NAS vs RAID Box vs External Drives vs Cloud Storage

[R1200CL]

11 hours ago, foodfiend said:

Meanwhile, the 4 TB Samsung 850 EVO has been on the market for about a year already (ages by today's timelines). Prices are of course, still much, much higher than the corresponding HDD. However, don't forget what SSDs real value proposition are - speed. Of course, it is of no concern in the audio market, since a HDD can easily delivery data at the required rate. The other thing that we may appreciate is that it runs silently, since it lacks moving parts.

 

I may be wrong, but be very careful using consumer SSD in RAID. If power loss, you're likely to loose data. This is why enterprise SSD has a sort of internal battery in order to keep them alive some milliseconds if loss of power. 

 

Dual NAS and a cloud solution seems to me as a total overkill. Not to talk about synchronization hell ?

Not to mention the possibility  that both your NAS and the cloud service would fail simultaneously. 

 

If you have to do overkill, then rather dual cloud and one NAS.

 

Actally you could considder just a PC tower with enough space for your HD's, and forget everything about RAID and NAS, but have a proper sync to the cloud. The OS may be raid, but do not store data on the OS disks. (Which I think most NAS do)

 

That's the cheapest solution. If a disk fails, the cloud sync should populate the replacement disk more or less automatically. Populate a 24TB raid from the cloud may not be an exercise you like to do, unless you and that cloud service has access to extremely high speed internet. 

 

Roon doesn't worry about RAID or many local disks. And Roon takes care of tagging etc in its own database, which you must backup. 

[agladstone]

6 hours ago, foodfiend said:

@agladstone How many concurrent users will be using the NAS? Also, what will you be writing from? I suspect that your home network may be more of a bottleneck than the NAS proper.

Probably just one user (me) , but I would access it from multiple locations and multiple computers within my house and I will also stream music (mostly) and some video to multiple locations/ stereo and TV's. 

I will prob also access it via WAN on occasion when I'm traveling, etc. 

I will however be ripping many CD's, Blu-Rays, and HDTracks downloads to and from it every day and also tagging and editing tagging, etc to and from it many times everyday also. 

Additionally I would most likely get a MicroRendu to use with it in at least one location and I do also have an aurender N100H and may also use it via the Aurrender too (for anything that can't fit on local storage, but playing locally from Aurender will be my preference). 

Also, I've now just discovered that the 916+ and the 1517+ are the same price (both $599 on Amazon , except the 916+ is 8GB RAM and the 1517+ is only 2GB RAM, so I would need to upgrade the RAM on the 1517+, I found compatible Crucial 16GB (2 X 8GB) kit for $115). So,, 916+ or 1517+??? They seem relatively similar in general, except the 1517+ is 5 bay and can expand to 15 bay vs the 916+ is 4bay and can expand to 9 bay. Also, seems

like the 1517+ has a few more available upgrade options the 916+ lacks (can add a PCIE mSata SSD or a PCIE 10gbps LAN Card) and the 916+ seems like it has better video capabilities (4K), however music storage is the primary focus for the NAS, but in sure once I get one, I'll be tempted to install Plex and use it in conjunction with my Amazon Fire TV box (that is 4K) and stream concert videos and movies, etc - could be fun, but overall I have an Oppo 105, an Apple TV,  an Amazon Firebox, a Cablebox, Netflix, amazon prime video, itunes movies, cable on demand, etc (i.e. I'm not at a loss for video/ movie TV Shows to watch, quite the opposite- total overload!!, so Music is the primary need / function of the NAS to soon be purchased), which one should I get?? (1517+ or 916+) 

[agladstone]

3 hours ago, R1200CL said:

 

I may be wrong, but be very careful using consumer SSD in RAID. If power loss, you're likely to loose data. This is why enterprise SSD has a sort of internal battery in order to keep them alive some milliseconds if loss of power. 

 

Dual NAS and a cloud solution seems to me as a total overkill. Not to talk about synchronization hell ?

Not to mention the possibility  that both your NAS and the cloud service would fail simultaneously. 

 

If you have to do overkill, then rather dual cloud and one NAS.

