run PI/DNS/DHCP/etc on it.
Old one can have the 'historical' hardly every changes data (for which I have an external backup as well- in the shed so not exactly off site but..) and all the GoPro renders/old iMovie libs.
Short term, going to do a cloud backup for share via OneDrive (there's an app in Synology that works well) and a weekly dump onto the external drive. I do kind of like the way you could go 'off net' with the Syntology, suite of office apps, viewers, chat server, mail, etc. I mean they aren't very good but you could!
So sorry @cougar keeping the original NAS drives as well...
It looked fantastic but it was massively RAM-hungry
Yeah - it uses RAM as a read-cache, and can use SSD as a write cache, although the defaults FreeNas/TrueNas implementations don't make best use of this. It does work best with a decent amount of RAM and also CPU, since it can use block-level compression to optimise storage usage, and given enough CPU performs better like this since disk writes are alway the bottleneck, but if you have enough cpu to compress the data on the fly you win on the reduced amount of data you need to read/write.
Essentially, it needs a bit of grunt behind it. I first used it on Sun's Thumper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Fire_X4500. This was pretty ground-breaking at the time for storage density as well as the cool zfs stuff attached to it.
Going for an Intel CPU with a RAM upgrade is worth it in a Synology NAS, being able to run Docker or VM's adds so much flexibility. I run Pi-Hole in Docker which helps with internet speed and security. Noting that depending on the CPU the Max RAM it can support.
I run Cloud Sync a little differently, my mobile devices sync to iCloud/Google directly, then Cloud Sync mirrors these back to the NAS, but with one difference I've set it up that if anything is deleted in the cloud it isn't deleted on the NAS, so even if a cloud provider has finger trouble, I retain it all.
Heaving drives out of an array is a great tool in your arsenal and I have – successfully – used it as disaster mitigation in a crisis. But it’s a bold move and by christ I wouldn’t want to rely on it.
The storage equivalent of go big or go home!
OP I'm using Toshiba drives in my NAS and they are quite a bit cheaper on Box.
@russell96 - yep bought an intel powered one. Can stick another 4 gig of memory in it if needed. I'm going to run a couple of things on my Pi in docker/VM. I did think I could move all of Home Assistant then realised I'd lose the bluetooth receiver I use for temp/humidity gauges etc.
Defo will be going full DMZ when we get fibre. Security stuff on the NAS seems pretty good. I've a few more videos to watch tho. I did a r/sync transfer between the old and new and it's fair to say the throughput on the new one is pretty impressive!
Oh and finally getting Syntology drive setup/working properly. Having multiple versions is great as we're terrible for over-writing each others work!
Can't beat an as-is schematic.
To-Be will finally give me a DMZ, but need fibre first.
That's excessive. 😁
What did you use do draw it?
@Alex you may already be aware but there was an update recently to HA/ESPhome so you can now use an ESP device as a Bluetooth proxy (relaying the data to HA via WiFi). Quite the game-changer! 😃I did think I could move all of Home Assistant then realised I’d lose the bluetooth receiver I use for temp/humidity gauges etc.
I've moved all my home-server stuff now including HA onto a Lenovo ThinkCentre mini PC (basically their cheaper version of an Intel NUC!) which is still pretty efficient energy wise but way more powerful than a Pi.
That’s excessive. 😁
I was waiting for a video to render last night. I used to love doing network drawing and then logical data models back in the day. It's almost therapeutic 🙂 @cougar - it's lucidchart. Can't run Visio on a MAC (No bad thing) and I use LC extensively for work stuff. It's like Visio should be and with it being web based, it's very easy to share/collaborate on stuff.
@zilog6128 - I have a couple of the USB powered ones from AliExpress but even tho I've programmed them with the TeleLink Flash web app I can't get them to actually work. I see them in the ESP console but they don't ever transmit any data. I'll have another go this weekend as I've got that PI in mind for running some DMZ stuff when we get fibre.
are you talking about ESP chips e.g. ESP32 or your actual BT sensors? No experience of the latter unfortunately!I have a couple of the USB powered ones from AliExpress but even tho I’ve programmed them with the TeleLink Flash web app I can’t get them to actually work.
I have an ESP in a box on a circuit board (so standard 'chip') that I use in the big shed. But I found basically what looks like a ESP32 that is powered by a USB-C that you can plug in anywhere and has same functionality. I'll dig out the link to aliexpress when I get a minute. A mate has some and his work fine!
@Alex ta, would be interested in the link. I normally buy this type with Micro-USB, usually try to buy the same type (WROOM DevKitC) as if you get different types sometimes the pinouts and/or number of pins are slightly different which gets confusing!)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08DXSMZSB/ref=pe_27063361_487055811_TE_dp_5?th=1
never had any problems & I usually get them from Amazon as I'm impatient & the price isn't that much more than AliExpress! 😃 (although I've also bought plenty of stuff from AE too with no problems)
The cool think about the above ESPs is they fit perfectly with the following which is ace for prototyping:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B092H9FM3R?ref_=pe_747761_41376721_dpLink
That’s excessive. 😁
I used to draw things like that, but eventually we discovered that keeping the working schema on a whiteboard worked best since it actually got updated to match reality...
[frequent photos required]
@zilog6128 - these are the ones: https://thepihut.com/products/atom-lite-esp32-development-kit
My current ESP32 is like the one you posted, on a board and in a box so I don't accidentally short it. Works great. These little ones should be perfect as 'bluetooth roamers' that connect back to HA via WiFi. I'm going to have another go today.
@jca - I'm just working on the future post fibre version. It's all the changes between now and then which won't make any documentation other than scribbled notes on random bits of paper!