NAS Advice

[robbbby]

Hey guys, looking for some advice on a NAS or alternatives.

 

I currently have a fileserver running an old core i7 920 which is a power hog.  OS on it is either windows 8.1 or 10, and I've used flexraid over the years to try and manage data and parity.

 

This setup however has become frustrating to deal with.  It's noisy, bulky, uses lots of power and trying to maintain windows and flexraid is a pain.

 

I want something simple that is plug and play and can be easily managed from a simple web user interface.

 

I have 11 hard drives total.  I believe it was setup for 9 data and 2 parity drives.

 

So far the only 12 drive option I have come across is a Synology DS2419+ which is about $2000 Canadian.

 

Is there any other options or methods of file storage I should be looking at?

 

Main use for the NAS would be music streaming.

 

Thanks

 

 

[ASRMichael]

I use an Intel NUC running Euphony SMB server. Effectively low powered device acting as a NAS. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

I’ve used QNAP, Synology, FreeNAS, open Media Vault, and a host of others over the years. If I had to start over with a new NAS today, I’d go the QNAP route. They are generally more powerful / have better hardware than Synology and are much more flexible than some home brew options. 
 

You should look at consolidating some of those drives to expand your options. I know it may not sound fun, but requiring 11 or 12 drives will push you into a solution that’s far less capable than you could otherwise use. Sure you can get mega drive NAS units, but they are far less flexible. For example something from 45 Drives - http://www.45drives.com/products/

 

I just finished an article about running Roon with a 300,000 track library on a QNAP. It’s off to the Roon team for fact checking and should be published here either Friday or Monday. 

[beerandmusic]

3 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 If I had to start over with a new NAS today, I’d go the QNAP route.

 

and they get SO MANY FIRMWARE UPDATES THAT IT IS ACTUALLY ANNOYING (grin)...seriously, it shows they are always improving....

[One and a half]

If the hard disk controller dies on a NAS, what are the methods to recover the data?

 

Is there MTBF figures for the QNAP NAS?

[robbbby]

6 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I’ve used QNAP, Synology, FreeNAS, open Media Vault, and a host of others over the years. If I had to start over with a new NAS today, I’d go the QNAP route. They are generally more powerful / have better hardware than Synology and are much more flexible than some home brew options. 
 

You should look at consolidating some of those drives to expand your options. I know it may not sound fun, but requiring 11 or 12 drives will push you into a solution that’s far less capable than you could otherwise use. Sure you can get mega drive NAS units, but they are far less flexible. For example something from 45 Drives - http://www.45drives.com/products/

 

I just finished an article about running Roon with a 300,000 track library on a QNAP. It’s off to the Roon team for fact checking and should be published here either Friday or Monday. 

 

Thanks Chris, I look forward to reading that article!

 

Is better and more powerful hardware beneficial if the NAS is being using for nothing other than serving files?  I don't see ever having the need to have the NAS do any heavy lifting like transcoding etc.

 

I looked at consolidating the drives but it becomes very costly.  I have 6x 6TB and 5x 4TB.

I can eliminate the 5x 4TB with say 2x 10TB but that becomes an added cost and I'd still need a 8bay.

 

I should probably check how much space I have free....

[The Computer Audiophile]

18 hours ago, robbbby said:

 

Thanks Chris, I look forward to reading that article!

 

Is better and more powerful hardware beneficial if the NAS is being using for nothing other than serving files?  I don't see ever having the need to have the NAS do any heavy lifting like transcoding etc.

 

I looked at consolidating the drives but it becomes very costly.  I have 6x 6TB and 5x 4TB.

I can eliminate the 5x 4TB with say 2x 10TB but that becomes an added cost and I'd still need a 8bay.

 

I should probably check how much space I have free....

Here is the article. 

 

https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/reviews/review-running-a-large-roon-library-on-a-qnap-tvs-872xt-r917/

[The Computer Audiophile]

18 hours ago, robbbby said:

Is better and more powerful hardware beneficial if the NAS is being using for nothing other than serving files?  I don't see ever having the need to have the NAS do any heavy lifting like transcoding etc.

