Upgrading storage...

[laural]

Hi Brian,

I was hoping you could help me think through my storage issue. I have a MacBook laptop and store/access my files from a Synology Diskstation with two drives mirrored (4TB useable space). I’m close to maxing out these drives. I upgraded them once when I had 2TB useable space and rather than keep installing bigger drives I’m trying to decide if I should get a whole other disk station or just start using an expansion drive. I have a budget of $500 but I was hoping to not spend all of that but running the numbers I think I’ll have to use most of that.

This is my workflow:
- Upload my cards to my laptop. Immediately backup the unedited/unculled raw files to Amazon cloud and then jpg copies to another online storage service.
- I do my culling and editing, then copy them to a backup external hard drive. Then I move them onto my Synology Diskstation and consider them as the “master” files. Occasionally I do a backup of the entire disk station though not as much as I intend to in theory.
- Sometimes I don’t get to edit the photos before I need to upload another card to my MacBook so I will either move them onto my disk station and later work with them across the network, or if I plan to be away from home I move the folder back onto my laptop and edit locally. The speed to access  across the network seems fine to me, no complaints, and I don’t mind not having access when I’m away from home (in a pinch I could always download the files from Amazon cloud). When I copy from Diskstation through my laptop to online cloud services, that’s reasonably fast. The only thing that is slower is if I copy from Diskstation to an external HDD attached to my laptop, but that’s not really a problem as I can do backups when I’m doing other stuff around the house.

I figure I should get an additional 6TB of useable space (so 12TB total because I like the idea of having my "master" files mirrored).

I’m not sure if I should get another two-bay Synology Diskstation and two hard drives (~$560), or get an expansion drive or just the “naked” drives and a docking station.

I bookmarked this 6TB expansion drive, which I’d need to get two of, so ~$214… so much cheaper than the whole disk station combination but I’m not sure what kind of speed that would give me working with my files on it. Plus I’d have to manually mirror it to the other every so often.

I also saw this docking station which I imagined I’d get two of plus two drives (~$384 total). But same concern about speed and the added step of manually mirroring or scheduling backups.

Does any of that seem like a good solution? For 2018 I used about 1.3TB including generated PSD files and expect to shoot/edit at about the same rate… although I would like to play with video/film at some point… but hoping for this next purchase to last me at least 2 years before I need to expand/upgrade more.

Would love to hear your opinion and recommendations if you have any.

Thanks in advance and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! ?

~Laura

[Brian]

I’m going to have to look at this thread when I get home. LOL! Here is the quick and dirty advice:

Your $500 budget is way too low if you want to continue with a NAS. It should be between $2000-$3000. Yes, you need a larger NAS and I don’t think the two-bay units hook to an external unit, though I could be wrong and will check this later.

You could get a single external 12TB G-Drive ThunderBolt Drive for about $650 but you lose redundancy with a single drive. I wouldn’t bother with Drives that are less than 8TB for your situation.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1360172-REG

[Brian]

The good news is that I’ve been looking to build a home media server using plex, so I have been researching NAS stuff. So I will pick this thread up later tonight. 

[laural]

Great - Thanks, Brian!

I have never heard of plex, so about to go Google that... ?

With another Synology NAS, I thought I'd just set it right next to the other and leave both plugged into the router so I can connect to whichever I need.

With the Thunderbolt, would it make any sense to partition it into two 6GB? I realize that wouldn't protect stuff from an overall mechanical failure of the drive, but would it provide any protection against corruption? And I assume with that I would just plug it in directly to my computer and work with the files on on there and then unmount it when I'm done, is that right?

[Damien Symonds]

4 hours ago, Brian said:

The good news is that I’ve been looking to build a home media server using plex, so I have been researching NAS stuff. So I will pick this thread up later tonight. 

Oh, Lara uses Plex!

[Brian]

2 hours ago, laural said:

With the Thunderbolt, would it make any sense to partition it into two 6GB?

Nope. It's just more to keep track of. If you did go the really big HD route, just have a "Business" and "Personal Folders setup, then go from there. It's the same as having two partitions. If you want redundancy, you are looking at some form of RAID. Which is either RAID 1, RAID 5/6, or RAID 10. More on this later.
 

