Hi all,

Still playing with the idea of putting together a couple of NAS's, one
for me (because) and one for daughter as she want's to get all her
photos together in one place (or 'copies of' at least).

Trying to keep the power requirements and noise levels to the minimum
whilst providing a reasonable (sufficient) online capacity to do what
is required at the lowest possible cost.

To that end I already have a few of the slim line (Atom powered)
Shuttle PC's:

http://www.shuttle.eu/products/disco...bones/xs35v3l/

.... with low capacity SSD's and enough RAM (4GB) to run something
like Open Media Vault.

https://www.openmediavault.org/

I've been running OMV on a Raspberry Pi2b for some time now and it
seems pretty reliable and the performance sufficient to stream a video
etc. Not saying it's 'fast' as these things go, but it's adequate,
very very low power and nearly silent (you can just hear the 4TB
external laptop drive running now and then).

However, the Pi is a bit 'bitsy' to give someone as a working solution
compared with the Shuttle, because you can actually fit two 2.5"
drives in the shuttle, the additional one going on the SATA connector
for the slim line drive (that's not present). So, the small SSD on
that for the boot / system and 'something bigger' for the actual
shared storage.

Now, you can buy a 2.5" form factor WD Red drive in 1TB (max) and
whilst that would probably be sufficient for daughters needs, isn't
'big' as such. However, what it does mean is that a 2TB USB backup
drive would be adequate and that helps to keep the overall price down.

So then we come to drives, makes and reliability.

*Traditionally* we would have stuck 'a drive' in whatever we were
doing and that would have been it, but now we have different drives
for different roles ... laptop, desktop, CCTV, NAS, Server, DVR's etc.

But, I can get 2 x 1TB 2.5" 'std' drives for the price of one 'Red'
drive or 1 drive of 2+ times the capacity of the Red?

If said drive was in a Shuttle running OMV and the drive spinning down
when idle ... and assuming they were fast, quiet and cool enough in
use, mightn't std drives be better VFM, even in the long term?

Along those lines, over 10 years ago I built a Windows Home Server
using 3 x Hitachi 500GB laptop drives (providing 1.5TB via Drive
Extender) and fingers crossed, they still seem to be hanging in
there. I can't remember if the drives spin down when idle but they
certainly spin down when the server hibernates and it does that most
nights. I notice you can still get Hitachi (HGST) 2.5" drives in 1TB
(~£45) and assuming they were the same thing as I have in my WHS, then
I'd have to say I'd be inclined to get a couple of them.

Yes, I could get a Synology box (DS119j?) and a higher capacity 3.5"
drive but at a lot more cost and no way I could swap out the hardware
so cheaply (outside the warranty etc).

So, apart from the d-i-y focused thoughts above, can anyone say these
days that any make / model of hard drive is actually going to be
better or worse (from a reliability POV) or is it still mostly a
matter of luck how long they last?

FWIW, I believe 'heat' is a killer of some electronic equipment and my
WHS and the HDD's run very cool (I ducted the air over the HDD's
specifically).

We probably all have tales of drives that lasted for ever but the
Internet is now littered with people reporting drives dying pretty
quickly. ;-(

I notice you can now buy 1TB SSD's for under £100 but would that be
any more likely to last 10 years an a conventional drive in a NAS
role?

Cheers, T i m

On 17/08/2019 13:01, T i m wrote:
Hi all,

Still playing with the idea of putting together a couple of NAS's, one
for me (because) and one for daughter as she want's to get all her
photos together in one place (or 'copies of' at least).

Trying to keep the power requirements and noise levels to the minimum
whilst providing a reasonable (sufficient) online capacity to do what
is required at the lowest possible cost.

To that end I already have a few of the slim line (Atom powered)
Shuttle PC's:

http://www.shuttle.eu/products/disco...bones/xs35v3l/

... with low capacity SSD's and enough RAM (4GB) to run something
like Open Media Vault.

https://www.openmediavault.org/

I've been running OMV on a Raspberry Pi2b for some time now and it
seems pretty reliable and the performance sufficient to stream a video
etc. Not saying it's 'fast' as these things go, but it's adequate,
very very low power and nearly silent (you can just hear the 4TB
external laptop drive running now and then).

However, the Pi is a bit 'bitsy' to give someone as a working solution
compared with the Shuttle, because you can actually fit two 2.5"
drives in the shuttle, the additional one going on the SATA connector
for the slim line drive (that's not present). So, the small SSD on
that for the boot / system and 'something bigger' for the actual
shared storage.

With the Pi 4, the Pi is now fast, proper gigabit ethernet. It also goes
up to 4GB RAM so you can run loads of other services on it as well as
file sharing.

Also SSDs are moving into cheap mass storage territory, e.g. Samsung
QVO. It's only going to get cheaper, quickly. For occasional NAS use
SSDs are probably already more durable than HDDs. For home use I think
the age of spinners is coming to an end.

I get what you are saying about the Pi not having a nice case, but the
Pi + SSD does seem to be a really neat solution. USB drives are faster
than a gigabit lan, so no need to worry about the lack of SATA. You can
even run it all off POE.

So happy with the Pi 4 + SSD as a NAS for my frequent NAS files, I was
looking for something to put my old spinning HDDs in, but everything
look a bit expensive or crap.

I think as an interim solution I will just put the spinning HDD's in an
old core2duo PC and use them for backup, +occasional use. In a couple of
years it will all be SSD and I can junk the old HDDs and just use
something like a PI 4 for everything. Even it if I left the old PC on
24/7 it would be three years before the electricity cost was more than
the capital cost of something like a less powerful Synology.





Now, you can buy a 2.5" form factor WD Red drive in 1TB (max) and
whilst that would probably be sufficient for daughters needs, isn't
'big' as such. However, what it does mean is that a 2TB USB backup
drive would be adequate and that helps to keep the overall price down.

So then we come to drives, makes and reliability.

*Traditionally* we would have stuck 'a drive' in whatever we were
doing and that would have been it, but now we have different drives
for different roles ... laptop, desktop, CCTV, NAS, Server, DVR's etc.

But, I can get 2 x 1TB 2.5" 'std' drives for the price of one 'Red'
drive or 1 drive of 2+ times the capacity of the Red?

If said drive was in a Shuttle running OMV and the drive spinning down
when idle ... and assuming they were fast, quiet and cool enough in
use, mightn't std drives be better VFM, even in the long term?

Along those lines, over 10 years ago I built a Windows Home Server
using 3 x Hitachi 500GB laptop drives (providing 1.5TB via Drive
Extender) and fingers crossed, they still seem to be hanging in
there. I can't remember if the drives spin down when idle but they
certainly spin down when the server hibernates and it does that most
nights. I notice you can still get Hitachi (HGST) 2.5" drives in 1TB
(~£45) and assuming they were the same thing as I have in my WHS, then
I'd have to say I'd be inclined to get a couple of them.

Yes, I could get a Synology box (DS119j?) and a higher capacity 3.5"
drive but at a lot more cost and no way I could swap out the hardware
so cheaply (outside the warranty etc).

So, apart from the d-i-y focused thoughts above, can anyone say these
days that any make / model of hard drive is actually going to be
better or worse (from a reliability POV) or is it still mostly a
matter of luck how long they last?

FWIW, I believe 'heat' is a killer of some electronic equipment and my
WHS and the HDD's run very cool (I ducted the air over the HDD's
specifically).

We probably all have tales of drives that lasted for ever but the
Internet is now littered with people reporting drives dying pretty
quickly. ;-(

I notice you can now buy 1TB SSD's for under £100 but would that be
any more likely to last 10 years an a conventional drive in a NAS
role?

Cheers, T i m

Pancho wrote:

For occasional NAS use SSDs are probably already more durable than HDDs.
For home use I think the age of spinners is coming to an end.

I have 2x 4TB spinners in RAID1 for my samba box, I think I'd be loathe
to burn a grand to have them be SSD.

On 17/08/2019 15:06, Andy Burns wrote:
Pancho wrote:

For occasional NAS use SSDs are probably already more durable than
HDDs. For home use I think the age of spinners is coming to an end.

I have 2x 4TB spinners in RAID1 for my samba box, I think I'd be loathe
to burn a grand to have them be SSD.
+1.

SSD simply doesnt make sense for my server at current prices.

I rarely reboot it, so speed of boot is not an isue and over the netowrk
that is the limiting factor on file performsancem, not the disk speed



--
To ban Christmas, simply give turkeys the vote.

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

I have 2x 4TB spinners in RAID1 for my samba box, I think I'd be
loathe to burn a grand to have them be SSD.

+1.
SSD simply doesnt make sense for my server at current prices.

I rarely reboot it, so speed of boot is not an isue and over the netowrk
that is the limiting factor on file performsancem, not the disk speed

Mine does have a 64GB SSD for the O/S, but only because I had a couple
knocking around.

