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Hello:

I'd like to add a diskless NAS for onsite backups only. I'd like to keep the price under $300, but will go higher if it really makes sense. I'm also shopping now for a 12TB hard drive, and would like to get one that is likely to still be around in 3-4 months so I can add a second one for mirroring.

I need some recommendations.

Other details and requirements follow:

• Two PCs in the house; a third one to be added later this year.
• Windows 10 on both PCs. No current plans for other OSs.
• The NAS will only stay at home and the drives won't be swapped out until I repurpose them or replace them with bigger capacity drives.
• All PCs already do their own local backups to a USB or directly-connected SATA drive. Those drives will be rotated for offsite storage.
• Should support 12 TB of freespace if it has 2 bays or less.
• A single 12 TB drive to start.
• A second drive + mirroring to be added in July or August for some redundancy.
• Should support Ethernet. WIFI a bonus.
• I use Macrium and would like to protect/encrypt these backups in the event that the drives or NAS are stolen.
• No DIY solutions this time. I'll install my own hard drives, but I simply don't have the time or energy to build something from scratch.

I think I prefer Synology diskless, but I don't understand the model numbering scheme.

Thoughts and comments welcome!

Price <$300 and 12 TB drive is simply not going to work. Cheapest 12 TB on Newegg as I type is $408.99. Also, Synology enclosures aren't cheap.

I assume he meant <$300 for the bare NAS (without the drive).

Going with a 12TB capacity drive does indeed drive $/GB up though, since it's a "flagship" capacity drive that comes with a premium price tag. Starting with a single drive also means you're vulnerable to losing the entire NAS due to a single drive failure, until you get the mirroring set up.

If you can get by with lower capacity, I'd do that and start with 2 mirrored drives from the get-go.

Don't worry too much about getting matched drives though, there are actually reasons to NOT do that. If there's a hardware or firmware design defect, it could cause both drives to fail at nearly the same time.

Here's a group of reviews on consumer/SOHO NAS boxen. Storage Review has been around for a LONG time.

http://www.storagereview.com/reviews/consumer/soho_nas

I thought I was clear, but just to be specific:

<$300 was for bare NAS only. I'll buy the drive(s) separately.

And yes, I might get a 10 TB drive (or 2) instead of a 12. The key for me (and the reason I only mentioned 12 TB drives) was to avoid wasting time considering any devices that could not accept drives with greater capacity.

Reviewing the other post content now...

Given the requirements for budget, space, and Macrium (ie: Samba/Windows shares only) I would go semi-DIY: cheap reliable box running a network share.

Off-lease HP and Dell workstations are cheap, powerful, efficient, and sometimes even come with ECC memory. You won't do better building your own.

For software you could either:

1. Keep Windows that typically comes with the box and run Storage Spaces, or buy into Stablebit Drivepool for flexible, file-based mirroring. Both let you add/remove drives of any size at will.
2. Install Linux with ZFS+Samba. ZFS basically requires you always add drives of the same size later.

Either way, it's an afternoon of setting things up and just standard maintenance afterwards. Macrium does all the encryption so you really just need something basic and reliable.

just brew it! wrote:

I assume he meant <$300 for the bare NAS (without the drive).

Going with a 12TB capacity drive does indeed drive $/GB up though, since it's a "flagship" capacity drive that comes with a premium price tag. Starting with a single drive also means you're vulnerable to losing the entire NAS due to a single drive failure, until you get the mirroring set up.

If you can get by with lower capacity, I'd do that and start with 2 mirrored drives from the get-go.

Point taken, and as I mentioned in another post, I'll consider lower capacity. But not a lot lower, because I know what needs to be backed up, how often, and how many cycles of backups I want to keep.

As for the concern about not having mirrored devices from the get-go, that's almost of zero worry for me. In my original requirements, I mentioned the locally-attached hard drives that are also used for backups. These will remain in place, so while the risk of failure is there, its impact would be small. If the NAS fails, I'll still have backups. If a local disk fails, I'll have the NAS. If both fail, I'll still have an older local disk.

Plus, I don't have any drives currently mirrored, so adding a temporarily un-mirrored drive for another set of backups will not really be raising my risk or the impact I might suffer.

Don't worry too much about getting matched drives though, there are actually reasons to NOT do that. If there's a hardware or firmware design defect, it could cause both drives to fail at nearly the same time.

Oh that's interesting. Is that a significant risk? Having like-drives go down because of a firmware or hardware issue in the NAS?

Thank you Captain Ned; I'm reviewing that now.

Duct Tape Dude: Thank you, but that's still more than I want to do at this time. I need a pre-packaged solution that only requires that I add the drives, follow some brief configuration steps, and then set up some new Macrium backups to point to the new storage. I can't spare the time or energy right now to buy, build, and find the space for an old computer for this task.

