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Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Voldenuit wrote:

* EDIT: My memory might be bad here. If Windows 10 doesn't natively support EXT3 (I can't tell because I've been using Ext2Fsd for a while), you can use Ext2Fsd.

After I put a few hundred gigs of data on the NAS, I want to take the drive out and mount it on my computer to see what it looks like just to prepare for that possibility. I'll give that utility a try. Thanks.

Last time I messed with that it was pretty unstable. That said, this was several years ago. I guess it has improved?

just brew it! wrote:

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Voldenuit wrote:

* EDIT: My memory might be bad here. If Windows 10 doesn't natively support EXT3 (I can't tell because I've been using Ext2Fsd for a while), you can use Ext2Fsd.

After I put a few hundred gigs of data on the NAS, I want to take the drive out and mount it on my computer to see what it looks like just to prepare for that possibility. I'll give that utility a try. Thanks.

Last time I messed with that it was pretty unstable. That said, this was several years ago. I guess it has improved?

Didn't have any crashes with it, but it seems to mess with unmounting drive letters in Windows, so I only have it loaded when I need to use it.

If I needed to read/write Linux file systems on Windows on a semi-regular basis, I'd probably use a USB dock and a Linux VM.

synthtel2 wrote:

Whoa, $3600 for a drive is definitely more than I was expecting. Sounds great if you've got that kind of access pattern and 200+ TB of data to handle though.

That's a cheaper older drive as well - write once, read maybe (or seldom) is what tape is for. Archives.

Finally pulled the trigger on a QNAP TS-453-Be with 4GB ram.

The nail in the coffin was that Newegg Canada's ebay site was selling this unit for $550 CAD (about $415 USD). May have been able to shave $100 off had I built a similarly powered machine myself, but then QNAP's software adds a bit of value.

Now to figure out how to economically populate it with drives.

Waco wrote:

synthtel2 wrote:

Whoa, $3600 for a drive is definitely more than I was expecting. Sounds great if you've got that kind of access pattern and 200+ TB of data to handle though.

That's a cheaper older drive as well - write once, read maybe (or seldom) is what tape is for. Archives.

...and 200+ TB isn't even particularly large these days. Systems storing hundreds of PB are becoming increasingly common at the enterprise and Cloud service provider level.

Last year they actually redesigned parts of the system I work on at my day job, to make it more competitive at the "low end" (which for us is basically your hypothetical 200 TB system).

cynan wrote:

Finally pulled the trigger on a QNAP TS-453-Be with 4GB ram.

Looking at Amazon in the US, that extra 2GB of RAM seems to come with a US$100 premium- assume that wasn't the case further north?

Also noted that QNAP produces a combo 2x NVMe (2x PCIe 2.0) + 10Gbase-T card for this thing, which is pretty nice, though it lists for >US$200.

Really not a fan of QNAP. Had a 431 that slowly developed a failing SATA port after the first year of use. Thought it was a drive issue and wasted money buying a replacement just to have the port fail completely right after the 2 year warranty ended. QNAP wouldn't warranty it. The only way you will ever know if there's a hardware fault with the NAS itself is if you download and run QNAP's own support diagnostic utilities on the device then sort through the logfiles.

My current NAS is a Synology, and it at least has the capability to warn me if drive IO errors are detected.

cynan wrote:

Now to figure out how to economically populate it with drives.

Watch slickdeals.net,ultra-cheap expansion drive for shucking purposes are routinely posted there.

Airmantharp wrote:

cynan wrote:

Finally pulled the trigger on a QNAP TS-453-Be with 4GB ram.

Looking at Amazon in the US, that extra 2GB of RAM seems to come with a US$100 premium- assume that wasn't the case further north?

Yeah. Here the 2GB version has been around $650 CAD, while the 4GB version starts around $700+.That why I jumped on the 4GB version for $550.

Airmantharp wrote:

Watch slickdeals.net,ultra-cheap expansion drive for shucking purposes are routinely posted there.

Kind of affraid of the reliability of shucked drives. You may be able to, say, find an 8TB external for under $150, but then you have zero warranty. I'm currently looking at starting with a couple of 8TB recertified HGST Ultrastars in RAID 1, which you can pick up on Amazon for under $200 USD each. And they come with 3 year warranties. But then, for about $50 more, you can get new NAS drives with 3 year warranties (WD Red/Seagate Ironwolf/HGST NAS)... Decisions.

Kougar wrote:

Really not a fan of QNAP. Had a 431 that slowly developed a failing SATA port after the first year of use. Thought it was a drive issue and wasted money buying a replacement just to have the port fail completely right after the 2 year warranty ended. QNAP wouldn't warranty it. The only way you will ever know if there's a hardware fault with the NAS itself is if you download and run QNAP's own support diagnostic utilities on the device then sort through the logfiles.

My current NAS is a Synology, and it at least has the capability to warn me if drive IO errors are detected.

Hopefully the QTS software is getting better on the diagnostics front. Apparently there is a new diagnostic tool app, but I have no idea how good it is on diagnosing disk errors. I was going to go with Synology, but QNAP software seems to be improving, and I like the flexibility of being able to use the device for some light HTPC use. Plus the price I got it for...