I was quite disappointed in my old samsung 256 gig only running for four
years personally. That was one of those that was like a big chip on the
motherboard socket. I now have a bigger on that pretends to be a normal
drive, and I backup each week.

To be honest it is the unreliability of drives that makes me still use cds
and dvds. If you shove them all onto media in a box and the box goes south
and you don't have the originals.....
Brian

--
----- --
This newsgroup posting comes to you directly from...
The Sofa of Brian Gaff...

Blind user, so no pictures please
Note this Signature is meaningless.!
"T i m" wrote in message
...
Hi all,

Still playing with the idea of putting together a couple of NAS's, one
for me (because) and one for daughter as she want's to get all her
photos together in one place (or 'copies of' at least).

Trying to keep the power requirements and noise levels to the minimum
whilst providing a reasonable (sufficient) online capacity to do what
is required at the lowest possible cost.

To that end I already have a few of the slim line (Atom powered)
Shuttle PC's:

http://www.shuttle.eu/products/disco...bones/xs35v3l/

... with low capacity SSD's and enough RAM (4GB) to run something
like Open Media Vault.

https://www.openmediavault.org/

I've been running OMV on a Raspberry Pi2b for some time now and it
seems pretty reliable and the performance sufficient to stream a video
etc. Not saying it's 'fast' as these things go, but it's adequate,
very very low power and nearly silent (you can just hear the 4TB
external laptop drive running now and then).

However, the Pi is a bit 'bitsy' to give someone as a working solution
compared with the Shuttle, because you can actually fit two 2.5"
drives in the shuttle, the additional one going on the SATA connector
for the slim line drive (that's not present). So, the small SSD on
that for the boot / system and 'something bigger' for the actual
shared storage.

Now, you can buy a 2.5" form factor WD Red drive in 1TB (max) and
whilst that would probably be sufficient for daughters needs, isn't
'big' as such. However, what it does mean is that a 2TB USB backup
drive would be adequate and that helps to keep the overall price down.

So then we come to drives, makes and reliability.

*Traditionally* we would have stuck 'a drive' in whatever we were
doing and that would have been it, but now we have different drives
for different roles ... laptop, desktop, CCTV, NAS, Server, DVR's etc.

But, I can get 2 x 1TB 2.5" 'std' drives for the price of one 'Red'
drive or 1 drive of 2+ times the capacity of the Red?

If said drive was in a Shuttle running OMV and the drive spinning down
when idle ... and assuming they were fast, quiet and cool enough in
use, mightn't std drives be better VFM, even in the long term?

Along those lines, over 10 years ago I built a Windows Home Server
using 3 x Hitachi 500GB laptop drives (providing 1.5TB via Drive
Extender) and fingers crossed, they still seem to be hanging in
there. I can't remember if the drives spin down when idle but they
certainly spin down when the server hibernates and it does that most
nights. I notice you can still get Hitachi (HGST) 2.5" drives in 1TB
(~£45) and assuming they were the same thing as I have in my WHS, then
I'd have to say I'd be inclined to get a couple of them.

Yes, I could get a Synology box (DS119j?) and a higher capacity 3.5"
drive but at a lot more cost and no way I could swap out the hardware
so cheaply (outside the warranty etc).

So, apart from the d-i-y focused thoughts above, can anyone say these
days that any make / model of hard drive is actually going to be
better or worse (from a reliability POV) or is it still mostly a
matter of luck how long they last?

FWIW, I believe 'heat' is a killer of some electronic equipment and my
WHS and the HDD's run very cool (I ducted the air over the HDD's
specifically).

We probably all have tales of drives that lasted for ever but the
Internet is now littered with people reporting drives dying pretty
quickly. ;-(

I notice you can now buy 1TB SSD's for under £100 but would that be
any more likely to last 10 years an a conventional drive in a NAS
role?

Cheers, T i m

On 17/08/2019 13:01, T i m wrote:
Hi all,

Still playing with the idea of putting together a couple of NAS's, one
for me (because) and one for daughter as she want's to get all her
photos together in one place (or 'copies of' at least).

Trying to keep the power requirements and noise levels to the minimum
whilst providing a reasonable (sufficient) online capacity to do what
is required at the lowest possible cost.

To that end I already have a few of the slim line (Atom powered)
Shuttle PC's:

http://www.shuttle.eu/products/disco...bones/xs35v3l/

... with low capacity SSD's and enough RAM (4GB) to run something
like Open Media Vault.

https://www.openmediavault.org/

I've been running OMV on a Raspberry Pi2b for some time now and it
seems pretty reliable and the performance sufficient to stream a video
etc. Not saying it's 'fast' as these things go, but it's adequate,
very very low power and nearly silent (you can just hear the 4TB
external laptop drive running now and then).

However, the Pi is a bit 'bitsy' to give someone as a working solution
compared with the Shuttle, because you can actually fit two 2.5"
drives in the shuttle, the additional one going on the SATA connector
for the slim line drive (that's not present). So, the small SSD on
that for the boot / system and 'something bigger' for the actual
shared storage.

Now, you can buy a 2.5" form factor WD Red drive in 1TB (max) and
whilst that would probably be sufficient for daughters needs, isn't
'big' as such. However, what it does mean is that a 2TB USB backup
drive would be adequate and that helps to keep the overall price down.

So then we come to drives, makes and reliability.

*Traditionally* we would have stuck 'a drive' in whatever we were
doing and that would have been it, but now we have different drives
for different roles ... laptop, desktop, CCTV, NAS, Server, DVR's etc.

But, I can get 2 x 1TB 2.5" 'std' drives for the price of one 'Red'
drive or 1 drive of 2+ times the capacity of the Red?

If said drive was in a Shuttle running OMV and the drive spinning down
when idle ... and assuming they were fast, quiet and cool enough in
use, mightn't std drives be better VFM, even in the long term?

Along those lines, over 10 years ago I built a Windows Home Server
using 3 x Hitachi 500GB laptop drives (providing 1.5TB via Drive
Extender) and fingers crossed, they still seem to be hanging in
there. I can't remember if the drives spin down when idle but they
certainly spin down when the server hibernates and it does that most
nights. I notice you can still get Hitachi (HGST) 2.5" drives in 1TB
(~£45) and assuming they were the same thing as I have in my WHS, then
I'd have to say I'd be inclined to get a couple of them.

Yes, I could get a Synology box (DS119j?) and a higher capacity 3.5"
drive but at a lot more cost and no way I could swap out the hardware
so cheaply (outside the warranty etc).

So, apart from the d-i-y focused thoughts above, can anyone say these
days that any make / model of hard drive is actually going to be
better or worse (from a reliability POV) or is it still mostly a
matter of luck how long they last?

FWIW, I believe 'heat' is a killer of some electronic equipment and my
WHS and the HDD's run very cool (I ducted the air over the HDD's
specifically).

We probably all have tales of drives that lasted for ever but the
Internet is now littered with people reporting drives dying pretty
quickly. ;-(

I notice you can now buy 1TB SSD's for under £100 but would that be
any more likely to last 10 years an a conventional drive in a NAS
role?

Cheers, T i m


'Putting together'?

I've used a couple of methods to provide a NAS and Timecapsule (for Mac)
services (R Pi, PC based..), tried Western Digital units, and now
Synology. The latter is by far the best.

For home use, I went for dual disks in a RAID config. If I want I can
access it from anywhere but I've not enabled this feature.

I've also got a single drive system I use in the motorhome. It also has
most of the clever facilities although I don't need to use them.

User/admin interface to set up etc is straight forward. There are a
range of apps they can run, including Plex on the dual system (it has a
faster uP), even Apache so you could host a website from it, although
I've not tried this.

"Jethro_uk" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 13:01:03 +0100, T i m wrote:

Hi all,

Still playing with the idea of putting together a couple of NAS's, one
for me (because) and one for daughter as she want's to get all her
photos together in one place (or 'copies of' at least).

Trying to keep the power requirements and noise levels to the minimum
whilst providing a reasonable (sufficient) online capacity to do what is
required at the lowest possible cost.

To that end I already have a few of the slim line (Atom powered) Shuttle
PC's:

http://www.shuttle.eu/products/disco...bones/xs35v3l/

... with low capacity SSD's and enough RAM (4GB) to run something like
Open Media Vault.

https://www.openmediavault.org/

I've been running OMV on a Raspberry Pi2b for some time now and it seems
pretty reliable and the performance sufficient to stream a video etc.
Not saying it's 'fast' as these things go, but it's adequate, very very
low power and nearly silent (you can just hear the 4TB external laptop
drive running now and then).

