How big is your NAS?

[Izerous]

4x10TB drives in raid 5 (no hot spare) would give 30TB of final storage. Automate backups to S3 probably cheaper than that much on google drive. Would at least that would be the cheapest way to setup a off the shelf 4 bay NAS and still have some room for growth.

 

[Marzipan]

I'm definitely not the source you need to tell you if a NAS would work for your situation, but from my experience over the last couple of days I can tell you that 20TB+ capacity is not going to be cheap, especially if you want redundancy.

Best I'm seeing (new) at the moment is 22TB Ironwolf Pros @ $490 (after current discount + 10% new user discount) so you'd be looking at $1K minimum for a mirrored setup just in HDDs alone. NAS enclosures seem to average somewhere around $500 for the lower end models if you didn't want to roll your own server.

I deal with a lot of Synology and their recommendation for business storage is in three parts:
1 - local onsite
2 - remote offsite duplication
3 - cloud backup

most go with local and remote offsite as cloud gets expensive fast...but the remote offsite copy is supposed to be remote, as in nowhere near the local geologically. I had a client who had a total NAS failure and had to spend thousands to recover his data...after that, a better NAS, with a local duplicate via USB connected external HDD and an offsite duplicate in another province, also with a USB connected external HDD. a wee bit of overkill perhaps, but the data was essentially his livelihood, without it he would go out of business and be absolutely crushed / ruined.

too many are reactive, not proactive...so when I get resistance to more than a HDD or USB key to copy stuff onto, I ask what would happen if that data was lost. could you carry on or would you be ruined? that has usually resulted in a proactive response of sorts. I'm now stressed about all my wife's videos because the NAS is the only copy. I plan on creating a local backup with an external HDD and thinking of a single drive NAS to setup at my folks place, in another province...just costly. LoL

 

[sswilson]

Am I right in thinking that I should hold off on unraid registration until I'm ready to go, and then run the 30 day trial before buying the license so that I get 13 months of updates? I'm also planning on getting the basic/starter for up to 6 storage drives (I'll be using all six with 3X 10TB, 1X 22TB parity, 1X 1TB NVMe cache, and possibly another 480GB ssd as cache, but possibly bumping up to the unleashed tier after my 1yr update window expires which will reset the one year timer.

What's their version update record been like? Is there typically a new version released every year?

 

[sswilson]

Question(s) for any of you NAS gurus......

It's been forever since I connected a mechanical drive to a motherboard let alone configured it, are there any settings I should be looking at in the bios other than boot order? Specifically things in the sata area (like spin up)?

 

[sswilson]

Heh..... parity on a 4X10TB array is mind numbing..... looks like it's going to be at least 13 hours to complete.

 

[Marzipan]

Heh..... parity on a 4X10TB array is mind numbing..... looks like it's going to be at least 13 hours to complete.

these are empty?

 

[sswilson]

these are empty?

Yes. I don't understand the process, but it's apparently something akin to a bare metal bit to bit sync as opposed to a straight up mirror of the existing data.

I'm not sure how exactly it works when you consider that your parity drive only needs to be as large as the largest drive without any concern as to how many data drives you have in the array.... how a 10TB drive can provide "backup" for 10X 10TB drives is a bit of a head scratcher unless the individual data drives are also being used for a portion of the other data drives.

edit: Here's a really easy to understand explanation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/vc8wm2/enlighten_me_about_how_parity_works

It works off of the binary value of each bit (sector?), and is able to restore (at least in single parity) the value of those bits by comparing odd/even value from the sum of the remaining drives to the value of the bit on the parity drive.

That's genius!

 

[Babrbarossa]

I'm definitely not the source you need to tell you if a NAS would work for your situation, but from my experience over the last couple of days I can tell you that 20TB+ capacity is not going to be cheap, especially if you want redundancy.

Best I'm seeing (new) at the moment is 22TB Ironwolf Pros @ $490 (after current discount + 10% new user discount) so you'd be looking at $1K minimum for a mirrored setup just in HDDs alone. NAS enclosures seem to average somewhere around $500 for the lower end models if you didn't want to roll your own server.

Yeah, we were expecting 1500 or so

 

[crazyea]

OOS but you can still order up to 3 I think. $639

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/B0D24TQK3Q/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A3DWYIK6Y9EEQB&psc=1

Really good nas that you can install unraid on. $799

https://www.amazon.ca/UGREEN-NASync-DXP4800-Plus-Bay/dp/B0D22JRHZB/ref=pd_aw_ci_mcx_mh_mcx_views_0_image?pd_rd_w=XIeSR&content-id=amzn1.sym.5d40da72-b39c-41b3-ba40-9c69e35fbc24%3Aamzn1.symc.cb15e6ef-dda0-4490-a93d-da66403ab544&pf_rd_p=5d40da72-b39c-41b3-ba40-9c69e35fbc24&pf_rd_r=N7J8952RD2FVACH25AJ9&pd_rd_wg=3X6MJ&pd_rd_r=7ecbb586-c96b-482f-a76d-b4851c95c3d3&pd_rd_i=B0D22JRHZB

 

[crazyea]

Well the drives were on sale a minute ago but now the option to buy is gone.