I need something all enclosed in a NAS-sized box, all ready to accept hard drives.

I'm using a DS418j here, and it's been pretty good so far. I have the PC rsync its home directory to the NAS nightly, and I'm using one of the cloud backup apps for DSM to replicate that data to S3. I had two drives left over from previous builds, so total cost was about $500, plus a few hours to configure everything. I'm also running my local git server from this box as well. Apparently it can do wifi also if you have a USB adapter to plug into it, but I didn't bother with that. It'd take forever to do backups over wifi, and that would just make me nervous even though it'd probably be fine.

Synology's model numbering scheme is bonkers, but what you're really paying for with the Synology units is the DSM software that runs on the NAS. You can get a lot more functionality possibly at less cost by going the DIY route, but if you don't have the time or inclination to go that way a pre-built box should be alright. Just be aware that if your requirements change at some point in the future you may be stuck going the DIY route anyway.

Pre-built kits seem to be a bit more economical. I recently built a NAS with separate components as a DIY project and it took awhile to find parts especially if you want ECC compatibility between the CPU, RAM and motherboard. My build notes about it is linked in my signature. I chose unRAID for the OS since my requirements were primarily incremental backups on a home network and archiving media, photos and a FLAC music library. unRAID does not require as robust hardware (or ECC) as I selected but i just wanted the option to try other server operating systems later. All of it came together well once I had all the parts installed. The webUI and software of unRAID was easy to work with too and I'm still pretty much a novice when it comes to networking. Swapping out parity and storage drives is easy in case I need to increase the amount of storage later. So far I've only used 25% of the 12TB available.

BIF wrote:

And yes, I might get a 10 TB drive (or 2) instead of a 12. The key for me (and the reason I only mentioned 12 TB drives) was to avoid wasting time considering any devices that could not accept drives with greater capacity.

I don't think you're going to find anything these days that has trouble with 12TB drives. The last limit (due to MBR partitioning) was at around 2TB; the next one I'm aware of is at 16TB (for 32-bit Linux systems using ext4).

BIF wrote:

Don't worry too much about getting matched drives though, there are actually reasons to NOT do that. If there's a hardware or firmware design defect, it could cause both drives to fail at nearly the same time.

Oh that's interesting. Is that a significant risk? Having like-drives go down because of a firmware or hardware issue in the NAS?

I wouldn't say significant, but definitely non-zero.

Probably more likely to be a firmware or hardware issue in the drives themselves (not the NAS), unless you're buying an off-brand NAS. IIRC a few years back there was a Seagate model that would brick itself if it got power cycled within a certain range of powered-up hours or somesuch. And every few years you hear about problematic drive makes/models that simply have a much higher failure rate than normal. Mirroring with different models of drive means if you happen to get unlucky and choose a problematic model, you're less likely to lose both stripes of the mirror.

Smallnetbuilder is my go-to for NAS unit reviews.

beep boop here we go

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-Dis ... B075N1BYWX

if you want a beefier CPU (and to bump the budget a tiny bit - though unless you're planning on storing any media and doing some streaming on the NAS this really shouldn't factor in too much) https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-Dis ... B075MZTQBT

4-bay: https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-Dis ... 1Z9LT?th=1 - though this is getting close to double your suggested budget, it still might be worth considering.

Duct Tape Dude wrote:

2. Install Linux with ZFS+Samba. ZFS basically requires you always add drives of the same size later.

If you're going the DIY hardware route, don't bother with trying to setup ZFS on Linux, just use FreeNAS.

Sweet spot for Synology right now is DS218play or DS418play. Either of these would work fine with up to 12Tb disks, and are pretty much plug and play.

1) Install disks (2 minutes)
2) Connect network cable and power
3) Follow Synology instructions for setup, using a browser (Chrome, whatever). Pretty painless.

The primary difference between the DS418play and the DS918+ (the 'play' and '+' series in general):
1) Expansion. The DS418play has no expansion, where the DS918 can cable to an additional enclosure.
2) The 'play' series, interestingly enough, has hardware more suitable for streaming, and can stream content without stutter. The 918 is actually iffy for that purpose.

I have a QNAP TS-431P. They are $261 on Amazon right now. I've been happy with it. 4 bays and supports up to 14TB drives for 56TB total storage.

I have a pair of 3TB WD Red in RAID1 leftover from a junky buffalo 2 bay NAS and another pair of 4TB HGST RAID1 drives in it now for "7TB" of useful storage. I get ~95-100MB/s write speeds over gig ethernet. It's very easy to setup. I ported my older pair and setup the volume, installed the new pair and did the same, then spanned the two to get a single logical space. Pretty good web interface to do all this.

It has a lot of server features, you can go read the literature on it.