However, the Pi is a bit 'bitsy' to give someone as a working solution
compared with the Shuttle, because you can actually fit two 2.5" drives
in the shuttle, the additional one going on the SATA connector for the
slim line drive (that's not present). So, the small SSD on that for the
boot / system and 'something bigger' for the actual shared storage.

Now, you can buy a 2.5" form factor WD Red drive in 1TB (max) and whilst
that would probably be sufficient for daughters needs, isn't 'big' as
such. However, what it does mean is that a 2TB USB backup drive would be
adequate and that helps to keep the overall price down.

So then we come to drives, makes and reliability.

*Traditionally* we would have stuck 'a drive' in whatever we were doing
and that would have been it, but now we have different drives for
different roles ... laptop, desktop, CCTV, NAS, Server, DVR's etc.

But, I can get 2 x 1TB 2.5" 'std' drives for the price of one 'Red'
drive or 1 drive of 2+ times the capacity of the Red?

If said drive was in a Shuttle running OMV and the drive spinning down
when idle ... and assuming they were fast, quiet and cool enough in use,
mightn't std drives be better VFM, even in the long term?

Along those lines, over 10 years ago I built a Windows Home Server using
3 x Hitachi 500GB laptop drives (providing 1.5TB via Drive Extender) and
fingers crossed, they still seem to be hanging in there. I can't
remember if the drives spin down when idle but they certainly spin down
when the server hibernates and it does that most nights. I notice you
can still get Hitachi (HGST) 2.5" drives in 1TB (~£45) and assuming they
were the same thing as I have in my WHS, then I'd have to say I'd be
inclined to get a couple of them.

Yes, I could get a Synology box (DS119j?) and a higher capacity 3.5"
drive but at a lot more cost and no way I could swap out the hardware so
cheaply (outside the warranty etc).

So, apart from the d-i-y focused thoughts above, can anyone say these
days that any make / model of hard drive is actually going to be better
or worse (from a reliability POV) or is it still mostly a matter of luck
how long they last?

FWIW, I believe 'heat' is a killer of some electronic equipment and my
WHS and the HDD's run very cool (I ducted the air over the HDD's
specifically).

We probably all have tales of drives that lasted for ever but the
Internet is now littered with people reporting drives dying pretty
quickly. ;-(

I notice you can now buy 1TB SSD's for under £100 but would that be any
more likely to last 10 years an a conventional drive in a NAS role?

Steer well clear of Seagate.

Work fine for me.

On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 05:43:39 +1000, jeikppkywk, better known as cantankerous
trolling senile geezer Rodent Speed, wrote:

Steer well clear of Seagate.

Work fine for me.

How could it be different, eh, auto-contradicting asshole?

--
Website (from 2007) dedicated to the 85-year-old trolling senile
cretin from Oz:
https://www.pcreview.co.uk/threads/r...d-faq.2973853/

On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 15:01:55 +0100, Pancho
wrote:

snip
However, the Pi is a bit 'bitsy' to give someone as a working solution
compared with the Shuttle, because you can actually fit two 2.5"
drives in the shuttle, the additional one going on the SATA connector
for the slim line drive (that's not present). So, the small SSD on
that for the boot / system and 'something bigger' for the actual
shared storage.

With the Pi 4, the Pi is now fast, proper gigabit ethernet. It also goes
up to 4GB RAM so you can run loads of other services on it as well as
file sharing.

True, however, I'm not sure there is an OMV image for the Pi4 yet, or
I'd give it a go on mine (I may have tried to install it on top of
Raspbian but don't think it worked for some Linuxy magic reason).

Also SSDs are moving into cheap mass storage territory, e.g. Samsung
QVO. It's only going to get cheaper, quickly. For occasional NAS use
SSDs are probably already more durable than HDDs. For home use I think
the age of spinners is coming to an end.

For desktop / laptops I think you are right, and possibly commercial
server farms, where heat and energy can be a big issue, cost less so.

I get what you are saying about the Pi not having a nice case, but the
Pi + SSD does seem to be a really neat solution.

There are plenty of nice cases for the various models, my Pi2b is in a
nice ally one, it's just that you have to stand the (USB) drive next
to it, or it on top of the drive it's a std desktop jobby and I can
see that becoming an issue in the wrong hands.

By contrast, a Shuttle PC with both drives internal would be more like
most SOHO NAS's, being all-in-one.

Nothing stopping one putting a RPi and HDD in a single case of course.
;-)

USB drives are faster
than a gigabit lan, so no need to worry about the lack of SATA.

Even USB2?

You can
even run it all off POE.

Handy if you wanted it down the shed or in the loft I guess. ;-)

So happy with the Pi 4 + SSD as a NAS for my frequent NAS files, I was
looking for something to put my old spinning HDDs in, but everything
look a bit expensive or crap.

Are you just running Raspian and some shares or some other NAS
software?

I applied the firmware patch to my Pi4 last night but not sure I was
working it hard enough to see much of an improvement before after. I
also have a length of copper bar and a round heatsink I intend to fit
though the lid of a stock RPi case (when it comes from CPC) so it can
run a bit cooler (especially if on 24/4 as a NAS).

I think as an interim solution I will just put the spinning HDD's in an
old core2duo PC and use them for backup, +occasional use.

It would nice to have a MB with 8 SATA connectors and run JBOD or
whatever for that sort of thing. WHS V1 does that with it's 'Drive
Extender' and across all interfaces and drive sizes. ;-)

In a couple of
years it will all be SSD and I can junk the old HDDs and just use
something like a PI 4 for everything.

Might be a Pi6 by then. ;-)

Even it if I left the old PC on
24/7 it would be three years before the electricity cost was more than
the capital cost of something like a less powerful Synology.

True, but you still have a fairly big box stuck somewhere and often,
fairly noisy (old PSU and CPU fans etc). That's why I liked these
Shuttle PC's, silent and very small. I even considered mounting the
opened Shuttle PC inside an ITX case as then I could extend both SATA
connectors (main HDD and DVD) to std drives, inc 3.5" jobbies inside
the main case.

Cheers, T i m

On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 15:06:45 +0100, Andy Burns
wrote:

Pancho wrote:

For occasional NAS use SSDs are probably already more durable than HDDs.
For home use I think the age of spinners is coming to an end.

I have 2x 4TB spinners in RAID1 for my samba box, I think I'd be loathe
to burn a grand to have them be SSD.

When looking around recently, if you can get away with the smaller
sizes then the price difference between NAS spinners and NAS SSD's
aren't far apart. 80 quid for a 1TB 2.5" WD Red and ~£90 for 'a' 1TB
SSD and ~100 for a Sammy.

Cheers, T i m

On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 15:17:17 +0100, Andy Burns
wrote:

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

I have 2x 4TB spinners in RAID1 for my samba box, I think I'd be
loathe to burn a grand to have them be SSD.

+1.
SSD simply doesnt make sense for my server at current prices.

I rarely reboot it, so speed of boot is not an isue and over the netowrk
that is the limiting factor on file performsancem, not the disk speed

Mine does have a 64GB SSD for the O/S, but only because I had a couple
knocking around.

An issue / limitation with the OMV NAS software is that it (OOTB
anyway?) uses all of the boot drive for the OS, even though it only
actually uses ~8GB of it? ;-(

I was looking for old 32GB drives or possibly the M.2 format, assuming
they could be had cheaper than a unbranded 60/4GB and could be adapted
to plug into a std HDD SATA connector ... just because.

Ironically the Shuttles have a handy SD card slot built in but whilst
you could run OMV from the SD card, I don't believe it's recommended
you do (even with the USB plugin thing) due to the number or writes
wearing an SD card out in no time at all (something to do with the
lack of wear leveling)?

Cheers, T i m

On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 05:43:39 +1000, "jeikppkywk"
wrote:



"Jethro_uk" wrote in message
...
snip

Steer well clear of Seagate.

Work fine for me.

And this is the thing with hard drives, they seem to be like tyres or
oil re the feelings of their supporters / detractors. ;-)

My first 'big' drive was a half height, 3.5" Seagate 80MB SCSI and I
may still have it somewhere and it's probably still working. ;-)

The Buffalo TeraStation I was given the other day came with three x
2012 and one 2009 2TB Seagate Barracudas and one of the 2012 drives
had failed it's SMART test because of reallocated blocks.

The NAS hadn't been running for a while before being given to me
(possibly a few years) but was probably on 27/7 from new (possibly
2009 from the age of the oldest drive). So I'm guessing the other 3
2009 drives had already failed?

Cheers, T i m

On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 20:06:23 +0100, Brian Reay wrote:

snip


'Putting together'?

Yes: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/di...h/put-together


I've used a couple of methods to provide a NAS and Timecapsule (for Mac)
services (R Pi, PC based..), tried Western Digital units, and now
Synology. The latter is by far the best.

Because?

For home use, I went for dual disks in a RAID config.

