NAS

[red321]

After years and years of dicking around I finally bit the bullet and added a NAS to my setup. Picked up a Synology DS416. 4 bays...plus 3 USB 3.0 ports.

So far I've only added one 8tb drive to the storage bays, and a 4tb USB drive...why the hell didn't I do this sooner? The Synology stuff is fantastic...love how, in essence, it's a small linux server when you look at all the packages you can add (just setup a dedicated Plex media server).

I was a little concerned on the performance at first, but after moving the 2 NAS network connections, and my PC network connection, off the router and to a gigabit switch that's made a huge difference. Probably could still do some network tweaking.

Now I just have to figure out which old USB drives to retire (and apparently recover since two of them won't boot up).

 

 

[Lou]

I'm waiting for the Synology DS417. 4 bays...plus 3 USB 3.0 ports.

[Thomas]

One of these days I'm going to bite the bullet and build a FreeNAS box.

[AngelsLakersFan]

I built a 4 drive RAID box about 4 or 5 years ago. If I was doing it all over I would probably just grab a Synology.

I set four 2TB drives up in RAID 5 only to learn later that you need higher grade network hard drives to avoid eventual failure. I've been too scared to change the set up so I ended up backing it up to a couple of 3TB disks I added to an old desktop.

When I get a time for a new project I think I might redo it as a FreeNAS or maybe a web server.

[red321]

I have an old tower I was thinking of turning into a freenas box...and kept thinking...and thinking...and realized I was never going to do it. I'd have to upgrade the power supply and network supply. At this point I'd probably have to replace the fan as well. 

The Synology is pretty cool. I've already setup the Plex server, and I was thinking about setting up a cloud station so I can access photos from over the internet...but I'm not sure I'm comfortable opening up my firewall. Supposedly they have a mechanism where the Synology box connects via secure tunnel to a Synology server which you then access...but I'm a few beers in and should probably read up more on it letter.

The synology box comes with a lot of add on packages, if you were running a small business you could do a lot with this.

I did order an additional 8tb drive today (Amazon dropped price on Seagate Ironwolf 7200rpm 8tb to $288)...decided to build some redundancy into the system...then again it is just being used for backup...do you really need to create a redundant backup solution if you are also backing up to Crashplan on the cloud? Probably shouldn't make decisions +5.

 

 

 

 

[Tank]

This conversation makes me feel like I wandered into a Latin class discussing the stock market.

[red321]

restart and make sure it's plugged in...all you need to remember Tank

[Thomas]

On 3/7/2017 at 11:42 PM, red321 said:

then again it is just being used for backup...do you really need to create a redundant backup solution if you are also backing up to Crashplan on the cloud? Probably shouldn't make decisions +5.

RAID is not backup as they make sysadmins repeat ad nauseam. But anything that involves not having to download at once all the (Tera?)bytes of photos you archive would be worth it's weight in gold, especially with ISPs implementing monthly bandwidth caps. But being safeguarded against a hardware SPOF and offsite backups for disaster recovery (I'm not sure there is such a thing Trump disaster recovery but I digress) sounds like a good plan.

[Thomas]

On 3/7/2017 at 9:40 PM, AngelsLakersFan said:

I built a 4 drive RAID box about 4 or 5 years ago. If I was doing it all over I would probably just grab a Synology.

I set four 2TB drives up in RAID 5 only to learn later that you need higher grade network hard drives to avoid eventual failure. I've been too scared to change the set up so I ended up backing it up to a couple of 3TB disks I added to an old desktop.

When I get a time for a new project I think I might redo it as a FreeNAS or maybe a web server.

There is no avoiding eventual hardware failure. 2% of your hard drives failing a month is a good approximation. But you can mitigate it with the use of hot spares. Make sure the notification of hardware failure is working. ZFS is such the hotness right now with it's feature set. Just make sure you have enough RAM for your storage. ECC RAM if you can manage it. 1GB of RAM per TB of storage is a good starting point. A SSD or two for caching will help tremendously from what I gathered.

