Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, JustAnEngineer
qmacpoint wrote:I'm looking for a NAS too, as I also have a WD USB enclosure, with RAID 1 for a whopping total of... 4 TBs. What particular Synology model would you prefer? and how much wallet damage should I expect?
roncat wrote:I have set up and run a FreeNAS server, and have a 4-bay Synology.
After a few years, the FreeNAS has been abandoned. I would recommend the Synology (or QNAP or whatever your fav is).
Use FreeNAS if:
1) You're not worried about having to constantly scrub disks, or have a bullet-proof backup of the NAS data (or occasionally losing some data is no big deal), OR
2) You have really good hardware... name-brand ECC memory running at conservative timings, a great power supply, etc. I would also go the non-recommended route and use a hard disk for the FreeNAS OS, as flash drives are the weak link and seem to have about a one year life span (or start corrupting the OS at that point, lol), AND
3) You don't mind doing custom mods to make add-ons (Media Servers, etc.) work correctly.
You can make FreeNAS work well, it just takes a moderate amount of hands-on work. Kinda like a puppy. It's gonna pee on your data once in a while.
Use Synology if:
1) You just want to plug and play a RAID 5 NAS, and want the thing to tell you "a disk is bad, replace it" by email with some simple setup.
One day setup, and pretty hands-off. Buy the mid or higher end models, and the media server software works great, i.e. completely stutterless playback of HD streams. Some models have link aggregation (I use it on mine). You don't get double the network speed, but I would say I see ~50% more network throughput with two ports aggregated using the simplest method (you have to have a high end switch/router to use the more advanced techniques).
SuperSpy wrote:On the power front I have a FreeNAS machine sitting next to me at work with 10 x 6 TB of spinning rust, 4 x 480 GB of silicon, and a 3.5 GHz Xeon E3 and it's drawing 117 watts according to the UPS it's on. Something very odd is going on if a single disk and whatever SoC that WD MyCloud has in it is drawing more power.
Waco wrote:
Scrubs are all automated with very little effort.
MOSFET wrote:Exactly. I didn’t understand that either. My biggest Freenas issues are usually SMB versioning, and sometimes share permissions for both Win / Lin clients.
4. Damn the power, just keep that Athlon 245 going.
SuperSpy wrote:The real value in automated scrubs is for data that's rarely read, like backups or logs. That's one of the big reasons I use FreeNAS/ZFS, as it prevents any sort of bit rot on something you wouldn't immediately notice corruption on.