Why? Ok, I can see if you needed something available 24/7 RAID1
(presumably) might give you that but what if the system hardware
fails? Also, what are you doing for the backups of the NAS itself?

If I want I can
access it from anywhere but I've not enabled this feature.

That was something that daughter might need and felt might be easier
to sort if some commercial solution came with the DDNS function via a
'My Cloud' sorta solution.

I've also got a single drive system I use in the motorhome. It also has
most of the clever facilities although I don't need to use them.

I installed and configured a Synology DS218j for a friend and once we
had sorted the DOA WD 4TB Red drive ... it sorta went Ok but the UI
was a bit confusing and non intuitive. And this was with someone who
knew what he wanted and what to expect etc?

User/admin interface to set up etc is straight forward. There are a
range of apps they can run, including Plex on the dual system (it has a
faster uP), even Apache so you could host a website from it, although
I've not tried this.

Understood. I have scrolled though the list of plugins (or whatever
Synology call them) and some of them looked quite interesting.

My main once would be whatever instigated a complete 'bare metal'
level backup of a Windows client PC on a daily basis but not sure
there is such a thing?

Based on suggestions offered by others here previously, I'm probably
going to order a Synology DS119j and duplicate the entire box across
the LAN to something (OMV probably) running on a Shuttle or RPi.
'Duplexing' (SFT III?) across two devices should give even better
availability and resilience than RAID1 in a single box? It also might
be the only way I could ensure daughter actually backs up her NAS. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

T i m wrote:
On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 20:06:23 +0100, Brian Reay wrote:

snip


'Putting together'?

Yes: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/di...h/put-together

I was trying to get a handle on the level you were going down to.

Scratch building from a drive, perhaps a R Pi and some software, or
assembling something from a mix of junk box parts/units and may be new
bits, or something else. All are perfectly good ideas. Ive tried several
of them myself.




I've used a couple of methods to provide a NAS and Timecapsule (for Mac)
services (R Pi, PC based..), tried Western Digital units, and now
Synology. The latter is by far the best.

Because?

Mainly convenience and features. While the Synology has a mass of features
Im not currently using, there are several I can see myself using at some
point.



For home use, I went for dual disks in a RAID config.

Why? Ok, I can see if you needed something available 24/7 RAID1
(presumably) might give you that but what if the system hardware
fails? Also, what are you doing for the backups of the NAS itself?


That is the idea of dual disk RAID. If a drive fails you can recover the
data.

If the actual box fails, who made it doesnt matter that much. It needs
repairing or replacing.


If I want I can
access it from anywhere but I've not enabled this feature.

That was something that daughter might need and felt might be easier
to sort if some commercial solution came with the DDNS function via a
'My Cloud' sorta solution.


That is also one of the features I can see myself using. Ive used it in
the past with my other solutions but dont need it at the moment.



I've also got a single drive system I use in the motorhome. It also has
most of the clever facilities although I don't need to use them.

I installed and configured a Synology DS218j for a friend and once we
had sorted the DOA WD 4TB Red drive ... it sorta went Ok but the UI
was a bit confusing and non intuitive. And this was with someone who
knew what he wanted and what to expect etc?


One of mine is the 218.

Some bits of the UI could be better but, all in all, it is pretty good in
my view.

I run PLEX on mine and it €˜feeds media (video and audio) to various TVs
and Wi-fi enabled radios. I used to run a Linux hosted version on an old
PC but this is part of the convenience factor I mentioned.




User/admin interface to set up etc is straight forward. There are a
range of apps they can run, including Plex on the dual system (it has a
faster uP), even Apache so you could host a website from it, although
I've not tried this.

Understood. I have scrolled though the list of plugins (or whatever
Synology call them) and some of them looked quite interesting.

My main once would be whatever instigated a complete 'bare metal'
level backup of a Windows client PC on a daily basis but not sure
there is such a thing?

Based on suggestions offered by others here previously, I'm probably
going to order a Synology DS119j and duplicate the entire box across
the LAN to something (OMV probably) running on a Shuttle or RPi.
'Duplexing' (SFT III?) across two devices should give even better
availability and resilience than RAID1 in a single box? It also might
be the only way I could ensure daughter actually backs up her NAS. ;-)

Cheers, T i m


The one I use in the motorhome is a 119. As you know the 119 only has one
drive so, if it fails, that is it. You can use your approach but it it
seems like a lot of hassle. The drives tend to be the weak spot and even
they arent bad. Your idea is certainly workable. Better is a matter of
opinion. While I enjoy tinkering, there are things I want to work
seamlessly in the background without needing intervention etc. The NAS is
one of those.

My 119 isnt used for backup, well not really. It is just a media store-
essentially I copy (nearly) all of our media library on to it and it feeds
the media system in the motorhome. Useful when in bad weather ;-) I
recently bought Senior Management an Amazon Fire Stick ( there is some
comedy series- Mrs Mazel? - she wanted to watch) and it works beautifully
with the 4G Wi-fi, Kodi, .....

BTW, WD seem to have lost the plot with their NAS drives. I have one which
is fine*, it must be 5 years old at least. It is dedicated to a particular
project now. When I wanted something for the motorhome, one of those with a
larger drive, would have been ideal. Sure enough they seemed to still sell
them, minor cosmetic differences but obviously the same series it
seemed....

The UI was a nightmare. Once the shares were set up they would drop off the
network willy nilly, everything was geared to setting up a personal cloud.
The old version offers remote access- which I have used in the past,
although I preferred my Linux based server- but it doesnt dominate the
operation.

*World Book series or something similar. They are style to look like books.

On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 00:44:41 +0100, T i m wrote:

Why? Ok, I can see if you needed something available 24/7 RAID1
(presumably) might give you that but what if the system hardware fails?

I use HP microservers a lot. The main NAS is one of those. If the
hardware fails, I swap it for a spare. If a disk fails (happened once in
9 years) then it's RAID-1 so it's easy to replace the faulty disk (cold
swap, but very fast) and rebuild the array.

Also, what are you doing for the backups of the NAS itself?

Three overlapping backup strategies, two of which are off-site.

BTW, they are all Western Digital Red now. The one that failed wasn't -
it was a Seagate.

I did have one other WD failure - at 37 hours, while I was setting up a
new system. Replaced very quickly by WD.

--
My posts are my copyright and if @diy_forums or Home Owners' Hub
wish to copy them they can pay me £1 a message.
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org
*lightning surge protection* - a w_tom conductor

"Jethro_uk" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 05:43:39 +1000, jeikppkywk wrote:

"Jethro_uk" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 13:01:03 +0100, T i m wrote:

Hi all,

Still playing with the idea of putting together a couple of NAS's, one
for me (because) and one for daughter as she want's to get all her
photos together in one place (or 'copies of' at least).

Trying to keep the power requirements and noise levels to the minimum
whilst providing a reasonable (sufficient) online capacity to do what
is required at the lowest possible cost.

To that end I already have a few of the slim line (Atom powered)
Shuttle PC's:

http://www.shuttle.eu/products/disco...bones/xs35v3l/

... with low capacity SSD's and enough RAM (4GB) to run something
like Open Media Vault.

https://www.openmediavault.org/

I've been running OMV on a Raspberry Pi2b for some time now and it
seems pretty reliable and the performance sufficient to stream a video
etc. Not saying it's 'fast' as these things go, but it's adequate,
very very low power and nearly silent (you can just hear the 4TB
external laptop drive running now and then).

However, the Pi is a bit 'bitsy' to give someone as a working solution
compared with the Shuttle, because you can actually fit two 2.5"
drives in the shuttle, the additional one going on the SATA connector
for the slim line drive (that's not present). So, the small SSD on
that for the boot / system and 'something bigger' for the actual
shared storage.

Now, you can buy a 2.5" form factor WD Red drive in 1TB (max) and
whilst that would probably be sufficient for daughters needs, isn't
'big' as such. However, what it does mean is that a 2TB USB backup
drive would be adequate and that helps to keep the overall price down.

So then we come to drives, makes and reliability.

*Traditionally* we would have stuck 'a drive' in whatever we were
doing and that would have been it, but now we have different drives
for different roles ... laptop, desktop, CCTV, NAS, Server, DVR's etc.

But, I can get 2 x 1TB 2.5" 'std' drives for the price of one 'Red'
drive or 1 drive of 2+ times the capacity of the Red?

If said drive was in a Shuttle running OMV and the drive spinning down
when idle ... and assuming they were fast, quiet and cool enough in
use, mightn't std drives be better VFM, even in the long term?

Along those lines, over 10 years ago I built a Windows Home Server
using 3 x Hitachi 500GB laptop drives (providing 1.5TB via Drive
Extender) and fingers crossed, they still seem to be hanging in
there. I can't remember if the drives spin down when idle but they
certainly spin down when the server hibernates and it does that most
nights. I notice you can still get Hitachi (HGST) 2.5" drives in 1TB
(~£45) and assuming they were the same thing as I have in my WHS, then
I'd have to say I'd be inclined to get a couple of them.