 

Actally you could considder just a PC tower with enough space for your HD's, and forget everything about RAID and NAS, but have a proper sync to the cloud. The OS may be raid, but do not store data on the OS disks. (Which I think most NAS do)

 

That's the cheapest solution. If a disk fails, the cloud sync should populate the replacement disk more or less automatically. Populate a 24TB raid from the cloud may not be an exercise you like to do, unless you and that cloud service has access to extremely high speed internet. 

 

Roon doesn't worry about RAID or many local disks. And Roon takes care of tagging etc in its own database, which you must backup. 

Thanks for the input, I'm definitely leaning heavily towards a Synology NAS and I will do local backup to a cold external HDD (maybe monthly?) and will also try and implement an auto sync / backup to G-Suite , but I realize it will take many months if not a year to complete the first initial uploading of everything to G-Suite, so for $10/ mo , G-Suite cloud w/ the Synology auto sync / backup software to G-Suite will be a cheap long term insurance plan, but so slow up and down speeds with my current 13TB of music and growing very fast everyday towards what will eventually be prob closer towards 20TB that I kow it's not as practical or fast as always having a local cold storage backup on hand (prob stored in my fireproof safe). 

However, another heavy music storage collector friend of mine (he has over 40TB of music!) claims the best option is that he has a very large and well cooled Desktop PC and he has 5 10TB drives installed in there as his "hot drives" and he has a DAS box with 4 10TB Seagate drives that he uses as his weekly cold backup and then he also uses like a Back blaze type of Cloud backup (not like a amzon or google cloud, but a pure backup only type) that he has sync his main hit drives on an 8 hour sync / backup cycle. 

His method , is / would be much cheaper to implement, but I feel the Synology NAS and cold weekly or monthly backup locally would be better and also provide me with more usage options and functions (yet more money)?   

 

[agladstone]

3 hours ago, foodfiend said:

For arrays of 5 HDDs or fewer, you may find that RAID 6 is going overboard. In fact, RAID 5 with a redundancy can easily serve the NAS well (while having a back-up for the data). RAID 6 is more suited for larger arrays, such as an 8 to 10 HDD array.

I've been reading that RAID 10 is the best?  

[R1200CL]

@agladstone

Are you using Roon ?

[agladstone]

2 hours ago, R1200CL said:

@agladstone

Are you using Roon ?

No:(  As of now I have only an Aurender N100H for playback of digital music, so I'm forced / stuck using Aurender's proprietary S/W and App (conductor) , it's not too bad actually, but I suspect that Roon is better!! Once I purchase the NAS and get it up and running, I may pickup one of these pre-owned MicroRendu's I keep seeing posted for sale on CA:) Seems like a good companion to a Synology NAS and also a great solution to finally have hires audio in my bedroom system  

[unbalanced output]

The doomsday-proof backup is still the LTO tape. It is also incredibly cheap (as low as 5 moneys per Tb, compressed) once you have the hardware for it. The only caveats are the tapes are non rewritable and the drive is quite expensive (1000+ moneys). Works well to tape snapshots of your library, but not so well for overnight backups unless you have a big organization. 

 

 

 

[foodfiend]

3 hours ago, agladstone said:

I've been reading that RAID 10 is the best?  

RAID 10 is fast and secure, but a do realise:

 

1. You basically yield half the storage compared with JBOD/RAID 0.

2. Synology units do not support volume expansion of RAID 10 arrays.

[foodfiend]

4 hours ago, agladstone said:

Probably just one user (me) , but I would access it from multiple locations and multiple computers within my house and I will also stream music (mostly) and some video to multiple locations/ stereo and TV's.

My more specific question is how many computers will be streaming music/video simultaneously? Or may be, how many people live in that house? Remember also that the NAS will be sharing your home network with all your other devices, so traffic can get congested.

4 hours ago, agladstone said:

I will prob also access it via WAN on occasion when I'm traveling, etc.

In this case, you are not at the mercy of your NAS, but the Internet connection from your NAS to whatever you are accessing your NAS with. I also remind people that exposing your NAS to the Internet has its risks - it can be hacked.

4 hours ago, agladstone said:

I will however be ripping many CD's, Blu-Rays, and HDTracks downloads to and from it every day and also tagging and editing tagging, etc to and from it many times everyday also.