2 hours ago, laural said:

And I assume with that I would just plug it in directly to my computer and work with the files on on there and then unmount it when I'm done, is that right? 

Yep.

2 hours ago, laural said:

With another Synology NAS, I thought I'd just set it right next to the other and leave both plugged into the router so I can connect to whichever I need.

That is a slippery slope. "Oh I will just buy another NAS..." then it turns into another one, then another one, then another one. I have a friend who is a photographer. She has at least 18 external hard drives in her closet! She runs out of room and it's another EHD purchased. It drives me nuts, but you can only lead a horse to water, can't make them drink. Typically with the 2-Bay NAS, having the ability to setup a 2nd external enclosure isn't an option.

OK, let's dive into your original post, shall we?

 

6 hours ago, laural said:

I bookmarked this 6TB expansion drive, which I’d need to get two of, so ~$214

No. Just don't. NAS units require a better HD than your typical cheap ones found in external drives. These drives usually run cooler and are meant to be on 24/7/365. Do not be tempted to get cheap HDs, RAID1, like all computer backup systems, isn't fool-proof. If you are determined to get a cheaper drive that isn't meant for a NAS, at least invest in higher quality drives, such as a Western Digital Caviar Black Drive. (Be sure to get the Caviar Black line and not the Blue or Green Drives.)

"But I've never had a problem and have always used cheap drives..."

I hear it all the time. Usually at some point I hear the phrase, "...why didn't I listen to you?" or "Why didn't I spend the money..." I also hate Seagate Hard drives. I don't seem to have good luck from them, and even had a couple SMOKE on me over the years. Some time back, Seagate bought Maxtor and their hard drives were cheap, and failed ALL THE TIME. So I often wonder if these inexpensive hard drives are just rebranded Maxtor Drives. Hmmm....

Of course this is the Internet, and there will be hoards of people telling me that I'm wrong and Seagate Hard Drives are #Amazeballz. Anyway, my remarks stand.

 

So what drives do I recommend? At the bare minimum, the WD Caviar Black Line that I linked to above. For a NAS Unit, I'd purchase a WD Gold 12TB Enterprise Class Hard Disk Drives. Yep, I'd buy those over the older WD RED Drives, which are also meant for NAS units but seem to have a high failure rate and firmware issues. The Gold Drives are an improved model; of course at a much higher price point.

 

6 hours ago, laural said:

I also saw this docking station

Docking stations make me nervous. If you plan on just making an external HD out of them...fine, but then you are back to having 18 external hard drives like a friend of mine. LOL!

 

6 hours ago, laural said:

I’m not sure if I should get another two-bay Synology Diskstation and two hard drives (~$560), or get an expansion drive or just the “naked” drives and a docking station.

Think bigger. Stop with the 2-Drive NAS units. You are going to keep outgrowing them. You really need at least a 4-Bay unit, which supports and external unit for added capacity. Currently, I'm looking at a Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS918+ (Diskless) for $549.99. (There goes your $500 budget.) Why? Personally, all the stuff you can do with it and as I mentioned before, I want to create my own home-based "Netflix." So all of the "thinking" the NAS has to do in order for that to happen, you need horse power. Now if you are just storing photos, then something like the Synology DS418Play, might be a better fit. (I'm even considering this model and am on the fence.) In my humble opinion, a model like the DS918+ is more future proof. Better CPU, more cache options and it allows you to use a expansion unit to add more drives. Then again, if you are just dumping photos to it and want redundancy, then your price-point will be less. In either case, opt for a 4 bay model at the minimum.

As for your existing RAID / NAS HDs, Synology makes it easy to migrate your hard drives to a new NAS without the loss of data.

 

6 hours ago, laural said:

although I would like to play with video/film at some point…

That's a whole other world and another topic. You will need a large budget to do video well. Probably a computer that supports RAID 0 that you would use as a cache drive. Actually, if you really want to get into video, you are looking at purchasing a Macintosh in the future. Give this video a watch to see what I mean.

 

Now for the bottom line and some additional info.

