NAS drives configuration to manage < 4TB music files ?

[kenreau]

I just purchased my first NAS, a Synology DS412+ and I'm in the early process stage of learning the ropes and setting up its architecture.

 

My current quest is to determine what size hdd's to acquire for my music library files. I currently have ~3.2TBs of music files. My intent is to allow it to grow to no more than 4TBs eventually.

 

My idea was to reserve 2 bays of the NAS for my music library (4TB) and 2 bays for the family/household central storage duties and back up (this requires less than 1 TB).

 

Given primary consideration to the music files, long term hdd's life and trouble free redundancy / file safety, I'm wondering if I should purchase 2 ea of 4TB hdd's for the music files (RAID 1)?, or rely on 2 ea of 2 TB hdd's in a RAID 0 format? I like the idea of 2 x 4TBs music drives to mirror one another, but wonder if the 2 x 2TBs offer any significant performance, or safety benefits.

 

I currently have two Seagate USB outboard backup 4TB drives that I make safety back ups to monthly. (I also have two Oyen mini pro 2.5" firewire drives I use as my current mac mini music library which I plan to retire as part of this move to the Synology DS412+ NAS).

 

Is there a clear consensus on how to size and arrange hard drives for this? Does it really matter?

 

Any recommendations, or direction to other resources would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

Kenreau

[DaQi]

Best not to think of setting aside drives for specific uses as that is not how a NAS works. Best way to think of it is how much storage you need in total and then decide what level of raid you want and buy the hard drives accordingly. In that NAS you have 4 bays and it sounds like you need at least 5tb of storage. So, if you go with raid 5 you would need 4 x 2tb drives which would give you 6tb of useable storage. If you decide you really need raid 0 then you could go with 4 x 3tb drive to get 6 tb of storage useable. I would suggest raid 5 which would mean that any 1 drive could crash and you would be fine. This is plenty adequate because as soon as a drive crashes the first thing you do is shut everything down buy a new drive and you are back up and running again. The raid 0 gives you protection from 2 drives failing at the same time. While it does happen it is relatively unlikely to happen. Also if you watch your drives you can usually tell when they are about to fail. I have had several drives fail in my NAS over the 8 years I have been running things on a NAS and every time it was a single drive that went down and I sort of expected it as the drive started getting errors and running warmer. When they crashed I shut down the NAS went out and bought a new drive. Put the drive in and a couple hours later was back fully redundant.

[PewterTA]

Daqi is correct, you're really thinking about a NAS wrong... You want it for maintaining uptime. In order to do this you need to use all 4 drives in a RAID configuration. Synology uses the SHR for deciding how to allocate the disks, I recommend using that vs doing your own thing. This way it will create the optimal setting for the drives. But I do recommend starting with 3 drives as it will pick (basically) raid 5 to start.

 

In my personal opinion, just because I'd done this before (MANY times on MANY people's NAS's that I've set up), you should look to buy drives as big as your budget can afford. I would personally recommend 3TB or 4TB drives, minimum. This will give you lots more space than you need: 9TB or 12TB of space. Now the reason I say this vs. planning for 4TB... is that once you have it in place, it's a LOT more time consuming for the NAS to upgrade to beyond 4TB. Also there is a lot more wear and tear if you allow the NAS to migrate the data. If you install a bigger drive, let it build, install another drive, let it build, install another drive, let it build. You can see how many times you're re-writing ALL that data. That's a lot of use on the drives that is not needed.

 

I see it all the time that people buy these (or others) and when diskless they buy for what they think they need. Then not too far into the future they have it filled and are wondering where to go. So why not fill it up and be done.

 

Now the nice thing with those (any NAS) is that you can start off with only getting 3 drives to start your raid 5. Expanding, while intensive work for the drives is easier here and there than trying to migrate all the drives at once.

 

So even if you only get 3x 3TB or 4TB drives to start, you can start the array and add the 4th 3TB or 4TB drive later.

[pooger]

In complete agreement with both posters above. I've been quite happy with WD red drives; I think they have changed the name in the past few months. I don't believe there are sonic issues with different capacity drives, but do remember reading (possibly in CA) about preferences related to the number of platters in the drive. There is little cost difference in getting the larger drives to start with.

[DaQi]

+1 on the WD red drives. I have had multiple Seagate drives crash and never any problems with WDs. A bit early to tell on the Red drives as I have only had them running for 2 years now but they do run quieter and lower temperature than the previous WD drives I had (forgot which color they were).

 

Don't underestimate the amount of time it can take to expand your NAS. I remember the last time I did an expansion and it took several days (yes, that reads days)!!!

 

I am very skeptical of any difference in the sound quality of different drives in a NAS and wouldn't worry about it. [Warning heavy sarcasm ahead] If you can hear the difference in hard drives in a NAS you have probably already spent an insane amount of money on your rig and a few more hard drives to find the most silent ones will be mere pocket change.