Yes, I could get a Synology box (DS119j?) and a higher capacity 3.5"
drive but at a lot more cost and no way I could swap out the hardware
so cheaply (outside the warranty etc).

So, apart from the d-i-y focused thoughts above, can anyone say these
days that any make / model of hard drive is actually going to be
better or worse (from a reliability POV) or is it still mostly a
matter of luck how long they last?

FWIW, I believe 'heat' is a killer of some electronic equipment and my
WHS and the HDD's run very cool (I ducted the air over the HDD's
specifically).

We probably all have tales of drives that lasted for ever but the
Internet is now littered with people reporting drives dying pretty
quickly. ;-(

I notice you can now buy 1TB SSD's for under £100 but would that be
any more likely to last 10 years an a conventional drive in a NAS
role?

Steer well clear of Seagate.

Work fine for me.

I've worked with a variety of external drives these past 10 years.

Me too, for much longer.

The only ones that have failed have been Seagate. Two within warranty.

None of mine have, all the failures have been WDs.

I can't fault their warranty service - but they're the
only manufacturers I've needed to make use of.

Its been the exact opposite for me.

On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 19:47:34 +1000, jeikppkywk, better known as cantankerous
trolling senile geezer Rodent Speed, wrote:


I've worked with a variety of external drives these past 10 years.

Me too, for much longer.

The only ones that have failed have been Seagate. Two within warranty.

None of mine have, all the failures have been WDs.

I can't fault their warranty service - but they're the
only manufacturers I've needed to make use of.

Its been the exact opposite for me.

So, who are we going to believe? The senile trolling asshole from Oz or some
decent poster?

--
Website (from 2007) dedicated to the 85-year-old trolling senile
cretin from Oz:
https://www.pcreview.co.uk/threads/r...d-faq.2973853/

On 17/08/2019 15:01, Pancho wrote:

I get what you are saying about the Pi not having a nice case, but the
Pi + SSD does seem to be a really neat solution. USB drives are faster
than a gigabit lan, so no need to worry about the lack of SATA. You can
even run it all off POE.

I don't think you will find USB drives faster on the Pi than the GigE.
They still don't have full throughput.


They are a lot faster on the Pi4 than previous Pies.

On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 06:26:52 +0000 (UTC), Brian Reay
wrote:

T i m wrote:
On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 20:06:23 +0100, Brian Reay wrote:

snip


'Putting together'?

Yes: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/di...h/put-together

I was trying to get a handle on the level you were going down to.

Ok.

Scratch building from a drive, perhaps a R Pi and some software, or
assembling something from a mix of junk box parts/units and may be new
bits, or something else. All are perfectly good ideas. I’ve tried several
of them myself.

And I am open to any of those, whatever give me the best results. That
said, I have a couple of starting points (for a 'NAS') re the RPi's or
the Shuttles. eg. Once we go to a full PC we might be looking at a
more traditional 'File Server' (although the boundary between NAS and
FS is fairly blurred these days).


I've used a couple of methods to provide a NAS and Timecapsule (for Mac)
services (R Pi, PC based..), tried Western Digital units, and now
Synology. The latter is by far the best.

Because?

Mainly convenience and features. While the Synology has a mass of features
I’m not currently using, there are several I can see myself using at some
point.

Understood.



For home use, I went for dual disks in a RAID config.

Why? Ok, I can see if you needed something available 24/7 RAID1
(presumably) might give you that but what if the system hardware
fails? Also, what are you doing for the backups of the NAS itself?


That is the idea of dual disk RAID. If a drive fails you can recover the
data.

Yeahbut ...

If the actual box fails, who made it doesn’t matter that much. It needs
repairing or replacing.

So what do you do in the meantime or how has the duplex drives helped?
What if that box is no longer available, what are the chances of a new
/ alternative box being able to use that drive (and offer the data)?

Which is why I asked about how you were backing up your NAS?


If I want I can
access it from anywhere but I've not enabled this feature.

That was something that daughter might need and felt might be easier
to sort if some commercial solution came with the DDNS function via a
'My Cloud' sorta solution.


That is also one of the features I can see myself using. I’ve used it in
the past with my other solutions but don’t need it at the moment.

Ok.



I've also got a single drive system I use in the motorhome. It also has
most of the clever facilities although I don't need to use them.

I installed and configured a Synology DS218j for a friend and once we
had sorted the DOA WD 4TB Red drive ... it sorta went Ok but the UI
was a bit confusing and non intuitive. And this was with someone who
knew what he wanted and what to expect etc?


One of mine is the 218.

218+ (black) or 218j (white) Brian?

Some bits of the UI could be better but, all in all, it is pretty good in
my view.

Yes, once I had worked out what bit of what utility did what ... and
many things could be done by more that one bit ... it seemed to work.

I run PLEX on mine and it ‘feeds’ media (video and audio) to various TVs
and Wi-fi enabled radios. I used to run a Linux hosted version on an old
PC but this is part of the convenience factor I mentioned.

Ok.


snip

Based on suggestions offered by others here previously, I'm probably
going to order a Synology DS119j and duplicate the entire box across
the LAN to something (OMV probably) running on a Shuttle or RPi.
'Duplexing' (SFT III?) across two devices should give even better
availability and resilience than RAID1 in a single box? It also might
be the only way I could ensure daughter actually backs up her NAS. ;-)


The one I use in the motorhome is a 119. As you know the 119 only has one
drive so, if it fails, that is it.

But what is the MTBF on the drive versus the box itself?

You can use your approach but it it
seems like a lot of hassle.

Depending on how you manage your NAS backups, possibly?

The drives tend to be the weak spot and even
they aren’t bad.

I'd say I've had more kit go dead than drives (in my ownership). I
have a dead netbook here and a dead Shuttle PC that both have perfect
hard drives in them. ;-)

Your idea is certainly workable. Better is a matter of
opinion.

Again, depending on how you run your NAS backups? RAID in any form
isn't a backup.

While I enjoy tinkering, there are things I want to work
seamlessly in the background without needing intervention etc. The NAS is
one of those.

Likewise, and I'd suggest there is more work fitting even a single
drive in say a DS119j than plugging a USB drive into a PRi or Shuttle
.... and installing the OS still needs to be done on the Synology boxes
(and on the 2 x 4TB drives we had on the one I installed I'd say it
look longer than actually installing OMV on a Shuttle and configuring
the drive for use, albeit that it did most of it on it's own).

My 119 isn’t used for backup, well not really. It is just a media store-
essentially I copy (nearly) all of our media library on to it and it feeds
the media system in the motorhome.

Then that might be an answer to my backup question, if it's just a
copy of the main files.

Useful when in bad weather ;-)

I can think of other things the Mrs and I would do, specifically if we
were on our own. ;-)

I
recently bought Senior Management an Amazon Fire Stick ( there is some
comedy series- Mrs Mazel? - she wanted to watch) and it works beautifully
with the 4G Wi-fi, Kodi, .....

Cool.

BTW, WD seem to have lost the plot with their NAS drives.

The 'My Cloud' things?

I have one which
is fine*, it must be 5 years old at least. It is dedicated to a particular
project now. When I wanted something for the motorhome, one of those with a
larger drive, would have been ideal. Sure enough they seemed to still sell
them, minor cosmetic differences but obviously the same series it
seemed....

Ok ...

The UI was a nightmare. Once the shares were set up they would drop off the
network willy nilly, everything was geared to setting up a personal cloud.

;-(

The old version offers remote access- which I have used in the past,
although I preferred my Linux based server- but it doesn’t dominate the
operation.

I think that would be a 'handy feature' for daughter *if* it meant she
could access files from work, *without* having to install any software
at work (because she can't without IT doing it).

*World Book series or something similar. They are style to look like books.

I have seen them.

I hope to get a DS119j myself soon (I have enough Top Cashback
rewards) and already have a drive waiting to go in it. Once I'm
reasonably familiar with it myself and have tested the ar$e off it
(and a suitable backup drive / solution), I'll probably give it to
daughter. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

p.s. On the lines of 'you can manage what you can measure', I've been
briefly testing all the NAS's / FS's I have here using the little
Windows utility called 'LAN_SpeedTest' (I run an old / free version on
this XP box).

https://old.totusoft.com/downloads.html

You select a share and a test file size and it runs and gives you a
bunch of stats.

https://old.totusoft.com/lanspeed1.h..._PhotoGallery1[PhotoGallery1]/0/

Interesting to see if taking a USB3 shared drive from USB2 to 3 makes
any difference. I would be interested to hear how representative this
particular utility was compared with more sophisticated tests?