If you're just serving files via CIFS I don't believe you'll benefit from anything stronger than a Raspberry Pi :~)

[robbbby]

3 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

If you're just serving files via CIFS I don't believe you'll benefit from anything stronger than a Raspberry Pi :~)

 

That was my plan until I read your article...

Being able to eliminate a PC that solely serves as a roon core server is a big plus, especially since I've been planning on getting a network streamer anyways.

Being able to run roon core on the NAS is a big bonus IMO.

QNAP seems to have an extensive choice of products, I will need to compare them all to see which would be best. 

I think the NAS you reviewed might be a bit overpowered for simply serving files and running roon core, I don't need any DSP.

 

I think an i3 would be suitable to handle what I'm looking for? 

[The Computer Audiophile]

5 minutes ago, robbbby said:

 

That was my plan until I read your article...

Being able to eliminate a PC that solely serves as a roon core server is a big plus, especially since I've been planning on getting a network streamer anyways.

Being able to run roon core on the NAS is a big bonus IMO.

QNAP seems to have an extensive choice of products, I will need to compare them all to see which would be best. 

I think the NAS you reviewed might be a bit overpowered for simply serving files and running roon core, I don't need any DSP.

 

I think an i3 would be suitable to handle what I'm looking for? 

i3 would probably be more than enough as long as Roon behaves :~)

[robbbby]

I think a TVS-872N might just fit the bill.  Looks very similar but core i3 variation and only 5Gb ethernet instead of 10, which is probably just fine in my use case.

[The Computer Audiophile]

52 minutes ago, robbbby said:

I think a TVS-872N might just fit the bill.  Looks very similar but core i3 variation and only 5Gb ethernet instead of 10, which is probably just fine in my use case.

Looks good. Make sure it either comes with enough RAM or you can add some. 

[robbbby]

9 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Looks good. Make sure it either comes with enough RAM or you can add some. 

 

I've done a bit of back and forth comparing.  The only differences are

 

core i5 vs core i3
10Gb ethernet vs 5Gb

16GB ram supplied vs 8GB

 

Ram is upgradeable up to 32GB, just like the XT, only difference is it is supplied with 2x 4GB vs 2x 8GB

 

How important is RAM when it comes to acting as a roon core and managing a fairly large database?

 

I'm trying to weigh the $500 (Canadian (Monopoly Money)), difference between the two. 

If RAM doesn't play a large part, I'd rather spend the money on a new 10TB+ drive, though if my browsing roon is affected by RAM, that $500 may be better spent on the better NAS....

 

Thoughts?

 

 

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

28 minutes ago, robbbby said:

 

I've done a bit of back and forth comparing.  The only differences are

 

core i5 vs core i3
10Gb ethernet vs 5Gb

16GB ram supplied vs 8GB

 

Ram is upgradeable up to 32GB, just like the XT, only difference is it is supplied with 2x 4GB vs 2x 8GB

 

How important is RAM when it comes to acting as a roon core and managing a fairly large database?

 

I'm trying to weigh the $500 (Canadian (Monopoly Money)), difference between the two. 

If RAM doesn't play a large part, I'd rather spend the money on a new 10TB+ drive, though if my browsing roon is affected by RAM, that $500 may be better spent on the better NAS....

 

Thoughts?

 

 

 

On my NAS Roon will use 6.5 GB of RAM easily. That doesn’t leave much headroom if you only get 8 GB. Probably doable, but very close. 

[davide256]

7 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

i3 would probably be more than enough as long as Roon behaves :~)

and library scan speed isn't important to you

[stefano_mbp]

On 6/9/2020 at 1:27 PM, robbbby said:

I have 11 hard drives total

Which capacity are your hard drives and what is the % used? This could help to plan a new solution.