[red321]

49 minutes ago, Thomas said:

RAID is not backup as they make sysadmins repeat ad nauseam. But anything that involves not having to download at once all the (Tera?)bytes of photos you archive would be worth it's weight in gold, especially with ISPs implementing monthly bandwidth caps. But being safeguarded against a hardware SPOF and offsite backups for disaster recovery (I'm not sure there is such a thing Trump disaster recovery but I digress) sounds like a good plan.

See, that's why I shouldn't be planning +5!

Didn't mean "backup" as much as redundancy. 

And yes...terabytes would be an accurate description, and growing at a significant clip. Historically I haven't purged "bad" photos, the effort to purge photos (8-10mb) wasn't worth it when storage was so cheap. But now that each image is 20+ mb a session like the wedding I photographed this weekend is upwards of 100gb. 

Here's where I'm at.

internal storage (not OS/program file related)

drive 1: 3tb (documents, media files, image catalogs)

drive 2: 4tb (primary drive for current images...older images archived off to usb drives)

nas storage

8tb (shr 1 disk redundancy)

Room for two additional 8tb drives at some point in the future - based on one disk redundancy that would be +16tb usable for total of 24tb.

usb storage

drive a: 750mb (going to retire this one, it's two similarly aged partners just died)

drive b: 1tb (thinking about retiring this one)

drive c: 2tb (slower usb 2.0 drive...will probably move music files to this drive)

drive d: 3tb (client image storage)

drive e: 3tb (older image storage)

drive f: 5tb (backup)

drive g: 4tb (connected to NAS - media files)

 

I'm still thinking of using the NAS for backup of images...but now I'm wondering if maybe I should move the older image storage to NAS so there is some redundancy and then backup to USB drives. Though as I type this I realize the math probably doesn't work in the long run.

[Thomas]

Man you could almost make an argument for tape backup in your case but I guess as long as the offline backups are working bandwidth wise you're better off with letting them worry about data integrity. But boy does the words backup and USB storage scare me.  I'd assume you wouldn't need to actually access the older files that often so retrieving them via online backup shouldn't be that much of a burden for you.

[Thomas]

Note I am so not actually practicing what I preach at home. I really need to change that.

[Thomas]

46 minutes ago, red321 said:

nas storage

8tb (shr 1 disk redundancy)

Room for two additional 8tb drives at some point in the future - based on one disk redundancy that would be +16tb usable for total of 24tb.

 

You would want to make sure that all your storage could fit on a smaller subset of drives after adding the two drives so you could then remove the smallest drives left in the array for upgrade/EOL purposes. Being stuck with a at capacity storage array with no additional storage bays is no bueno.

[red321]

23 minutes ago, Thomas said:

Man you could almost make an argument for tape backup in your case but I guess as long as the offline backups are working bandwidth wise you're better off with letting them worry about data integrity. But boy does the words backup and USB storage scare me.  I'd assume you wouldn't need to actually access the older files that often so retrieving them via online backup shouldn't be that much of a burden for you.

The initial online backup sucked ass....took over 6+ months and included me upgrading my internet service or it probably would have been another 6+ months (actually it took a year, I ditched my initial provider because they throttled upload to 1mb/s as well as tried to raise storage costs through the roof so I had to start over). Crashplan has been excellent and for $60, it's a helluva value. Now that I have a baseline it isn't nearly as painful.

I ingest an image, back it up locally, and then it takes a 2-3 days to fully back up the cloud (depending on how big the shoot was). So, I do have some risk if something catastrophic were to happen in that week, but if that scenario were to happen...I probably have bigger issues.

I'll go months (and maybe years) not needing older images...and then I'll get a hair up my ass and want to relook at a trip. Hell, I still haven't fully gone through trips to India and Thailand in 2007. But in those cases, it's not time sensitive so I could download from the cloud and my catalog makes it real easy to identify the specific files I need to download.