On 18 Aug 2019 08:41:06 GMT, Bob Eager wrote:

On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 00:44:41 +0100, T i m wrote:

Why? Ok, I can see if you needed something available 24/7 RAID1
(presumably) might give you that but what if the system hardware fails?

I use HP microservers a lot.

A couple of friends have them Bob (and I think I remember they could
be good VFM when bought with some form of cashback?) but I was
concerned of how specific the hardware was over building my own for
'std' PC parts.

The main NAS is one of those.

What OS is running on it?

If the
hardware fails, I swap it for a spare.

That was my thought re using std PC components (mobos and PSUs
specifically), you just swap out the bad 'bit'.

If a disk fails (happened once in
9 years)

And that's the thing. Whilst I know daughter would be pi$$ed off if
she couldn't access her data because the only disk had failed, I'm not
sure what the odds are on the hardware itself failing (removing access
to both mirrored drives) over the drive (if only a single drive etc)
failing?

then it's RAID-1 so it's easy to replace the faulty disk (cold
swap, but very fast) and rebuild the array.

I'm not sure it's *always* easy though is it Rob? I have read many
tales of the rebuild process screwing up and taking all your data with
it, hence you are *still* reliant on a backup?

Also, what are you doing for the backups of the NAS itself?

Three overlapping backup strategies, two of which are off-site.

Excellent. ;-)

BTW, they are all Western Digital Red now. The one that failed wasn't -
it was a Seagate.

OOI, were the drives that would typically be failing now have been
specific 'NAS / Server' drives or just 'drives' (FWIW etc)?

Like, the drives that came in the TeraStation I was given were 'just'
Seagate Barracudas and I think they were 'just' general purpose hard
drives?

I did have one other WD failure - at 37 hours, while I was setting up a
new system. Replaced very quickly by WD.

I had one (of a friends) go within a couple of hours ... which didn't
help my learning of 'how to set up a Synology NAS' very much. ;-(

The replacement went in and made much more sense of the whole setup
procedure. ;-)

Whilst I can't say I favoured Synology's OS over OMV, I might give
Xpenology a look in case it does things we need 'better'?

https://xpenology.org/

Cheers, T i m

On 17/08/2019 23:53, T i m wrote:
On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 15:01:55 +0100, Pancho
wrote:

snip
However, the Pi is a bit 'bitsy' to give someone as a working solution
compared with the Shuttle, because you can actually fit two 2.5"
drives in the shuttle, the additional one going on the SATA connector
for the slim line drive (that's not present). So, the small SSD on
that for the boot / system and 'something bigger' for the actual
shared storage.

With the Pi 4, the Pi is now fast, proper gigabit ethernet. It also goes
up to 4GB RAM so you can run loads of other services on it as well as
file sharing.

True, however, I'm not sure there is an OMV image for the Pi4 yet, or
I'd give it a go on mine (I may have tried to install it on top of
Raspbian but don't think it worked for some Linuxy magic reason).

Also SSDs are moving into cheap mass storage territory, e.g. Samsung
QVO. It's only going to get cheaper, quickly. For occasional NAS use
SSDs are probably already more durable than HDDs. For home use I think
the age of spinners is coming to an end.

For desktop / laptops I think you are right, and possibly commercial
server farms, where heat and energy can be a big issue, cost less so.

I get what you are saying about the Pi not having a nice case, but the
Pi + SSD does seem to be a really neat solution.

There are plenty of nice cases for the various models, my Pi2b is in a
nice ally one, it's just that you have to stand the (USB) drive next
to it, or it on top of the drive it's a std desktop jobby and I can
see that becoming an issue in the wrong hands.

By contrast, a Shuttle PC with both drives internal would be more like
most SOHO NAS's, being all-in-one.

Nothing stopping one putting a RPi and HDD in a single case of course.
;-)

I just put mine in a cupboard. I expect someone will do a case to hold
an Pi + SSD soon, now the Pi has proper gigabit Ethernet.

Shuttle is nice but expensive.

USB drives are faster
than a gigabit lan, so no need to worry about the lack of SATA.

Even USB2?


No, but the Pi 4 has USB 3.

You can
even run it all off POE.

Handy if you wanted it down the shed or in the loft I guess. ;-)

Added security from theft/fire if it is out of the way. Another basket
to put the eggs in.


So happy with the Pi 4 + SSD as a NAS for my frequent NAS files, I was
looking for something to put my old spinning HDDs in, but everything
look a bit expensive or crap.

Are you just running Raspian and some shares or some other NAS
software?


Just a Smaba share on Raspbian (well Hypriot actually = Debian very
similar to Raspbian Lite. I only used Hypriot as the Docker install was
problematic on the initial release of Raspbian Buster. It's fixed now,
and I would use Raspbian Lite if I reinstall).

I applied the firmware patch to my Pi4 last night but not sure I was
working it hard enough to see much of an improvement before after. I
also have a length of copper bar and a round heatsink I intend to fit
though the lid of a stock RPi case (when it comes from CPC) so it can
run a bit cooler (especially if on 24/4 as a NAS).

I was unaware, good to know, thx.


I think as an interim solution I will just put the spinning HDD's in an
old core2duo PC and use them for backup, +occasional use.

It would nice to have a MB with 8 SATA connectors and run JBOD or
whatever for that sort of thing. WHS V1 does that with it's 'Drive
Extender' and across all interfaces and drive sizes. ;-)

In a couple of
years it will all be SSD and I can junk the old HDDs and just use
something like a PI 4 for everything.

Might be a Pi6 by then. ;-)

Even it if I left the old PC on
24/7 it would be three years before the electricity cost was more than
the capital cost of something like a less powerful Synology.

True, but you still have a fairly big box stuck somewhere and often,
fairly noisy (old PSU and CPU fans etc). That's why I liked these
Shuttle PC's, silent and very small. I even considered mounting the
opened Shuttle PC inside an ITX case as then I could extend both SATA
connectors (main HDD and DVD) to std drives, inc 3.5" jobbies inside
the main case.


But my spinner HDDs are noisy so whatever I put them in will be noisy.
The actual Core2Duo fan + case isn't particularly noisy. I also have a
cupboard to put it in. The real ****er is it doesn't have wake on lan.

I also have an ultra small ZBox CI323 nano, looks nice, it works ok as a
router (130Mb/s OpenVPN tunnel) but is a bit **** for anything else,
although now you mention it it would make a good NAS.

On 18/08/2019 11:17, dennis@home wrote:
On 17/08/2019 15:01, Pancho wrote:

I get what you are saying about the Pi not having a nice case, but the
Pi + SSD does seem to be a really neat solution. USB drives are faster
than a gigabit lan, so no need to worry about the lack of SATA. You
can even run it all off POE.

I don't think you will find USB drives faster on the Pi than the GigE.
They still don't have full throughput.


They do. Kingston SA400S37/240G SSD A400 locally on the Pi4 gives
300MB/s read, 200 MB/s write.

From a windows machine I get 115 MB/s for sequential read and write.

On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 12:42:33 +0100, T i m wrote:

I use HP microservers a lot.

A couple of friends have them Bob (and I think I remember they could be
good VFM when bought with some form of cashback?) but I was concerned of
how specific the hardware was over building my own for 'std' PC parts.

The only thing that's ever failed is a couple of PSUs, and that wasn't
their fault. I fitted optical drives to the machines, and the power
adaptors I'd used failed catastrophically and killed the PSU. New PSUs
aren't cheap from HP, but they are just ITX PSUs, of which I had a few.

The main NAS is one of those.

What OS is running on it?

FreeBSD, with geom/gmirror.

If a disk fails (happened once in 9 years)

And that's the thing. Whilst I know daughter would be pi$$ed off if she
couldn't access her data because the only disk had failed, I'm not sure
what the odds are on the hardware itself failing (removing access to
both mirrored drives) over the drive (if only a single drive etc)
failing?

As I said, spare machine (they were cheap enough). And I always go for
dual (RAID-1) drives - and they even give a small edge in performance
over the single drive.

then it's RAID-1 so it's easy to replace the faulty disk (cold
swap, but very fast) and rebuild the array.

I'm not sure it's *always* easy though is it Rob? I have read many tales
of the rebuild process screwing up and taking all your data with it,
hence you are *still* reliant on a backup?

I have honestly never heard of that happening with geom/gmirror. This is
software RAID in the OS. Hardware RAID I consider problematical (not
least if you can't get exactly the same controller if that fails).

BTW, they are all Western Digital Red now. The one that failed wasn't -
it was a Seagate.

OOI, were the drives that would typically be failing now have been
specific 'NAS / Server' drives or just 'drives' (FWIW etc)?

The first failure was a bog standard Seagate. It came with one of the
early microservers so I just used it.