Got the drive shucked without any real problem. Loaded about a Terabyte of data overnight, so the plan for today is the pull the drive and try to read the data correctly. Assuming all goes well, time to migrate the rest of the data. I'm moving all most network stuff to a wiring closet, so that's my task for this weekend. That'll let me have wired to the desktop, which will be nice. Also I have a new UPS to put everything into.
Separately, I bought a new 240GB SSD to update the desktop to so I'm going to clone the existing drive and migrate everything over. I'll wipe the 120 and leave it in there for who-knows-what. Maybe a scratch disk while I'm playing with my Plex setup.

cynan wrote:

Airmantharp wrote:

cynan wrote:

Finally pulled the trigger on a QNAP TS-453-Be with 4GB ram.

Looking at Amazon in the US, that extra 2GB of RAM seems to come with a US$100 premium- assume that wasn't the case further north?

Yeah. Here the 2GB version has been around $650 CAD, while the 4GB version starts around $700+.That why I jumped on the 4GB version for $550.

Yeah, that's a good price on your 4GB. QNAP's RAM upgrade prices put Apple and Google to shame. That's why I upgraded my 2GB TS-451+ myself to 8GB (2x4GB DDR3L-1600) for about $40.

So now I'm contemplating shucking 3 8TB WD MyBooks, which are currently on sale for below $150 (USD). Apparently, there has been a very good probability that these will contain some sort of 5400 RPM version of helium filled HGST drives (WD80EZAZ). The remaining issue is that these purportedly support 3.3V SATA power disable - which some power supplies aren't compatible with. I know you can try to tape the power disable pin... but I'd rather avoid this.

The thing is the QNAP ts-453A and seemingly most modern Synology NAS power supplies support 3.3V power disable and these drives are plug and play. Wondering about the TS-453be... Any ideas?

cynan wrote:

So now I'm contemplating shucking 3 8TB WD MyBooks, which are currently on sale for below $150 (USD). Apparently, there has been a very good probability that these will contain some sort of 5400 RPM version of helium filled HGST drives (WD80EZAZ). The remaining issue is that these purportedly support 3.3V SATA power disable - which some power supplies aren't compatible with. I know you can try to tape the power disable pin... but I'd rather avoid this.

The thing is the QNAP ts-453A and seemingly most modern Synology NAS power supplies support 3.3V power disable and these drives are plug and play. Wondering about the TS-453be... Any ideas?

The QNAP Compatibility list doesn't seem to flag any issues with the 453Be and WD NAS and Red Pro NAS drives, but the WD80EZAZ is not listed.

Forum thread at QNAP seems to indicate that QNAP NASes that support SATA 3.2 will work with SATA 3.3 drives using power disable, but you should check w QNAP to see if the 453Be is SATA 3.2 or higher.

Thanks for the info. Pretty frustrating that there is absolutely no info on either the SATA spec for these NASes or reports of it working with drives that have 3.3V Power Disable... However, as the TS-453A purportedly works with these drives (from user report) and the compatibility list across the TS-453A/B/Be seems to be identical on QNAP's site, I'm going to assume it will work.

Ironically, the NAS and 3 8TB drives came out to about the same price. Now to find some shucking tools..

So I randomly unpowered the NAS, pulled the drive out, put it back in the enclosure, and plugged it into the desktop. Ext2fsd didn't work great (or the UI wasn't intuitive or I'm daft, choose 1) but I found DiskInternals Linux Reader and it seemed to work fine. It doesn't mount the drives; one has to use their interface to extract individual files, but so far that seems to be working, albeit slowly. I'm going to let it extract for awhile, and I'm assuming that is going to work. If so, I'll throw the drive back in the NAS and copy the data off of both of the drives. Once it is moved over (and checksum verified), then I'll pull both drives out and do my disk swapping. Fun Times!

I do feel better for having faked a failure and am more comfortable at least seeing the data. One can never be too careful with data.

EDIT: So it moved to larger files and not so slow. Hitting 100+ MB/sec over USB3. Nice!

EDIT2: Put the drive back in and it was if it had never left. Excellent

cynan wrote:

Hopefully the QTS software is getting better on the diagnostics front. Apparently there is a new diagnostic tool app, but I have no idea how good it is on diagnosing disk errors. I was going to go with Synology, but QNAP software seems to be improving, and I like the flexibility of being able to use the device for some light HTPC use. Plus the price I got it for...

The 431 was running the latest version of QTS at the time, happened less than a year ago. The standard diagnostic tools will stress test the drives, do benches, and proactively monitor SMART data but that does zilch if the NAS unit itself is generating the errors. I am simply stating that QTS simply doesn't handle IO issues proactively. Should you experience a drive dropping from your array then install the support diagnostic package and pull the logfiles (it is what QNAP would have you send to them anyway).