Going through this exercise I did find one of my archive drives had died and did a quick check of the cloud and everything I needed was there.

Guess I should really figure out what my priorities are.

 

[Tank]

On 3/7/2017 at 11:21 PM, red321 said:

restart and make sure it's plugged in...all you need to remember Tank

whoa, slow down, bill gates.

[Vegas Halo Fan]

On 3/7/2017 at 11:00 PM, Tank said:

This conversation makes me feel like I wandered into a Latin class discussing the stock market.

Don't sweat it, Tank. I have no idea what they are discussing either. NAS to me means Naval Air Station.

[Blarg]

What the fuck you punk ass white bitches think y'all doin appropriatin my name? 

[AngelsLakersFan]

Anyone build a HTPC?

It would be a fun project to replace the cable boxes / DVR. Maybe connect the tv's to a Raspberry Pi, and have everything hooked up to the wireless network. If I repurpose one of these old pc's as a server, in theory I think I could stream live tv and dvr recordings to my phone / internet connected devices.

Obviously there are easier ways to accomplish these things but it's kind of fun to tinker (see Blargs car thread).

[Thomas]

19 hours ago, AngelsLakersFan said:

Anyone build a HTPC?

It would be a fun project to replace the cable boxes / DVR. Maybe connect the tv's to a Raspberry Pi, and have everything hooked up to the wireless network. If I repurpose one of these old pc's as a server, in theory I think I could stream live tv and dvr recordings to my phone / internet connected devices.

Obviously there are easier ways to accomplish these things but it's kind of fun to tinker (see Blargs car thread).

Check out Kodi, the former XBMC project/

https://kodi.tv/about/

[red321]

hmmm...so if I'm reading this correctly, I can use the Raspberry PI kit sitting in my inbox and connect it to the Synology and use it as a media server? Hmm...that might be a fun little project and require less ER time than using that Pi kit to create a time lapse dolly and soldering my fingers together.

[AngelsLakersFan]

2 hours ago, Thomas said:

Check out Kodi, the former XBMC project/

https://kodi.tv/about/

Ya, it was Kodi that was giving me the ideas. I'll have to check the forums out to see how people are putting their together. 

[red321]

19 hours ago, AngelsLakersFan said:

Ya, it was Kodi that was giving me the ideas. I'll have to check the forums out to see how people are putting their together. 

Send a link when you find it...I might play with that as well.

[nate]

On 3/7/2017 at 4:55 PM, Thomas said:

One of these days I'm going to bite the bullet and build a FreeNAS box.

Just built a FreeNAS box.  Well, I turned my old computer into one. i7 2600k.

It is not as great as you would think.  The software feels very alpha right now.  I am having issues right now where the jails are changing MAC address on reboot which completely torpedoes any plugins running and requires a ton of work to fix.  If you have DD-WRT running on your router it would be easier because you could release the IPs being saved for the old MAC address.  Apparently it's a bug that has existed for years and they can't seem to fix it.

On the other hand it is faster than any little Synology or Drobo you could get.  More storage options and if you already have the components around it is easy to setup.

I know Linux/Unix well but FreeBSD has enough differences that it is taking me some time to get used to.

[AngelsLakersFan]

3 hours ago, red321 said:

Send a link when you find it...I might play with that as well.

After browsing the forum... omg... there are topics with different builds everywhere. Hard to figure out where to start. It seems it all depends on what functionality you want, since everyone is going for something slightly different.

I'd like to build a media server that could function as a dvr and pass through a cable tv signal. I'd then like to connect the tv's to the network with RasberryPi boxes. Most of the builds are contained in one box. 

[nate]

@AngelsLakersFan are any of your TVs smart TVs already?  Might not need the RPi.  One thing is even RPi3 is not very powerful even when it comes to media playback there can be issues.

For playback I use AppleTV or a PS4 for the most part and Plex to stream.

If you are anti-Apple you can always use an inferior device like a Roku or Fire TV