A do it all NAS for an NAS Newbie/Wannabe

L C

Prospective NAS duties;

1st pair of bays SSD for music WAV files only, one SSD to be mirrored with a second SSD so if one fails I do not have to re-rip the Cds. this audio will need to be sync-able to an Ipod Classic. As theses music SSDs will be the first that I will purchase they need to be able to operate alone with the other bays unoccupied. I should only need around 500GB for each SSD. (All original Cds will be kept at separate location as emergency back-up in case of double drive failure).

2nd pair of hard disks to store DVD and Blu-ray and maybe later 4k. as with the music above this will be one drive mirrorred by 1 other =2 drives. (all original DVDs, Blu-rays etc will be kept at separate location as emergency back-up in case of double drive failure).

3rd pair of drives to house scanned photos and personal and family documents. (will as the music and video bays comprise 2 drives one mirrorring the other.) and be backed up regularly to M-Discs for onsite and ofsite back-up.

7th drive bay, to be used as a PVR storage from tv.

8th drive bay to be used as storage for upto 8 HD 24hour security cameras (probably purged every week). This to be added when cash allows.

9th and 10th drive bays to be used incase of overflow in the future.


My main questions are;

Can an NAS play stored movies on a projector, AND simultaneously record cctv and show on the same screen at the same time (when required) live security camera footage. AND at the same time be recording tv as a PVR for a couple of channels?


Can an NAS do the above without being permanently attached to a computer or am I just being silly?

Is the above set up feasible?
Is the above set up recommended for this use?
What sort of processing power should I be looking for?
How much RAM should I be looking for?
What is the minimum level of equipement I should be looking at (including accessories)?
What is the Ideal level of equipment I should be looking at (including accessories)?
Which NAS would you reccommend to do all of the above, comfortably?


Would I be better off buying separate systems for each task; eg dedicatied security station, dedicated PVR etc?

Are there any other recommendations as to how to achieve my goal?

My absolute maximum  budget for the NAS and the two SSD drives and leads and UPS is £1,000.

Also any reccommendations for an external Blu-ray player to rip the Audio, DVD and Blu-rays to the NAS with? The most important thing to me will be the audio quality of the rips (speed is secondary) and I intend to use EAC for the audio rips. (would be even better if the Blu-ray player could write to M-disk).


Please bear in mind that I am a complete beginner when it comes to NAS' and have so far read and understood enough about it that I would be a probable danger to myself and those around me. Even if you can only answer a couple of my questions it would be a great start.

Many thanks for your knowledge and your time.

Lee
.

Markr123

What are your approx storage requirements in Gb for music, photos etc etc? I think you're approaching this the wrong way. Why physical pairs of disks for each media type? Buy less, but larger disks and separate the media types into folders and create a shared "drives". If you attempt to build as described, you'll soon eat the budget!! For example, x10 2Tb WD Red NAS drives would set you back £800 alone! This is just the drives. As I say, describe storage needs first. We can then address the other Q's.

wormvortex

RAID is redundancy and not a backup solution. Mirroring also is very risky as accidentally erasing something will automatically erase it on the mirrored drive. I much prefer having a drive set to sync with another disk say once a day/week so if you do end up doing something stupid you have time to rectify the issue and in the case of Media it shouldn't be constantly changing so a daily backup for instance should be fine.

I would also look into not physically allocating a drive for separate things and instead think about buying larger HDD's and creating separate shares on them. 6TB disks are quite reasonable now.

Also why go down the route of SSD's for your audio? SSD storage is expensive compared to standard HDDs and you will gain nothing by putting your audio on them.

L C

@wormvortex


Thanks for the info on mirroring vs syncing I will definitely follow this advice as even if anything goes wrong the worst that would happen is I would have to re-rip a days worth of content, so it makes sense. As for the back-up advice, I understand that redundancy isn't the same as a back-up, and hope that having the original copies off-site will improve the safety of the content. The mirroring is really an issue for me of convenience, so that if the worst happens I do not have to manually rip all of those Cd's again, especially as my collection increases. I will probably also use this syncing advice for my personal and family photos and documents section.

