To NAS or not to NAS?

[Conza]

So I have a substancial DVD collection I'd like to backup, and I figure, as long as I store the DVDs somewhere, I might as well make my life easier and convert them into a playable format too, so I want to put many/all my DVDs onto a NAS.

Without going into every show I have, there's roughly 590-650 hours of shows (approximately), at DVD quality, so I'm thinking of a 4-bay NAS with 2 x 4TB (4TB is the price point). If I get stuck, add more HDDs up to 16TB or even 24TB, I surely couldn't need more than that for the next 4-5 years (personally).

My research so far, for a decent box (Synology 414J) + 2 x 4TB drives is basically ~$800, I have a compatible wifi-dongle already, so there we go, wireless 8TB NAS with room to grow.

However, I could get an external 8TB drive for a little bit less, also sort of NAS ready, HDDs included, a neater smaller box, and when something goes wrong, just one item to chase up, not three. Then when I do need more room, buy again and it'll be cheaper (cheaper than 2 x 4TB drives later on? probably not).

I'm resistant to a 2-bay NAS, because I know I'll immediately be full unless I buy 1 x 8TB, which are overpriced, otherwise when I do need to upgrade, I'll transfer the 4TB data to the new drive (meaning buying an 8TB for only an extra 4TB of space, then having an extra 4TB).

The 4-bay NAS also means I could get other HDDs and backup other machines on them too, or if the capacity is high enough, I can get +(2 x 8TB) in the future, or another 4TB, 6TB, ect, any combination

Anyone gone down either route to know enough about;

A. When is it time to go NAS and not just more external HDDs; or
B. Anything else relevant to my plan (DVD quality size calcs, based on minutes or DVD quantity, NAS Bay sizes, alternatives to my two plans, ect).

 

[Grayfox]

Gotta NAS man.

If you going to get a 4-Bay one, find one that supports RAID.

Then use RAID 5, if one drive fails, just replace it, tell the box to rebuild the RAID and boom, your data is still intact.
4x4TB in my RAID box

I went NAS as i was getting annoyed having multiple desktop externals on the desk and having data get corrupted when the drives started to fail.

Since I was needed more and more storage, I went why not go all out.

I used 4x4TB WD Reds which cost $1000 in total and the RAID box was about $250

 

[Robin]

I don't get all this hard drives failing stuff.

All my hard drives of various brands from the early 90's till now all still work perfectly after being used constantly. Not one has failed or even corrupted. I don't Raid or anything, just make copies of important stuff manually to different drives and DVD's.

Just lucky? If so touch wood!

 

[Conza]

Thanks Grayfox, may I ask which box you picked and why? All seem so samey, .5GB/1GB ram, 1.2GHz DC, read speeds, ~20db, ect

The current favourite, is an ASUS AS-204TE, slightly cheaper price, much better quality, also has an HDMI port, and compatible with my wifi dongle again, I'm basically getting a HTPC as well.

Getting 2 x 4TB for $350, I think I won't go for a 4TB RAID, I have a feeling that RAIDS cause failures in HDDs, its weird I know, I've never had any HDD fail on me ever (like Robin), so I'll see how I go with that.

Build is still at $800.

 

[BobK]

I have a Synology DS211j and a Synology DS411+; the 211j has 2x4TB drives and the 411 currently has 4x2TB drives. The capacity of the 211j is 4TB because, having only two drives, it's 100% redundant (one drive is a mirror of the other). The 411 has a capacity of 5.4TB because one drive is dedicated to redundancy (not strictly true but close enough). In other words a 414 with 2x4TB drives would only have a capacity of 4TB (minus a bit) unless yoiu had no redundancy whatsoever in which case you might as well just buy a single 8TB drive.

But NAS is definitely the way to go.

 

[acascianelli]

I have a Synology DS212j and I love it. It's pretty much the centerpiece tech appliance for my house. My next upgrade will probably be a 4 bay model though.

 

[Conza]

Yes, Synology's software looks great, but their prices are a bit high.

The 414J model I was looking at, was their cheaper version (J?), and it was going to be $470. The Asustor AS-204TE is a bit less, but has more ram and an HDMI out, slightly easier upgrades, an LCD screen, and a nice kettle cord power (no external transformer, makes it cleaner). So unless the software is completely useless, it seems the way to go right now.

 

[Grayfox]

I don't get all this hard drives failing stuff.

All my hard drives of various brands from the early 90's till now all still work perfectly after being used constantly. Not one has failed or even corrupted. I don't Raid or anything, just make copies of important stuff manually to different drives and DVD's.

Just lucky? If so touch wood!