The largest issue with using cheap shucked drives is you may get models (like the Greens/Barracudas) that aren't designed for NAS use so they are more vibration sensitive. If you can be sure you are getting WD Reds, IronWolfs, or some sort of enterprise helium drive then those are designed to handle the vibration in a NAS and should do just fine. There shouldn't be any issue with the NAS and 3.3v SATA power disable, if they are Red branded then they are designed for NAS use.

I don't think you'll see any appreciable difference in drives between "NAS" and non-NAS drives in practice. I've put Green drives in dense enclosures (4U102) with very little trouble, further, small quantities of drives in home-NAS type workloads are pretty nice compared to enterprise workloads.

The bigger catch with shucked drives is that they are sometimes SMR (Seagate 8 TB Barracuda Compute) and that none will carry a warranty if shucked.

So the data has all been migrated. The 2 3.5" drives have been pulled out of the desktop. The new SSD is installed, used Macrium to clone it, then wiped the old SSD for a scratch disk.
Time to throw the 3TB into the Synology as an internal backup and then the 2TB as an external backup.

Waco wrote:

The bigger catch with shucked drives is that they are sometimes SMR (Seagate 8 TB Barracuda Compute) and that none will carry a warranty if shucked.

Yup, and as I noted on the previous page, you REALLY want to avoid those. I'm so fed up with mine that they are being relegated strictly to archive and off-site backup duty. Write once (potentially very slowly...), read hopefully never (other than to occasionally verify data integrity).

Oh, and if you're a Linux user, make sure you use the "noatime" option when mounting SMR drives. Even "relatime" (the default) is a bad idea, since it updates the access time if a file hasn't been touched in the past 24 hours. Meta-data changes (to update file access times) look like non-sequential writes, and can tank performance on SMR drives even for what you would assume are "read only" workloads. Sweeping through a large directory tree computing MD5 hashes of all of the files is particularly bad (this is how I discovered this issue). Throughput on the drive periodically drops to near zero, for several seconds at a time.

So I’m pretty much done. No problems moving the drives. Wiping the drives is always scary. I setup the schedule for daily backups to both the internal and external backups. Want with fat32 for the external just to make my life easier.
I’m in the process for better organizing my photos. I found a great program called DIM so I’m using that to resort everything by picture create date. I’m organizing them by date taken in YYYY/YYYY-MM structure. Also putting videos into their own parallel folder structure.

just brew it! wrote:

Yup, and as I noted on the previous page, you REALLY want to avoid those. I'm so fed up with mine that they are being relegated strictly to archive and off-site backup duty. Write once (potentially very slowly...), read hopefully never (other than to occasionally verify data integrity).

With some tuning 99% of the drawbacks are eliminated. I write to mine in large bursts (few tens to hundreds of GB at a time, a few times a week) and read pretty constantly. No issues with throughput on either with a nicely tuned ZFS sitting over them.

Given their crazy low cost, I know I'll be buying more going forward. If you write constantly at reasonable bandwidths they can be troublesome but that's about it.

Waco wrote:

Given their crazy low cost, I know I'll be buying more going forward. If you write constantly at reasonable bandwidths they can be troublesome but that's about it.

They’re not significantly lower in cost than the Red’s that it is worth the hassle, IMHO.

Maybe I'll use a couple of them to experiment with ZFS since I already bought them.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Waco wrote:

Given their crazy low cost, I know I'll be buying more going forward. If you write constantly at reasonable bandwidths they can be troublesome but that's about it.

They’re not significantly lower in cost than the Red’s that it is worth the hassle, IMHO.

IME they're not much less than the Blues. The cost differential vs the Reds is larger.

just brew it! wrote:

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Waco wrote:

Given their crazy low cost, I know I'll be buying more going forward. If you write constantly at reasonable bandwidths they can be troublesome but that's about it.

They’re not significantly lower in cost than the Red’s that it is worth the hassle, IMHO.

IME they're not much less than the Blues. The cost differential vs the Reds is larger.

I guess if you are looking at straight non-shucked cost. for 8TB currently on Amazon:
WD Purple - $255
WD Red - $259
WD Gold - $355
WD External (Probably Red) $150

Seagate Ironwolf - $240
Seagate Barracuda - $194
Seagate Skyhawk - $240
Seagate Exos - $245
Seagate External (Probably SMR) $140

My buddy just shucked two 8TB WD externals and got two "Red" helium filled models (which might be HGST models?). Pretty lucky considering the cost saving.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Waco wrote:

Given their crazy low cost, I know I'll be buying more going forward. If you write constantly at reasonable bandwidths they can be troublesome but that's about it.

They’re not significantly lower in cost than the Red’s that it is worth the hassle, IMHO.

Mine were $130 each a few months back. I guess shucked WD drives are $20 or so more now? They didn't use to be so cheap.

External drives DEFINITELY used to cost more than their internal counterparts.

DancinJack wrote:

External drives DEFINITELY used to cost more than their internal counterparts.

This is what makes me wonder if there's a form of binning going on, i.e. drives which don't do as well on some subset of QA tests getting used for externals instead of being sold as bare drives.

I think it's the convenience actually - I bet 90% of consumer drive sales these days are external drives. We're the oddballs.