The second failure was a WD Red, obviously something wrong because of the
quick failure. Some of my early drives are still in there, and they are
WD Blue, but most are now Red ones.

The Red ones have a three year warranty (think Blue are one year) but
they don't go 'deaf' for more than a few seconds if they have trouble
reading a sector - much better when the disk is in an array.

I just checked, and one pair of the Reds has done about 55,000 hours
(pretty well continously). Another is at 47,000 and then it ranges down
through 25,000 - to 3,500 for the newest pair (I upgraded capacity).

I have a total of seven machines running with FreeBSD geom/gmirror.

Also running one Windows machine with a mirrored pair - using the
standard Windows mirroring.




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On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 13:06:42 +0100, Pancho
wrote:

snip

By contrast, a Shuttle PC with both drives internal would be more like
most SOHO NAS's, being all-in-one.

Nothing stopping one putting a RPi and HDD in a single case of course.
;-)

I just put mine in a cupboard. I expect someone will do a case to hold
an Pi + SSD soon, now the Pi has proper gigabit Ethernet.

That would be nice.

Shuttle is nice but expensive.

Not so bad s/h. ;-)

USB drives are faster
than a gigabit lan, so no need to worry about the lack of SATA.

Even USB2?


No, but the Pi 4 has USB 3.

True but I was thinking more the drive (bay) itself if only USB2.

You can
even run it all off POE.

Handy if you wanted it down the shed or in the loft I guess. ;-)

Added security from theft/fire if it is out of the way. Another basket
to put the eggs in.

Quite.


So happy with the Pi 4 + SSD as a NAS for my frequent NAS files, I was
looking for something to put my old spinning HDDs in, but everything
look a bit expensive or crap.

Are you just running Raspian and some shares or some other NAS
software?


Just a Smaba share on Raspbian (well Hypriot actually = Debian very
similar to Raspbian Lite. I only used Hypriot as the Docker install was
problematic on the initial release of Raspbian Buster. It's fixed now,
and I would use Raspbian Lite if I reinstall).

Ok thanks.

Hmm, 'Docker', seen mention of it many times but wasn't sure what it
was. So, that would make it easier to get access to files stored on a
NAS from the outside world ... using the likes of ownCloud possibly?

snip

Even it if I left the old PC on
24/7 it would be three years before the electricity cost was more than
the capital cost of something like a less powerful Synology.

True, but you still have a fairly big box stuck somewhere and often,
fairly noisy (old PSU and CPU fans etc). That's why I liked these
Shuttle PC's, silent and very small. I even considered mounting the
opened Shuttle PC inside an ITX case as then I could extend both SATA
connectors (main HDD and DVD) to std drives, inc 3.5" jobbies inside
the main case.


But my spinner HDDs are noisy so whatever I put them in will be noisy.

Maybe I'm lucky that I can't hear any of mine. ;-) That said, maybe
because they were chosen (or happen to be, as in this Mac Mini) laptop
drives in well damped enclosures / mounts? Even the 4TB external
laptop drive on my OMV RPi2B NAS is virtually silent and that's
currently by our bed. ;-)

The actual Core2Duo fan + case isn't particularly noisy. I also have a
cupboard to put it in.

I prefer to have such machines out in the open to ensure they get a
reasonable airflow?

The real ****er is it doesn't have wake on lan.

That's an advantage of having something that is so low power that it
can just sleep.

I also have an ultra small ZBox CI323 nano, looks nice, it works ok as a
router (130Mb/s OpenVPN tunnel) but is a bit **** for anything else,
although now you mention it it would make a good NAS.

The other day I was copying a large (Ex BD) video file to the OMV
Shuttle whilst streaming another from the OMV it to another PC and the
CUP utilisation was hardly registering, suggesting even the lowly Atom
could cope with such roles with ease.

Cheers, T i m

p.s. I've just noticed / downloading the image for OMV4 for the Pi4.
;-)

On 17/08/2019 20:43, jeikppkywk wrote:


"Jethro_uk" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 13:01:03 +0100, T i m wrote:

Hi all,

Still playing with the idea of putting together a couple of NAS's, one
for me (because) and one for daughter as she want's to get all her
photos together in one place (or 'copies of' at least).

Trying to keep the power requirements and noise levels to the minimum
whilst providing a reasonable (sufficient) online capacity to do what is
required at the lowest possible cost.

To that end I already have a few of the slim line (Atom powered) Shuttle
PC's:

http://www.shuttle.eu/products/disco...bones/xs35v3l/

...Â* with low capacity SSD's and enough RAM (4GB) to run something like
Open Media Vault.

https://www.openmediavault.org/

I've been running OMV on a Raspberry Pi2b for some time now and it seems
pretty reliable and the performance sufficient to stream a video etc.
Not saying it's 'fast' as these things go, but it's adequate, very very
low power and nearly silent (you can just hear the 4TB external laptop
drive running now and then).

However, the Pi is a bit 'bitsy' to give someone as a working solution
compared with the Shuttle, because you can actually fit two 2.5" drives
in the shuttle, the additional one going on the SATA connector for the
slim line drive (that's not present). So, the small SSD on that for the
boot / system and 'something bigger' for the actual shared storage.

Now, you can buy a 2.5" form factor WD Red drive in 1TB (max) and whilst
that would probably be sufficient for daughters needs, isn't 'big' as
such. However, what it does mean is that a 2TB USB backup drive would be
adequate and that helps to keep the overall price down.

So then we come to drives, makes and reliability.

*Traditionally* we would have stuckÂ* 'a drive' in whatever we were doing
and that would have been it, but now we have different drives for
different roles ... laptop, desktop, CCTV, NAS, Server, DVR's etc.

But, I can get 2 x 1TB 2.5" 'std' drives for the price of one 'Red'
drive or 1 drive of 2+ times the capacity of the Red?

If said drive was in a Shuttle running OMV and the drive spinning down
when idle ... and assuming they were fast, quiet and cool enough in use,
mightn't std drives be better VFM, even in the long term?

Along those lines, over 10 years ago I built a Windows Home Server using
3 x Hitachi 500GB laptop drives (providing 1.5TB via Drive Extender) and
fingers crossed, they still seem to be hanging in there. I can't
remember if the drives spin down when idle but they certainly spin down
when the server hibernates and it does that most nights. I notice you
can still get Hitachi (HGST) 2.5" drives in 1TB (~£45) and assuming they
were the same thing as I have in my WHS, then I'd have to say I'd be
inclined to get a couple of them.

Yes, I could get a Synology box (DS119j?) and a higher capacity 3.5"
drive but at a lot more cost and no way I could swap out the hardware so
cheaply (outside the warranty etc).

So, apart from the d-i-y focused thoughts above, can anyone say these
days that any make / model of hard drive is actually going to be better
or worse (from a reliability POV) or is it still mostly a matter of luck
how long they last?

FWIW, I believe 'heat' is a killer of some electronic equipment and my
WHS and the HDD's run very cool (I ducted the air over the HDD's
specifically).

We probably all have tales of drives that lasted for ever but the
Internet is now littered with people reporting drives dying pretty
quickly. ;-(

I notice you can now buy 1TB SSD's for under £100 but would that be any
more likely to last 10 years an a conventional drive in a NAS role?

Steer well clear of Seagate.

Work fine for me.

In my time in IT, seagate, fujistu, IBM and western digital have all
been 'the drives to have' and 'the drives to avoid'


Certain technologies proved good and some bad. What was written on the
case is orthogonal to what is inside.


--
If I had all the money I've spent on drink...
...I'd spend it on drink.

Sir Henry (at Rawlinson's End)

On 18/08/2019 07:26, Brian Reay wrote:
although I preferred my Linux based server

I have just one linux based server.

All of the jobs it does *could* be done better by dedicated boxes, but
then I would have 15 dedicated boxes instead of one massive linux server
with mirrored discs.




--
"And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch".

Gospel of St. Mathew 15:14

On 18 Aug 2019 12:40:35 GMT, Bob Eager wrote:

On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 12:42:33 +0100, T i m wrote:

I use HP microservers a lot.

A couple of friends have them Bob (and I think I remember they could be
good VFM when bought with some form of cashback?) but I was concerned of
how specific the hardware was over building my own for 'std' PC parts.

The only thing that's ever failed is a couple of PSUs, and that wasn't
their fault. I fitted optical drives to the machines, and the power
adaptors I'd used failed catastrophically and killed the PSU.

The worst example of that I witnessed is someone using a very cheap
Molex to SATA power adapter take out a brand new and very large
(expensive) capacity HDD. 5 and 12V crossed over. ;-(


New PSUs
aren't cheap from HP, but they are just ITX PSUs, of which I had a few.

Handy.


The main NAS is one of those.

What OS is running on it?

FreeBSD, with geom/gmirror.

Ok, thanks.