I presume that you rip your CDs/Blu-Rays/HD Tracks sequentially? Or do you put CDs into multiple computers to speed up ripping? I would think the former, and in that case, the NAS will have no problem dealing with this.

4 hours ago, agladstone said:

Additionally I would most likely get a MicroRendu to use with it in at least one location and I do also have an aurender N100H and may also use it via the Aurrender too (for anything that can't fit on local storage, but playing locally from Aurender will be my preference).

Again, the question would be how many of them would be playing music at the same time?

4 hours ago, agladstone said:

Also, I've now just discovered that the 916+ and the 1517+ are the same price (both $599 on Amazon , except the 916+ is 8GB RAM and the 1517+ is only 2GB RAM, so I would need to upgrade the RAM on the 1517+, I found compatible Crucial 16GB (2 X 8GB) kit for $115). So,, 916+ or 1517+??? They seem relatively similar in general, except the 1517+ is 5 bay and can expand to 15 bay vs the 916+ is 4bay and can expand to 9 bay. Also, seems like the 1517+ has a few more available upgrade options the 916+ lacks (can add a PCIE mSata SSD or a PCIE 10gbps LAN Card) and the 916+ seems like it has better video capabilities (4K), however music storage is the primary focus for the NAS, but in sure once I get one, I'll be tempted to install Plex and use it in conjunction with my Amazon Fire TV box (that is 4K) and stream concert videos and movies, etc - could be fun, but overall I have an Oppo 105, an Apple TV,  an Amazon Firebox, a Cablebox, Netflix, amazon prime video, itunes movies, cable on demand, etc (i.e. I'm not at a loss for video/ movie TV Shows to watch, quite the opposite- total overload!!, so Music is the primary need / function of the NAS to soon be purchased), which one should I get?? (1517+ or 916+) 

The DS1517+ is more powerful than the DS916+ in terms of processor power. However, the DS916+ has a hardware transcoding engine for 4K video, which the DS1517+ does not. 10 Gbps LAN is still rare in the consumer space (this is really targeted at the enterprise market), so unless you have a 10 Gbps router at home, you will not see any benefits. Do also remember your cabling, since longer runs of lower spec cables can lead to signal loss, and a corresponding drop in transmission speed.

 

Also, don't get too hyped by PLEX, do try it out between your computer and TV, say. I tried, and uninstalled it. I still prefer the normal serving by the Synology in-built software - I don't need the additional tid-bits about movies, etc.

[foodfiend]

2 hours ago, agladstone said:

No:(  As of now I have only an Aurender N100H for playback of digital music, so I'm forced / stuck using Aurender's proprietary S/W and App (conductor) , it's not too bad actually, but I suspect that Roon is better!! Once I purchase the NAS and get it up and running, I may pickup one of these pre-owned MicroRendu's I keep seeing posted for sale on CA:) Seems like a good companion to a Synology NAS and also a great solution to finally have hires audio in my bedroom system  

Careful here, if you are thinking of Roon. If you want to use your NAS as the Roon Core, most Synology units are not powerful enough to serve as Roon Core. You may have to get a QNAP instead.

[rickca]

4 hours ago, agladstone said:

I've been reading that RAID 10 is the best?

I don't think striping (other than RAID 5 distributed parity) is useful for music files.  You don't need the performance striping gives you on read operations.  It's not like you're running some data intensive application like an engineering/scientific workload.

 

Really, mirroring (RAID 1) makes the most sense.  Disk capacity is cheap and getting cheaper.  At the moment, SSD capacity is relatively expensive due to flash supply constraints.  If you really want to go cheap on redundancy at the cost of recovery time, use RAID 5.

 

Nothing else really makes sense to me.

[agladstone]

2 minutes ago, foodfiend said:

My more specific question is how many computers will be streaming music/video simultaneously? Or may be, how many people live in that house? Remember also that the NAS will be sharing your home network with all your other devices, so traffic can get congested.

In this case, you are not at the mercy of your NAS, but the Internet connection from your NAS to whatever you are accessing your NAS with. I also remind people that exposing your NAS to the Internet has its risks - it can be hacked.

I presume that you rip your CDs/Blu-Rays/HD Tracks sequentially? Or do you put CDs into multiple computers to speed up ripping? I would think the former, and in that case, the NAS will have no problem dealing with this.

