NAS vs RAID Box vs External Drives vs Cloud Storage

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2 hours ago, agladstone said:

Thanks for the advice! 

Currently, I'm only playing music through the Aurender that is stored locally inside the Aurender's internal Hard Drive. 

The menagerie of smaller external drives I have now are all just for storage and management (I load up the stuff I want to listen to onto the Aurender's internal drive (I have a 5TB internal drive in the Aurender, so it holds plenty of music) and Each of my external drives are manually "mirrored" (so I have 2 4TB drives one a copy of the other and so on for the others I have). 

I think the Synology 916play seems like a good choice for me, I could start with 4 8TB drives and either have them in a RAID or just use as JBOD and use external Hard Drives to make a backup copy of what's on them (I've been told RAID is not always ideal if your constantly making changes which I am, and that an offline external HD backup or a cloud backup of JBOD may be better ? (Thoughts)? 

The Synology 916play is not "cheap", but when I think about all the time and money I've spent at this point to get almost 16TB's of music (most is DSD or 24 bit high rez), I never want to lose it and I could not fathom the time or cost involved to replace it!! 

Also, as you mentioned, I could also stream from the NAS to a soon to come mini bedroom system and I could even make a switch to an ultra Rendu in the future from the Aurender, etc. 

Also, to answer your question the DAS would only be attached to my desktop for ripping, storage, tagging, and management of my collection, anything I would play through my system would most likely always be via the local internal Aurender Hard Drive. 

Move read via this forum and also many reviews of the Aurender, that locally stored playback has better sound quality vs a NAS or USB attached Hard Drive. 

 

I'm also looking at a NAS. You don't need the play version only for music playback and backup, these versions are mainly for 4k video. The 916 series can be attached to additional drives (total of 9), however this doesn't increase the reliability of your backups.

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If you want it to stream videos, then the play version is the way to go! I regret having missed getting one on sale last week. Check out the 416play as well, it is a great option unless you think you might need to expand to more than four drives in the future and it is cheaper.

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The 916 fits 9 disks with the expansion, that's 64tb with 8tb disks on raid 5. 

 

I just thought of buying a local drive for my Roon server, is a neat idea until I realise the size of DSD albums... Just got one with 13Gb! Storage will go fast this way...

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That's true. But remember that the NAS has a limited timespan, say 10 years or so. You could estimate your needs then, e.g if you buy say 2 DSD albums per month, 3 CDs and one blue ray that's say 50GB/month or 1.2 Tb/year, 12 Tb over 10 years (plus you current collection obviously). Some could double or triple that amount (and that would be a lot of money), but hardly one would max out an expanded 916+ even if keeping different versions of their albums. Of course there are bigger, professional Nas out there, but at this level backup becomes a real concern - would you duplicate all with reel tape? A second NAS? That gets real expensive real quick!

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@foodfiend wow I don't think I have the time to listen to 20 new CDs a month! Anyhow that was an example... I don't do blue rays

 

@agladstone don't consider Raid as a backup solution. It's just not reliable unless you have many drives. If you lose one drive, the chance of losing a second drive while rebuilding the system is multifold. Happened to me. There are also other tricks like not buying all drives at the same time (likely from the same lot and hence with a good chance that will fail at the same time). Also saw this happeninh. Ideally your backup won't be on the same electrical system. If you have a short circuit you may lose both units. 

 

I've seen HDDs fail in so many ways. One had a short circuit which melted the controller chip which in turn set the whole board on fire. Was quite spectacular...

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If you guys are interested in 50Tb+… why not the 1817+? It is actually just a few hundred more and fits 8 disks standard - the 916 with expansion unit will probably cost more.

 

Whichever logical arrangement you take for the disks, a raid is always a hot backup. If all is working but you erase all the data you're still doomed. I would always have a backup which is generally off the grid. If a 5gb hires album would cost 10 moneys, that's 2k per Tb of data - backup is cheap in comparison.

 

Edit: I see @foodfiend uses the 1815, looks like a good choice. How noisy does that get for you? What drives are you running?

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Back to the topic. For music streaming and storage, I went with the 416play. I'm not considering it as an option for backup though. For long term backup, I would prefer a 'cold' storage (physical and/or cloud offline) option. The advantage of physical backup is the price in the long term - costs you once, but the data can be kept for 30+ years. It is not very convenient, however if you stop to think which cloud service would give you peace of mind for this long?

 

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@foodfiend, I was referring to the OP with regards to backup. Aside from a possible RAID as an immediate 'hot' backup, @agladstone wanted an option to keep a second backup for his music. That's something very wise to do, but I wouldn't add a second NAS layer. I'd either go with remote (cloud) or a cold backup. 

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I'm not particular keen on cloud backup. It's just that NAS is not really a solution for backup since it is always online. There are better, cheaper and more reliable (even though less convenient) options. 

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If you're serious about long term backup, HDDs are a poor idea. You'll still have to replace them every few years due to the chance of mechanical failures. Don't forget that over long periods of time the HDDs the magnetization also decays, which mean that data naturally gets corrupted over time. So yeah disconnecting the HDD has its limitations. 

 

I currently use offline HDDs as backup; I've just brought two old HDDs online for checking and replacing. One of them has over 30000 hours in it! It used to be a 'hot' drive before. I noticed that small number of bad sectors appeared on each drive after ~2 years. 

 

Some interesting numbers on HDD reliability here (mind that those are mostly new, high usage drives):

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/

 

 

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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. 

 

 

 

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All, remember that in a Raid configuration all it takes is one logical failure to lose all data. So if you have a raid 1 and press 'delete volume' you lose the data from both drives (just an example, but shit happens). Therefore separate backup is a must to keep your valuable data, no matter which Raid you use.

Still for the 50Tb of @Fitzcaraldo215 what makes most sense for a cold backup is tape. For this data size it is cheap and fast - you could have multiple copies of your data for less than 2000 dollars and with ultrium 6 tapes (cheaper ones) you can backup 0.5 Tb per hour. That would take 5 days to transfer at 10mbps speeds. Ultrium 7 are even faster than small Raids, but they aren't that cheap.

 

 

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10 hours ago, foodfiend said:

If a second off-site NAS is used as a back-up of the primary NAS, I would think that the probability of both NASes going belly-up simultaneously is also pretty slim.

 

If you make images, probably yes. If in the other hand you just have a mirror drive, not necessarily - if the primary gets lost there is quite a chance of losing the image as well before you realise. The idea would be to only back it up when you're confident your data has not been corrupted or compromised (e.g. a cyber attack).

 

I still think a backup Nas is a poor idea...