My main reason for allocating drives for separate things is a psychological one. I am an absolute newbie to all of this NAS stuff (I don't even have one yet) and it is easier for me to get my head around (and picture) the 'order' of things if they are physically separated. It also makes it easier (again psychologically) to plan the upgrade/priority path of the additional drives. Although as I become more accustomed to the equipment and the way it works, I can see the logic and cost savings in your suggestion.

Why the SSD route? Again a psychological one (I can see I am going to get a reputation on here of being neurotic). I feel that the fewer moving parts there are, the fewer things can go wrong, and as SSD drives have no moving parts.....then. Also, I assume that hard-drives make some residual noise, and as the NAS will be very close to me, for a while at-least, I would like to cut mechanical noise to a minimum especially when listening to music. And there is also the 'psycho-acoustic effect' that may or may not improve the sound or at-least the 'comprehension' of an increase in sound quality (although the latter is pretty low on my list for reasons, truth be told).

Thanks again for the advice

L C

@Markr123

Sorry I didn't see your post first (otherwise I would have responded to it first), my bad.

I have given thought to the capacities involved and I am hoping that if I add the drives in stages, that as the time comes the hard-drive prices will become more reasonable.

To give some idea of storage needs at present they are very small.
eg approx 200GB of music files (uncompressed). So I have doubled my requirement in this area. eg; 2x500GB sync'd.

With the dvd and blu-ray I am not too concerned about compression being used. but I would think about 500 dvds and when the time comes approaching 100-200 blu-rays, the biggy for me is 4k this for me is the unknown, but I am only relying on future proofing for say the next 5-10 years.  Bear in mind that until very recently I was still using 'windows vista' and am now using 'windows 7', I am far from an early adopter and once the aims of my original post have been realized then I am unlikely to be yearning after the latest tech at the 'drop of a hat'. I think 4k is my ultimate future, for my near to medium term future.

The other 'Biggy' is the 8 camera HD storage (again using compression is fine), but this functionality will be added much further down the line, probably one to two years away. So I am hoping that hard-drive storage will be pretty cheap per TB by then.

My initial guesstimates would be as follows;

2x 500GB SSD sync'd (music)
2x 2TB Hard-drives (sync'd) scanned documents, books, photos etc
2x 6TB Hard-drives (sync'd) Movies
The above to be acquired over the next year or so in the order above.
Then
1 x 2TB Hard-drive PVR
1 x ?? Surveillance footage
2x empty bays or if cash allows 4x empty bays for unforeseen, to catch overflow of any of the other drives (especially any 4K content). and/or further raid redundancy if required and when my knowledge allows.

Hope the above clarifies things. your thoughts on the above will be appreciated

Thanks for taking the time to reply

Lee

PS the budget that I have given (£1,000) is for the empty NAS with 2 x 500Gb SSD and UPS. All other drives will be added later from a different budget.

mickevh

Re: ripping - if you use something like MakeMKV the A/V is preserved exactly as it is stored on the original discs, it's just wrapped in a new container (MKV file.) To change quality you'd have to use something like HandBrake that can actually re-encodes the A/V to different formats (and probably takes a lot longer to do the job.) Though I would argue that if one is concerned enough about quality to buy Blu-Rays, why would you want to crunch down to something less good (if you don't need to,) but others have different opinions.