[The Computer Audiophile]

7 hours ago, davide256 said:

and library scan speed isn't important to you

The original scan in Roon can take forever, but subsequent scans are very quick on most CPUs. The i3 would be fast.

[robbbby]

3 hours ago, stefano_mbp said:

Which capacity are your hard drives and what is the % used? This could help to plan a new solution.

 

I just took a look at them last night, quite a few drives are all video related  stuff which I don't need on the NAS

 

So for my music related data I have 6x 6TB drives, with 1 being a parity drive.

So, of 5 drives containing data I have 7.5TB free.

I think I am going to be able to get away with a 6 bay unit.

[stefano_mbp]

9 minutes ago, robbbby said:

5 drives containing data I have 7.5TB free

.... anyway a lot of space ... I was thinking about a Qnap hs-453dx fanless but it is too small ...

[robbbby]

I was ready to pull the trigger on a tvs-672xt, I assumed it was the same as the 872xt just with two less bays. I was wrong. 
It is a core i3 and only comes with 8GB of ram. Why would they have such a big hardware difference in the exact same product line. Does not make any sense in my opinion. I thought the x72n was the similar line with less hardware. 

[robbbby]

Well I ended up getting the TVS-672N  and bought 16GB of ram to upgrade from the 4GB it ships with. 
The 6 bay XT wasn’t worth the extra cash since the processors are the same. And I’d never use the Thunderbolt ports or 10 gigabit lan. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 minute ago, robbbby said:

Well I ended up getting the TVS-672N  and bought 16GB of ram to upgrade from the 4GB it ships with. 
The 6 bay XT wasn’t worth the extra cash since the processors are the same. And I’d never use the Thunderbolt ports or 10 gigabit lan. 

Great. Tell us how it all turns out. 

[robbbby]

Alright, I am a little confused at how to migrate my data to the new NAS. 

Apparently just popping the drives into the NAS formats them to whatever linux filesystem it uses.

So I figured my best bet was to take my old parity drive, put it into QNAP to be formatted, then over the network, copy one drives data to the newly formatted drive.  Remove the drive I just copied data from, install in QNAP, format and repeat until I have the last drive I can install.

 

However, I'm just realizing I probably cannot do this to run raid 5, since data and parity is striped across all disks?

I was used to flexraid where data just sat on single drives and all parity was created on a single drive.

 

So now, how the heck do I store all the data from those 5 disks, so that I can put the disks into the NAS to be formatted to create a raid 5 array, and then move all the data back.

 

This is turning into a bigger mess that I was imagining.

[The Computer Audiophile]

3 minutes ago, robbbby said:

Alright, I am a little confused at how to migrate my data to the new NAS. 

Apparently just popping the drives into the NAS formats them to whatever linux filesystem it uses.

So I figured my best bet was to take my old parity drive, put it into QNAP to be formatted, then over the network, copy one drives data to the newly formatted drive.  Remove the drive I just copied data from, install in QNAP, format and repeat until I have the last drive I can install.

 

However, I'm just realizing I probably cannot do this to run raid 5, since data and parity is striped across all disks?

I was used to flexraid where data just sat on single drives and all parity was created on a single drive.

 

So now, how the heck do I store all the data from those 5 disks, so that I can put the disks into the NAS to be formatted to create a raid 5 array, and then move all the data back.

 

This is turning into a bigger mess that I was imagining.

Yeah, you are in for a treat. You will need somewhere to store the stuff if you want to use the existing disks. 

 

Do you have a backup right now that you could restore from?

[robbbby]

2 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Yeah, you are in for a treat. You will need somewhere to store the stuff if you want to use the existing disks. 

 

Do you have a backup right now that you could restore from?

 

I don't have a 1:1 backup.  I know it wasn't the best method, but I relied on the flexraid parity disk in case of any failures.

I guess I should have researched more before diving in.

I have no idea where the heck I'm going temporarily store nearly 20TB of data. 

Lol what a mess I've got myself into.