What if you don't have the budget to spend $3000 on a NAS unit? What do you do? I would make sure your firmware is the most current, and the software that runs the NAS is also current and purchase two larger HDs. Like two 12TB WD Gold Models. You really need 12TB going forward. Otherwise, we are going to have this conversation again in a year. Or get a 4 Bay NAS unit, put the existing HDs from your NAS into it and purchase two smaller HDs and have two RAID 1 units.

Ultimately, if you are looking for the maximum amount of storage AND have some redundancy, you are looking at setting up a RAID10 or a RAID 1+0. 

Why that RAID and how many drives will I need?

You will need a MINIMUM of four identical drives to get this setup and have it work well. Mix-matching HDs with a RAID10 is not good. 

Here is how it works...

Let's say you just inherited a large some of money or that scratch-off lottery ticket was a winner and you have a large budget. We will start with 12TB drives:

12 TB  +  12 TB | Configured as a RAID0 = 24TB  >>----- Which is then Mirrored / RAID1 -----> 12 TB  +  12 TB | Configured as a RAID0 = 24TB Mirrored.

24TB is A LOT of photographs. If you need even more storage, you just purchase a Synology External Enclosure, buy more drives and keep going.

So RAID 10 is RAID 1+0 or RAID 0 + 1, depending on how you look at it. With RAID0, two hard drives act in unison and become one really big hard drive. Then the RAID1, which is mirroring comes into play. The RAID 0 / One big HD is Mirrored to another RAID 0. Make sense? Long term, I think this is what you are after. Now you don't need 12TB drives. You could go for a quantity of four 4TB drives, which will be 8TB Mirrored.

Of course, you could scrap all of this and just get a External 12TB G-Drive and be done with it.

[laural]

Thank you! Lots to chew on. A few questions...

3 hours ago, Brian said:

Typically with the 2-Bay NAS, having the ability to setup a 2nd external enclosure isn't an option. 

To clarify, do you mean I can't run two completely separately? Like I wouldn't be able to have two plugged into my router? If I go with a 4-bay unit I was thinking I could just keep the current set up and not migrate any data (and thus "save" an extra 4TB). I do have the WD red drives in my current diskstation, I see the gold come in 12TB whereas the red and black only come in 6TB so that's good to know.

3 hours ago, Brian said:

Actually, if you really want to get into video, you are looking at purchasing a Macintosh in the future. Give this video a watch to see what I mean.

Oh man, that's so depressing. I bought into Macs long ago when I was in research and everyone developed analysis programs exclusively on Mac & Linux. But I would have definitely considered a Windows desktop, but that guy makes a good point. I was surprised to hear him say people said they used their Macbook with Premiere though. I worked on a 15 second promo clip for a business with less than 8GB of raw footage total, and both Adobe Premiere and Da Vinci Resolve kept crashing my Macbook. I spent 6 hours of installing and reinstalling, retrying etc. before I finally gave up and put it together in iMovie. ?‍♀️ I definitely have no delusions of doing video on my laptop. That guy is right, time is definitely money. I have a Mark 5D ii body which I'm itching to upgrade to the IV for many reasons, but the 4k video would be fun to play with. My videographer friend told me I'd go through a 16GB card in about 30 seconds of footage ? Oof.

 

3 hours ago, Brian said:

DS918+ is more future proof. Better CPU, more cache options and it allows you to use a expansion unit to add more drives.

I'm leaning towards this DS918+ you recommended, the option of a future expansion unit sounds promising. They connect by eSata, right? Is that really fast enough if in the future I wanted to "add" the expansion unit drives to the NAS rather than just making it a simple backup?

 

I have to think about the RAID configurations a little more to work out the math. Currently I use Synology's propriety hybrid RAID which to my understanding is essentially RAID1/mirrored. I wouldn't be averse to having more drives and working with a different configuration where it's 1 or 2 disk fault tolerance rather than mirrored. I see that the 4 bay unit is hot swappable so that would make it easier. What if as a temporary solution I bought a 4 bay station and only used two drives (RAID1) in it, until I purchased the extra, in the future. Assuming I could leave my current Diskstation in place and migrate that later on. Would that make sense? What is it that limits how many units I can have plugged into my router, what specs would I look for?

3 hours ago, Brian said:

Of course, you could scrap all of this and just get a External 12TB G-Drive and be done with it.