Again, the question would be how many of them would be playing music at the same time?

The DS1517+ is more powerful than the DS916+ in terms of processor power. However, the DS916+ has a hardware transcoding engine for 4K video, which the DS1517+ does not. 10 Gbps LAN is still rare in the consumer space (this is really targeted at the enterprise market), so unless you have a 10 Gbps router at home, you will not see any benefits. Do also remember your cabling, since longer runs of lower spec cables can lead to signal loss, and a corresponding drop in transmission speed.

 

Also, don't get too hyped by PLEX, do try it out between your computer and TV, say. I tried, and uninstalled it. I still prefer the normal serving by the Synology in-built software - I don't need the additional tid-bits about movies, etc.

@foodfiend thank you again for your NAS knowledge! I live alone and I would be the only person using the NAS, so I would say most of the time, just one source up to as many as three sources at a time would be using the NAS at the simultaneously.  

(Perhaps streaming music from NAS to stereo at the same time that I'm ripping or downloading to it from one or two networked computers at the same time as playing music from it). 

I don't think I will end up doing a lot of movie or concert video streaming from the NAS to TV, but once I have one, I'll probably occasionally experiment and play with the capability since I'll have it, but music storage, management, and streaming will be its primary function! 

Also, I don't travel a lot right now (I've had jobs in the past where I did, so that could change again in the future), so WAN access and streaming is less important to me too. 

I would like to try and have the NAS auto sync and backup to a G-Drive for backup though. 

Also, I have a Netgear Nighthawk R8 router and it supports LAN Port aggregation, so I would be able to run 2 LAN cables between the 916+ and the Netgear Router for a total of 2GBps max speed. I plan on placing the NAS in my stereo rack / cabinet, so I won't have long Ethernet cable runs between it and the router. So, seems like maybe the 916+ is the right choice for me? Perhaps the 1517+ would be a little overkill? 

Maybe I should consider either JBOD or would RAID 5 be better / safer? Seems like from what I've read, that RAID 1 is Slow and I want as fast as possible write speeds for when I'm ripping, downloading, and managing my music files. 

[agladstone]

3 minutes ago, rickca said:

I don't think striping (other than RAID 5 distributed parity) is useful for music files.  You don't need the performance striping gives you on read operations.  It's not like you're running some data intensive application like an engineering/scientific workload.

 

Really, mirroring (RAID 1) makes the most sense.  Disk capacity is cheap and getting cheaper.  At the moment, SSD capacity is relatively expensive due to flash supply constraints.  If you really want to go cheap on redundancy at the cost of recovery time, use RAID 5.

 

Nothing else really makes sense to me.

Thank you! So RAID 1 should be best for me then? Any thoughts of using RAID 0 or JBOD and then just keeping a cold back up on HDD's and being religious about it (weekly backups) and not really using RAID at all, or is it still smart to use at least RAID 1 at the sacrifice of storage space? 

[agladstone]

19 minutes ago, foodfiend said:

Careful here, if you are thinking of Roon. If you want to use your NAS as the Roon Core, most Synology units are not powerful enough to serve as Roon Core. You may have to get a QNAP instead.

I did not realize this!! So are QNap units better than Synology? Also, would the 1517+ with 8GB or even 16GB if RAM and an SSD Cache be able

to run Roon vs the 916+ not being able to? (They both have a quad core processor, the 916+ has a 1.6 CPU vs the 1517+ having a 2.6 CPU)

I don't have or use Roon now, but it's a thought for the future if I'm going to finally have a NAS? 

[foodfiend]

1 minute ago, agladstone said:

Thank you! So RAID 1 should be best for me then? Any thoughts of using RAID 0 or JBOD and then just keeping a cold back up on HDD's and being religious about it (weekly backups) and not really using RAID at all, or is it still smart to use at least RAID 1 at the sacrifice of storage space? 

Remember if a single HDD in your RAID 1 or JBOD fails, you will have to rebuild your whole data volume from scratch. So, in your case, it will be taking the cold back-up HDDs to load into the rebuilt NAS.

[agladstone]

Ahh, okay , so with RAID 5, if a single DISC fails, it does not require backing entire data volume from a cold HDD backup? Just replace the failed drive? 