HDDs fail, things go corrupted mainly due to bad sectors occurring

Thanks Grayfox, may I ask which box you picked and why? All seem so samey, .5GB/1GB ram, 1.2GHz DC, read speeds, ~20db, ect

The current favourite, is an ASUS AS-204TE, slightly cheaper price, much better quality, also has an HDMI port, and compatible with my wifi dongle again, I'm basically getting a HTPC as well.

Getting 2 x 4TB for $350, I think I won't go for a 4TB RAID, I have a feeling that RAIDS cause failures in HDDs, its weird I know, I've never had any HDD fail on me ever (like Robin), so I'll see how I go with that.

Build is still at $800.

I have a mediasonic proraid 4 bay box.
It has eSATA, USB3.0 and 256bit AES encryption via USB key if i want to encrypt things.
I just run it via eSATA and formatted with a 64k sector size

I got this box as it was the cheaper 4 bay RAID box that still go good reviews.

RAIDs dont cause failures.
The RAID level just does things when writing to either increase speed of reading and writing, add data redundancy or a little of both.

 

[Pako]

I would agree, go NAS. 4 bay raid is about as cheap as you can go for a 16TB setup (10.8 effective). I've been running a small Seagate box successfully for just the reason you are describing. I've been running XMBC on a standalone box I build and it's awesome. Honestly, the only thing that would make it better is a second XMBC build for my other living space. WiFi doesn't always stream my higher resolution DVD's. I agree with Greyfox.

 

[Grayfox]

10.9 on my setup with RAID 5.

 

[BobK]

Yes, Synology's software looks great, but their prices are a bit high.

The 414J model I was looking at, was their cheaper version (J?), and it was going to be $470. The Asustor AS-204TE is a bit less, but has more ram and an HDMI out, slightly easier upgrades, an LCD screen, and a nice kettle cord power (no external transformer, makes it cleaner). So unless the software is completely useless, it seems the way to go right now.

Synology is pricier, but worth it IMO. Not just the software but the hardware is top-notch.

I am not familiar with the current line, but the "j" models are the "junior" versions of a particular product; typically less RAM and slower processor.

After I bought my 211j I sometimes wished I'd opted for the 211 or 211+ but the 211j does suit my needs.

 

[acascianelli]

Another option is to get one of those small HP N40 servers and build a NAS yourself. That way can run whatever OS you want; Windows, Linux, BSD.

They have 4 hot swappable bays, and an additional bay internally. Get 1 SSD for the OS, and then use the 4 hot swappable drives for you data LUN.

 

[doctorrg]

Definitely NAS, then have a nice media center frontend. Physical media definitely needs to be put away as the backup. I, myself, have a Synology 1812+ and it's been great. Can definitely recommend Synology. If I didn't want to spend the money and had some spare hardware lying around, I'd be looking into building my own NAS, using some of the free, or reasonably cheap, NAS software options on standard PC hardware. It's definitely better than having a set of external drives. A lot easier to manage as well, IMO.

 

[Conza]

I have a separate question related to my plans, regarding DVD extraction.

I want to take the raw data from the DVDs (the VIDEO_TS and maybe the AUDIO_TS files?) and place them into giant folders, so I don't need to navigate often when playing shows. Even better, I'd like to make a giant DVD menu that could be playable in VLC by opening the right folder, where I could select the show, then the season, episode, or play all from a season ect. I think that'd be great, maybe the NAS has something like that, surely someone would've thought of this.

Wow haven't visited this in a month, ok here's where I am.

I just bought the Asustor AS-204TE, found it for ~$20 off, at ~$440 so jumped on it, can't wait for it to arrive.

I also bought an external Seagate Expansion 4TB, for ~$190 was cheaper than any internals I could find, plus I'll to salvage the gutted exterior as an enclosure.

I also needed a new DVD drive, so I finally replaced a creative DVD player that's been in about 4-6 different computers since around 1999, its out of region code changes, struggles to read some discs some times, so I went 'all out' and bought a blu ray burner for $100

I only bought a single external, because I'm not sure if I'll need more / want to back up more discs, as it stands there's roughly 300 DVDs to backup and organise.

My calculations was based on two discs. One had 2 40 minute episodes and some special features, it came in at 7GB, the other had 4 40 minute episodes at 7.19GB. So conservatively 7.19 x 319 discs = 2233GB, which in dummy TB is 2.233TB (a real 2.18TB using 1024 not 1000). So a single 4000GB or 3.9 TB gives me 1.73GB of extra room.

When I've sorted out my menus and formats, ect, and have a process down, then I might expand to the 2nd bay, but that should do for now, and I'll still have 2 bay left 👍

 

[Grayfox]

which in dummy TB is 2.233TB (a real 2.18TB using 1024 not 1000).