I'm tempting to go this route. I wonder if I'm too OCD about backups and if I really need the redundancy... with Amazon cloud I'm not sure I need it, although I can only back up my personal photos there, not anything commercial, which I am starting to get into.

 

[laural]

3 hours ago, Brian said:

Or get a 4 Bay NAS unit, put the existing HDs from your NAS into it and purchase two smaller HDs and have two RAID 1 units.

I think I misunderstood this on my first read. If I went this route, I would have to buy two additional drives identical in size to the ones I have, or would that not matter? Having the two RAID1 units would be akin to my thought of buying another diskstation and having the drives appear as two different drives but be in the same enclosure, is that right? So in that case, I'd really only be ditching the enclosure of my original diskstation but the disks I have wouldn't go to waste. If they are red, could the next two I buy be gold?

[laural]

One last question... I know you're supposed to keep drives no fuller than, what, 70% full to protect against corruption. Let's say, purely hypothetically ?, that I only have 170GB left on my 4TB... if I clear up space on that, is the disk then "safe" or have I already put it at risk by filling it to near-capacity once even though I've made room again?

[Brian]

1 hour ago, laural said:

To clarify, do you mean I can't run two completely separately? Like I wouldn't be able to have two plugged into my router?

No. You can have two different NAS units with their own IP addresses hooked to your router.

What I'm talking about is with a NAS like the Synology DS918+, you can purchase a external module, the Synology DX517 Expansion Unit that uses the eSATA port on the back of the unit. This external unit doesn't do anything, it just houses 5 additional hard drives. The software on your main NAS controls it. So instead of just having 4 hard drives to play with / configure, you would have 9 drives at your disposal. The cost of this expansion unit is pretty decent, it's not much more than buying a separate NAS. The 918+ is $550 and the DX517 is $470. That's a lot less money than forking out $1600+ on a 8-bay unit.

eSATA in this case is pretty fast. In terms of speed, with the main unit / expansion unit. it's faster than a 1Gb Ethernet Connection. The other thing you have to take into consideration is the bottleneck that you get with using mechanical hard drives. I think in the lab eSATA is 3Gbps, but in your real-world environment, it's more like 1.5Gbps-ish. Give or take. Still faster than a 1Gb Ethernet.

The point I'm trying to make is it's silly to have multiple NAS units on your network. So instead of having two or three NAS units with small hard drives, replace the HDs in your NAS with larger ones. If your current NAS meets your needs and you know how to configure / utilize things, why buy another NAS because you are out of room? You need larger Hard Drives. Period. Even if you bought a second NAS, you are wasting your money if you just get another 4TB NAS setup. I'm sure it would seem cheaper, but spending $250 on a two-bay NAS, then forking out another $360 for a couple of 4TB drives, you are only kicking the proverbial "can" down the road. You are going to run out of room again in a year. Then what? A third NAS?

1 hour ago, laural said:

I would have to buy two additional drives identical in size to the ones I have, or would that not matter? Having the two RAID1 units would be akin to my thought of buying another diskstation and having the drives appear as two different drives but be in the same enclosure, is that right? So in that case, I'd really only be ditching the enclosure of my original diskstation but the disks I have wouldn't go to waste. If they are red, could the next two I buy be gold? 

RAID is a funny thing. To get the best performance and not deal with the unexpected  "Gotchas," I would purchase two additional WD 4TB Red drives, with the exact same model number, capacity and speed (RPM). Since you are looking for the maximum storage, with RAID 1+0, we are mimicking that but using 4 drives instead of two. If you added the two 4TB Drives to a new enclosure and migrated your exisiting drives to the new 4-bay NAS unit, you would double your current capacity and still have redundancy. If you went with a RAID 5 setup, you would need a minimum of three hard drives, all identical. So let's use your current 4TB drives and you purchase one, that's 12TB total, but you'd lose around 4TB for redundancy (Mirroring / Striping) and that leaves you with 8TB. If speed isn't an issue for you, then RAID 5 makes sense. Keep in mind with a RAID 5, if one hard drive fails, you are fine but if two hard drives fail, the entire RAID fails.

Here is a thought...