[rickca]

9 minutes ago, agladstone said:

Maybe I should consider either JBOD or would RAID 5 be better / safer?

RAID 5 writes are very expensive.  Parity RAID adds a somewhat complicated need to verify and re-write parity with every write that goes to disk. This means that a RAID 5 array will have to read the data, read the parity, write the data, and finally write the parity. Four operations for each effective one. This gives us a write penalty on RAID 5 of four.

[foodfiend]

1 minute ago, agladstone said:

I did not realize this!! So are QNap units better than Synology? Also, would the 1517+ with 8GB or even 16GB if RAM and an SSD Cache be able

to run Roon vs the 916+ not being able to? (They both have a quad core processor, the 916+ has a 1.6 CPU vs the 1517+ having a 2.6 CPU)

Read the Roon Core requirements carefully. It clearly states an Intel i3, Ivy Bridge+ processor. Only QNAP's higher range NASes (also more expensive) offer this. I am also thinking of running Roon, but I think I will build a separate Roon Core on a NUC, so as to keep using my DS1815+

[agladstone]

1 minute ago, rickca said:

RAID 5 writes are very expensive.  Parity RAID adds a somewhat complicated need to verify and re-write parity with every write that goes to disk. This means that a RAID 5 array will have to read the data, read the parity, write the data, and finally write the parity. Four operations for each effective one. This gives us a write penalty on RAID 5 of four.

I'm so confused now  when I was researching this via the web, I was convinced RAID 10 was best, but I did not think to research RAID specifically in regards to music and media storage, so I guess I was reading about enterprise data storage:( 

[rickca]

Just now, agladstone said:

Ahh, okay , so with RAID 5, if a single DISC fails, it does not require backing entire data volume from a cold HDD backup? Just replace the failed drive? 

Correct.  RAID 5 can rebuild itself from the remaining good drives, but it will bog down the performance of your array for the duration of the recovery.  RAID 1 just requires copying the good drive to the replacement drive to restore the mirror.

[agladstone]

1 minute ago, foodfiend said:

Read the Roon Core requirements carefully. It clearly states an Intel i3, Ivy Bridge+ processor. Only QNAP's higher range NASes (also more expensive) offer this. I am also thinking of running Roon, but I think I will build a separate Roon Core on a NUC, so as to keep using my DS1815+

Okay, so maybe don't think about Roon when considering which NAS to buy and if I decide to give Roon a try in the future, best to use a separate Roon server / NUC instead (I suspect you could build one or buy one for not an enormous amount of money that would do a better job as a Roon server vs trying to run Roon on a NAS anyhow? 

[agladstone]

1 hour ago, foodfiend said:

RAID 10 is fast and secure, but a do realise:

 

1. You basically yield half the storage compared with JBOD/RAID 0.

2. Synology units do not support volume expansion of RAID 10 arrays.

With RAID 1 vs RAID 0 or JBOD, do you also yield half the storage the same as you do with RAID 10? 

 

[foodfiend]

5 minutes ago, agladstone said:

I'm so confused now  when I was researching this via the web, I was convinced RAID 10 was best, but I did not think to research RAID specifically in regards to music and media storage, so I guess I was reading about enterprise data storage:( 

You did not read wrongly. RAID 10 is fast and secure. However, it is expensive, since you are essentially running a hot back-up of your striped drives. The question to ask is if you need such performance/security?

[rickca]

1 minute ago, agladstone said:

With RAID 1 vs RAID 0 or JBOD, do you also yield half the storage the same as you do with RAID 10? 

 

Correct.  With RAID 1 mirroring, you have 2 copies of everything.

[foodfiend]

1 minute ago, agladstone said:

With RAID 1 vs RAID 0 or JBOD, do you also yield half the storage the same as you do with RAID 10? 

 

RAID 1: Mirroring - Whatever you copy to your RAID is copied twice to two different HDDs. Hence data storage is halved.

 

RAID 0: Striping - The data is split between two HDDs to improve speed. So effectively, you retain all your data storage, but lose all data once a single HDD fails.

 

JBOD: The discs are just seen as a large drive that is an amalgamation of the HDDs in the array.

 

RAID 10 is basically a nested system. You stripe your data between 2 drives, and mirror it at the same time. So it is both RAID 1 and RAID 0 at the same time.