KB, MB, GB, TB are all units of 1000.

KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB are all units of 1024

Microsoft doesn't know the real definition, they are still confusing people and all because people didnt use the correct units back in the 90s.

 

[Conza]

KB, MB, GB, TB are all units of 1000.

KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB are all units of 1024

Microsoft doesn't know the real definition, they are still confusing people and all because people didnt use the correct units back in the 90s.

Well, I prefer 1024 anyway, its on the basis of an 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. 97.65625% doesn't seem like a great loss, but compounding it means heaps of data is lost. I wish the industry followed Microsoft in that regard, even if they insisted on using the TiB instead of TB. if it follows all the way back to the kilobyte, I'm losing 9% of the space I would've got from a TiB drive.

 

[Grayfox]

Well, I prefer 1024 anyway, its on the basis of an 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. 97.65625% doesn't seem like a great loss, but compounding it means heaps of data is lost. I wish the industry followed Microsoft in that regard, even if they insisted on using the TiB instead of TB. if it follows all the way back to the kilobyte, I'm losing 9% of the space I would've got from a TiB drive.

Industry doesn't have to do anything.

Microsoft has to stop acting like its users are retarded and will get confused if they change it

It is not hard to change the prefix units in microsoft as it can be done with a update, just a "i" and not many will notice.
It didn't matter back in the 90's as he had drives in the range of MB, not TB.

A 3.5" floppy had a capacity of 1.44MB but in windows it had 1.38MiB

But with a 1TB drive showing 931GiB, the loss seems more huge

I am pretty sure OSX uses the correct units, I know linux uses the correct units

 

[Conza]

@Grayfox I did some reading on this before, and it turns out Microsoft aren't acting like their users are retarded.

This particular segment is refering to the exact same thing I'm talking about, the loss of space between the new KB definition and the old KB definition, which up until 2006, the terms were used interchangeably, and everyone, refered to TiB, GiB, MiB, ect, as their 1000 version name as well (TB, GB, MB). And frankly, despite the standard I prefer the old method, which is what Microsoft use.

Reading further along, this is really still a new issue, for computing standards its much easier to follow 1024x1024, instead of 1000x1000 ect, its all about multiples.

Hence I feel ripped off when I want to buy a 4TiB drive, but they only sell them in 4TB at a time. Personally I think they should rename the 1000x1000 to something else, and leave XB for the traditional 1024, which 1000 could be lower case or something (eg. 4TB and 4tB, would be so much easier).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#Deviation_between_powers_of_1024_and_powers_of_1000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebibyte

 

[Grayfox]

My NAS has 4x4TB drives in it, 1 is a parity drive which means I have 12TB to use.

Windows shows it as 10.9TB
Linux shows it as 12TB as well as 10.92TiB

In the file manager it shows metric prefixes

In the partition manager it shows the IEC prefixes

 

[Conza]

Looks like a very nice OS, maybe pseudo-Win7, but I like it - My box "RAID levels supported by ASUSTOR NAS: RAID 0/1/5/6/10", of course Raid 5 has the read benefits as well, however I do need atleast two more drives... I might go that way, If 1/4 is lost with 4 drives, is 1/3 lost with 3 drives? Your eg. 4x4TB drives gives 12TB of space, 25% is taken for safety, would 33% be taken up with 3 drives?

If I build slowly, I may opt for a RAID 1 in between upgrades.

Adding up my HDDs to backup (not in my original calc for the NAS's 1st task). 500GB laptop (time machine supported on NAS) + 3419.58GiB on my PC (3671.746067GB according to Google) = 4171.75GB + 2418.93 DVD backups = 6590.68GB / 6.6 TB (starting to see why TB/GB is easier than TiB/GiB btw, 1000 is easier maths), based on my 33% assumption above (multiply by 4/3?) = 8,787.57 GB so three 4GB drives aren't enough on Raid 5 :/ - unless I'm wrong.

Looks like I'd need 4x4TBs if I wanted Raid 5 AND to backup my other drives on the NAS, one step at a time I guess.

 

[Grayfox]

I run ZorinOS based of Ubuntu.

It is very windows like, you can change the start button look from Windows 9x, Windows XP, Windows Vista/7 or GNOME

Yes you lose one drive in RAID 5 for parity

This gives you an idea of what to expect with RAID
https://www.icc-usa.com/raid-calculator/

 

[TheDabbinDave]

I have several HDD's and a dead laptop. Is there a network device that I can use to hot-swap my drives, that has AV outputs and can stream to DNLA devices?

I saw a YouTube video that peaked my interest, the uploaded has not commented.

 

[Grayfox]

Nope.avi

But you can get how swap SATA bays that fit into a spare 5.25" bay on your case