Get the DS918+ and purchase one WD Red 4TB Drive...same exact model number, capacity, RPM, etc as you currently own. Configure the RAID in the new NAS unit as a RAID 5 and you'll get more storage, even better redundancy and end up with the same capacity if you were to do a RAID10. Since you are just housing data files (images and such) in your NAS, a RAID 5 would work well. With a 4 bay NAS, you could purchase another 4TB when funds allow and end up with 12TB of accessible storage. (16TB total Capacity, minus 4TB for redundancy = 12TB) By going this route, it keeps your budget in-check with using your existing drives, double your capacity, while allowing you options down the road that you just won't get with buying another 2-bay NAS. I'm thinking the cost will be around $125 for the extra WD RED drive, plus $550 for the DS918+. That's around the same cost as a single 12TB G-Drive Thunderbolt EHD.

For me personally, since I would be streaming movies over my network, I need the performance boost that you get with RAID0, and by using the RAID1 Technology to mirror to another RAID0, I get redundancy. Personally, I feel when it comes to streaming video, RAID 1+0 / RAID10 should be used. For housing data files, I still use and recommend RAID5. Of course, there is RAID6 but that requires 4 hard drives to setup for even more redundancy, (Data is striped / mirrored using two hard drives instead of one) and you'd still only end up with 8TB if you had four 4TB drives in a RAID6 configuration. (Lots of overhead with RAID6.)

If you want to play around with RAID configuration setups, Synology has a neat RAID Configuration Tool.
 

1 hour ago, laural said:

I only have 170GB left on my 4TB

OMG!!! You need to cull-cull-cull!!! Delete-Delete-Delete!!! 

You do not need 75 Raw files taken of your lunch from 6 years ago. Those blurry, never-gonna-see-the-light-of-day-photos? Delete!!! LOL!! You need to be ruthless, or plan on making a purchase really soon. It Is not good to have less than 10% free on ANY hard drive and you are past that at around 4 percent free!! UGH. You like living on the edge? That thing could crash you. Hard Drives are not dumping grounds. I know, 170 Gigabytes seems like a lot of space, if you compare it to Megabytes. Today's GB is yesterday's MB. So if this were 20+ years ago, you'd have 170MB free on that drive. Not good.

From a Hardware standpoint, you won't "Damage" your hard drives by having them that full. Data Corruption? That's what is at risk. Just think of the HOURS you will spend rebuilding that thing.

 

[Brian]

One more thing...

In my haste I forgot to mention one critical thing: When switching RAID methods / levels, the existing RAID configuration on the drives will be deleted in order to setup a different RAID configuration. So you will need to migrate the data to a temporary source, configure a RAID 5 in the 4-Bay NAS, then set things up again / migrate the data back. So I can see where purchasing a second NAS unit is tempting. Even so, you still have one problem...budget.

I was trying to stay as close as possible to your $500 budget. If you do go with another NAS, you are either buying two larger HDs than 4TB and still have the limitations of a two-bay NAS. I'm thinking you really need to delete stuff and save up a bit more to get a 4-bay NAS setup.

[laural]

22 hours ago, Brian said:

OMG!!! You need to cull-cull-cull!!! Delete-Delete-Delete!!! 

I know, I know, it's really bad ?

13 hours ago, Brian said:

One more thing...

In my haste I forgot to mention one critical thing: When switching RAID methods / levels, the existing RAID configuration on the drives will be deleted in order to setup a different RAID configuration. So you will need to migrate the data to a temporary source, configure a RAID 5 in the 4-Bay NAS, then set things up again / migrate the data back. So I can see where purchasing a second NAS unit is tempting. Even so, you still have one problem...budget.

I was trying to stay as close as possible to your $500 budget. If you do go with another NAS, you are either buying two larger HDs than 4TB and still have the limitations of a two-bay NAS. I'm thinking you really need to delete stuff and save up a bit more to get a 4-bay NAS setup.

Thank you soooooo much. ? I'm going to sit down over the weekend and make a decision on how much TB to get (and cull more); you saved me from almost going with those Seagate expansion drives which I know now would have been a very poor/wasteful choice. "Beer" sent your way via Damien's PP link. ?

Happy New Year! ?