Regarding an external drive, you can buy a "drive caddy" pretty cheaply into which you can install an optical drive normally used internally in a computer. Thence, you can pretty much choose any optical drive you like. The drive caddy I have is basically a plastic box with a little circuit board at the back that plugs into the drive using SATA etc and presents onto USB (and in my case eSATA) on the outside. Thence you can plug it into anything that talks USB and recognises the drive.

neilball

I use a Synology DS1815  currently populated with 6 drives, and use it for my CD collection (ripped as lossless FLAC for Sonos plus MP3 for Apple/portable devices - approx 500MB currently), plus DVD/BluRay backups (MKVs played in multiple locations using Kodi on a variety of hardware platforms - currently around 10TB), plus NVR for my Dahua IP-based CCTV cameras using the Synology Surveillance Station apps (6 cameras, some 4Mp, some 12Mp, setup to record using motion detection, and at full native resolution, and overwritten after 30 days). I'm also starting to migrate my photo collection over to the unit (taking it as an opportunity to review how I tag and organise photos so it's taking time to sort out). Finally I also backup from a variety of laptops to the NAS using a file sync program (one way sync only, no deletions). I also use a variety of other storage methods for backup of important stuff too, I don't rely just on my NAS.

I've upgraded the NAS ram to 16GB, and it sits on a single gigabit connection to my network. It easily copes with all duties simultaneously and shows no signs of running out of steam.

I only use WD Red drives, no SSDs in my NAS as it would offer no benefit for the streaming or CCTV.

I use Synology hybrid raid and have all disks in one volume with separate folders/shares for each "activity". This gives better storage utilisation with an element of redundancy for one or two concurrent drive failures (depending on whether you choose one or two redundant drives in the array).

mickevh

It's perhaps worth mentioning about mirrored RAID (RAID1) - data is written to all discs in the mirror simultaneously and the write operation is not considered to be completed until the data is successfully committed to all discs (there can be more than two discs in a mirror.) Mechanisms are employed to "roll back" a write if it doesn't complete successfully for any reason.

So data is either written to all discs or none - there's never any sense of being present on one but not the other (unless you are recovering from a failure in which case the whole lot is being rebuilt.) It's called an "atomic" process (there's a lot of them in computing technology) in that it is either completely successful, or completely failed - there's never any half measure or partial success.

It is often asked "in that case what's the point" of RAID: It is to avail continued uninterrupted access to data in the event of a disc failure. The use case for that is obvious in a business environment where work can't stop for a day or two because we're dropped a disc (they all die in the end) but many argue it's overkill in SOHO. Thusly, as others have observed, RAID is not a backup.

DarkEntity

Doh...wrong link clicked

Sloppy Bob

I'd listen to what people are advising you, you're just going to fill your NAS, pointlessly, with drives that are too small and leave no room for expansion.

Also in a RAID 1 (or RAID 10) mirrored array all the drives have to be the same size, so if you stick in a small 500GB SSD for your music, every drive after that, regardless of its size will only be seen as 500GB.

I have an 8-Bay NAS with a total available drive space of ~ 54TB (16TB currently free), it's split into 3 folders
X: Media
Y: Data
Z: Photos and documents.

These all show up on my desktop as separate drives, but they are all only 1 volume on the NAS, all sharing that 54TB regardless of which folder or drive letter needs it.

I use Synology SHR-1, so unlike traditional RAID I can mix and match my drive sizes and use all of it as long as I follow a few simple rules. It's equivalent would be RAID 5, if a single drive fails I can just swap it out for a new one of equivalent or larger size and the NAS will continue working as before with no issues. You can also use SHR-2 which gives dual disk redundancy.
Redundancy is the key word however, RAID of any type is not backup. If the NAS fails, if it gets stolen, if there's a fire it's all gone.
I have a separate backup of all the important data.

The other advantage to SHR compared to traditional RAID is that I can expand my drive pool by removing one of the smaller disks and replacing it with a larger one. I just did this recently, removing 3 x 6TB drives and replacing them one at a time with 10TB drives.

The older 6TB's then replaced smaller ones in my backup NAS, also running SHR-1.

Personally, I think you need to do a lot more research as your approach to this strikes me as very wrong, I don't see the benefit in a non-commercial environment of using SSD's in your NAS either.

EDIT - Well that was pointless as I just realised this is an old thread that someone else gave a pointless bump..... doh