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NAS advice
Hello. I'm trying to work out what I need to get to replace my trusty old Firewire Drobo. The Drobo has been outstanding for the 20 odd years I've owned it, but Firewire is pretty much dead and Drobo themselves seem to have gone out of business. I've been looking at Synology NAS enclosures but I don't really understand RAID and I'm concerned about the noise as the thing will need to live in my studio. Can I fill them with SSDs like I had in the Drobo? How much will I need to know about RAID? Anyone here using one for external sample storage?
Comments
I use a Synology NAS and it is quiet. I find it straightforward to use and doesn’t require knowledge of how RAIDs work. I am not sure if SSDs are a great idea. I have read mixed things about long-term reliability of SSDs for backups. Some articles say that if using SSDs for a NAS that you should stick ones designed for NAS use.
The more storage you use the better as the NAS does some redundant storage so data remains retrievable if a drive starts to go bad. My understanding is that SDD’s fail without warning when they go bad whereas HDDs have warnings before catastrophic failure.
I am not an expert though. So, I could be wrong.
You can completely skip the RAID thing by starting with a single disk inserted before setup.
The unit will then run in „just a bunch of disks“ mode if you add more disks later and is fairly quiet (if your drives are).
In RAID setup it‘s the opposite: it will be permanently shifting data around and kill „regular“ drives in no time. I‘ve had this in a company once where we started with (new) spare drives from the shelf and the default RAID setup.
In non-RAID it‘s a great solution, even covers MacOS9 network and data, supports TimeMachine and auto-backup to external drives.
RAID doesn‘t add any security for (archival type) of backups.
But it may be required to secure transaction data (like shop processes) with hot swap and self healing capabilities in higher RAID levels.
Excellent info, thanks both!
It won’t kill disks to use redundancy. Synology’s default is an easy to use hybrid raid that offers redundancy. They call the mode SHR. It is what Synology recommends for non-experts and I chose it after talking to friends with more expertise than me all of whom recommended using a mode with some redundancy.
Get the biggest drives you can comfortably afford and get one’s intended for NAS use.
The hybrid raid mode is Time Machine compatible.
I am not sure how it handles the resource forks of early OSX and earlier Mac files. I have archived those files to external drives from my Mac after discovering that few UNIX-based systems handle them well.
I spent the whole bank holiday weekend inadvertently connecting a WD My Cloud drive (by being dismantled) up to another drive with a Raspberry Pi 400 in between, it went on for ages, the My Cloud drive kept going read-only and behaving craply in the way that it must’ve been doing all the time in the NAS enclosure (it basically never worked properly in recent years)
In the end my solution was to scrap it all and just do without all the data – who needs that much data anyway? Useless – I feel much freeer and more relaxed now it’s all gone
Delete everything is certainly one option and it really does sound like freedom. Might stick to @espiegel123's advice for now though.
You want 10 gigabit ethernet on your Mac. If it's not built in check out adapters like this one, here is one from OWC.
Apple also sells an adapter and I've used that one in the past, but it's not compatible with newer Macs without another adapter and much slower.