[Brian]

Thank You for the Beer!! Damien forwarded it to me. 

Happy New Year! 

[laural]

On 12/26/2018 at 5:41 PM, Brian said:

Currently, I'm looking at a Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS918+ (Diskless) for $549.99.

Hey Brian,

I'm looking at finally purchasing this with drives. I was curious if you ended up buying it and if you were satisfied with it's performance?

[Brian]

Unfortunately no. I’ve had other expenditures and a NAS right now isn’t in the cards for me. 
 

Personally, I’d spend $60 more and get the next model up, the 920+. Why? It has Ethernet Ports. This way you can hook your NAS to your Router/Switch and all devices on your network have access to it. Otherwise it’s a glorified EHD. Even if you only have one computer, think for things down the road. Like having your own private Netflix Server or to host your iTunes Library. Things like SmartPhones can access a NAS too. 
 

Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS920+ (Diskless), 4-bay; 4GB DDR4 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087Z34F3R/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_stLpFbYZ6BPVH

[laural]

Thanks a lot, I didn’t notice the new model, I’ll look at going for that instead. ?

[laural]

On 8/20/2020 at 6:45 AM, Brian said:

Unfortunately no. I’ve had other expenditures and a NAS right now isn’t in the cards for me. 
 

Personally, I’d spend $60 more and get the next model up, the 920+. Why? It has Ethernet Ports. This way you can hook your NAS to your Router/Switch and all devices on your network have access to it. Otherwise it’s a glorified EHD. Even if you only have one computer, think for things down the road. Like having your own private Netflix Server or to host your iTunes Library. Things like SmartPhones can access a NAS too. 
 

Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS920+ (Diskless), 4-bay; 4GB DDR4 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087Z34F3R/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_stLpFbYZ6BPVH

Hey Brian! I got this DiskStation 920+ finally and set it up with two 8TB WD Red Plus drives for now. I have a question for you about expectations & noise... the thing is loud. The smaller Synology I have is so quiet, but it is a smaller unit. In your experience, does this sound like something is wrong? Link here, starts at second 0:17. I tried it on different surfaces. I played with the location of the disks cause I thought maybe it was a balance issue but it still sounds like that in all configurations. In some cases I can apply some light pressure on top to make it quieter, which lead me to believe something wasn't right with the unit. I contacted Synology and they had me boot it up without any disks - perfectly quiet. So they said it is the disks causing it. They are brand new so I find that hard to believe - especially since it happened when I tried each disk alone - what's the chance of getting one dud but two dud drives? I came across someone on YouTube saying higher end drives will be louder - are they this loud? I think they used the term Enterprise drive which seem to be higher quality than the Red Plus, so I'm deciding on what to do. In your experience, which seems most plausible?

[Brian]

Wow. Yeah, that's loud. Synology is correct, the HDs are causing the issue. Specifically the spinning platters at a high rate of RPM. What WD Red Drives did you get? How fast is the RPM?

The other thing that is causing the issue, is cheap plastic from the Synology. There is nothing to cut down on the vibration of a spinning HD. Man, are they making them incredibly cheap these days, but that's with everything unfortunately.

If you are looking for more quiet drive, I'd try a WD Black 7200RPM Drive and see what happens. You might have to return the Synology. Sorry for recommending it, on paper it looks good and I have another Synology Unit, and it's quiet. It's also about 10 years old and they used better plastics back then.

[laural]

15 hours ago, Brian said:

What WD Red Drives did you get? How fast is the RPM?

I got these ones: Western Digital 8TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive - 5400 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD80EFAX .

 

I probably would have gotten a Synology anyway - I love the smaller one I have, also older - about 7 years. And come to think of it, the plastic on that is much thicker.

 

This is the black one you recommend, right? The Xbox/gaming kind? https://smile.amazon.com/Black-Performance-Desktop-Hard-Drive/dp/B0792GSD6N/ref=sr_1_12?dchild=1&keywords=WD%2BBlack%2B7200RPM%2BDrive&qid=1614621071&sr=8-12&th=1

 

As always, thank you for your help!!

[Brian]

Yeah, that should work, but I’m not sure how much less vibration you are going to get. Damn cheap & thin plastics. They do make a difference.