If a disk fails (happened once in 9 years)

And that's the thing. Whilst I know daughter would be pi$$ed off if she
couldn't access her data because the only disk had failed, I'm not sure
what the odds are on the hardware itself failing (removing access to
both mirrored drives) over the drive (if only a single drive etc)
failing?

As I said, spare machine (they were cheap enough). And I always go for
dual (RAID-1) drives - and they even give a small edge in performance
over the single drive.

Understood.

then it's RAID-1 so it's easy to replace the faulty disk (cold
swap, but very fast) and rebuild the array.

I'm not sure it's *always* easy though is it Rob? I have read many tales
of the rebuild process screwing up and taking all your data with it,
hence you are *still* reliant on a backup?

I have honestly never heard of that happening with geom/gmirror. This is
software RAID in the OS.

That's good then.

Hardware RAID I consider problematical (not
least if you can't get exactly the same controller if that fails).

I have heard of a bug in a commercial RAID box that recovered the
replacement (blank) drive over the rest of the array. I have also used
a few HW RAID mobos with mirrored drives (Intel RAID controllers if I
remember correctly) and they were always throwing up error messages
and having issues. It was suggested that software RAID was even less
predictable / reliable?



BTW, they are all Western Digital Red now. The one that failed wasn't -
it was a Seagate.

OOI, were the drives that would typically be failing now have been
specific 'NAS / Server' drives or just 'drives' (FWIW etc)?

The first failure was a bog standard Seagate. It came with one of the
early microservers so I just used it.

Ok.

The second failure was a WD Red, obviously something wrong because of the
quick failure. Some of my early drives are still in there, and they are
WD Blue, but most are now Red ones.

It will be interesting to hear how they fair over time.

The Red ones have a three year warranty (think Blue are one year) but
they don't go 'deaf' for more than a few seconds if they have trouble
reading a sector - much better when the disk is in an array.

Sure. Do I remember correctly that some drives / controllers could
actually ensure all spindles in an array were kept in sync?

I just checked, and one pair of the Reds has done about 55,000 hours
(pretty well continously). Another is at 47,000 and then it ranges down
through 25,000 - to 3,500 for the newest pair (I upgraded capacity).

Interesting, thanks.

I have a total of seven machines running with FreeBSD geom/gmirror.

Cool!

Also running one Windows machine with a mirrored pair - using the
standard Windows mirroring.

Ok. OOI, how many have ever failed in use and how well did they handle
the failure (did they just 'carry on as hoped / expected')?

How do you back that lot up or are some backups of the others?

Cheers, T i m

On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 14:32:28 +0100, T i m wrote:

The only thing that's ever failed is a couple of PSUs, and that wasn't
their fault. I fitted optical drives to the machines, and the power
adaptors I'd used failed catastrophically and killed the PSU.

The worst example of that I witnessed is someone using a very cheap
Molex to SATA power adapter take out a brand new and very large
(expensive) capacity HDD. 5 and 12V crossed over. ;-(

In this case they worked loose, overheated, the plastic melted and
shorted the power!

That was the firewall system. Took less than 20 minutes to change over
(it only runs on a USB stick).



--
My posts are my copyright and if @diy_forums or Home Owners' Hub
wish to copy them they can pay me £1 a message.
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org
*lightning surge protection* - a w_tom conductor

On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 14:32:28 +0100, T i m wrote:

The second failure was a WD Red, obviously something wrong because of
the quick failure. Some of my early drives are still in there, and they
are WD Blue, but most are now Red ones.

It will be interesting to hear how they fair over time.

Some are up top over 50,000 hours (the Red ones).

Sure. Do I remember correctly that some drives / controllers could
actually ensure all spindles in an array were kept in sync?

I would imagine so, as some RAID requires that (I think).

Also running one Windows machine with a mirrored pair - using the
standard Windows mirroring.

Ok. OOI, how many have ever failed in use and how well did they handle
the failure (did they just 'carry on as hoped / expected')?

Two. Carried on as they should and emailed me the details.

How do you back that lot up or are some backups of the others?

Some back up others (on different floors of the house). Some to DVD
(using heavy ECC, see below). Important stuff goes offsite in storage (10
miles away) and also on http://tarsnap.com

DVD ECC is via dvdisaster. I did a test; wrote a DVD with ECC then used a
Swiss Army knife to make random cuts and scrapes (took enough away that
you could see through it). It was recovered perfectly.
--
My posts are my copyright and if @diy_forums or Home Owners' Hub
wish to copy them they can pay me £1 a message.
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org
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On 18/08/2019 13:11, Pancho wrote:
On 18/08/2019 11:17, dennis@home wrote:
On 17/08/2019 15:01, Pancho wrote:

I get what you are saying about the Pi not having a nice case, but
the Pi + SSD does seem to be a really neat solution. USB drives are
faster than a gigabit lan, so no need to worry about the lack of
SATA. You can even run it all off POE.

I don't think you will find USB drives faster on the Pi than the GigE.
They still don't have full throughput.


They do. Kingston SA400S37/240G SSD A400 locally on the Pi4 gives
300MB/s read, 200 MB/s write.

From a windows machine I get 115 MB/s for sequential read and write.


I get 512MB/s write and 516MB/s read from a Samsung 860 sata drive in a
USB caddy.

Somewhat faster from the WD NVME drive in a USB caddy (only problem is
the caddy is too small so the drive can't stay in there).

That's a windows laptop.



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On 18/08/2019 12:26, T i m wrote:
On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 06:26:52 +0000 (UTC), Brian Reay
wrote:



Scratch building from a drive, perhaps a R Pi and some software, or
assembling something from a mix of junk box parts/units and may be new
bits, or something else. All are perfectly good ideas. Ive tried several
of them myself.

And I am open to any of those, whatever give me the best results. That
said, I have a couple of starting points (for a 'NAS') re the RPi's or
the Shuttles. eg. Once we go to a full PC we might be looking at a
more traditional 'File Server' (although the boundary between NAS and
FS is fairly blurred these days).


True. I tend to look at it from the size/convenience angle. Others may
have a different take.

As I see the NAS as background function, I don't want to expend time etc
on it.



I've used a couple of methods to provide a NAS and Timecapsule (for Mac)
services (R Pi, PC based..), tried Western Digital units, and now
Synology. The latter is by far the best.

Because?

Mainly convenience and features. While the Synology has a mass of features
Im not currently using, there are several I can see myself using at some
point.

Understood.



For home use, I went for dual disks in a RAID config.

Why? Ok, I can see if you needed something available 24/7 RAID1
(presumably) might give you that but what if the system hardware
fails? Also, what are you doing for the backups of the NAS itself?


That is the idea of dual disk RAID. If a drive fails you can recover the
data.

Yeahbut ...

If the actual box fails, who made it doesnt matter that much. It needs
repairing or replacing.

So what do you do in the meantime or how has the duplex drives helped?
What if that box is no longer available, what are the chances of a new
/ alternative box being able to use that drive (and offer the data)?

Which is why I asked about how you were backing up your NAS?



The NAS contains data held elsewhere in most cases- eg on local PCs or,
in the case of media, the 'mobile' NAS. Plus, if a disk fails, the data
is 'safe' due to the RAID.

If the Box fails, at worst I pop the disks in a new unit. A few days
downtime isn't crucial.

Remember, this is a home system- not a business.



One of mine is the 218.

218+ (black) or 218j (white) Brian?


The 218+ I assume as it is black.

The 119 one is white.

The disk mounting in the 218+ is much neater, they slide in. No taking
the unit apart (unless you count a cover with drops of all too easily).

The 119 is disk mounting is easy enough but not as neat as the 218+.



Some bits of the UI could be better but, all in all, it is pretty good in
my view.

Yes, once I had worked out what bit of what utility did what ... and
many things could be done by more that one bit ... it seemed to work.

I run PLEX on mine and it €˜feeds media (video and audio) to various TVs
and Wi-fi enabled radios. I used to run a Linux hosted version on an old
PC but this is part of the convenience factor I mentioned.

Ok.


snip

Based on suggestions offered by others here previously, I'm probably
going to order a Synology DS119j and duplicate the entire box across
the LAN to something (OMV probably) running on a Shuttle or RPi.
'Duplexing' (SFT III?) across two devices should give even better
availability and resilience than RAID1 in a single box? It also might
be the only way I could ensure daughter actually backs up her NAS. ;-)


The one I use in the motorhome is a 119. As you know the 119 only has one
drive so, if it fails, that is it.

But what is the MTBF on the drive versus the box itself?

Dunno, I'd have to look at the specs.



You can use your approach but it it
seems like a lot of hassle.

Depending on how you manage your NAS backups, possibly?

The drives tend to be the weak spot and even
they arent bad.

I'd say I've had more kit go dead than drives (in my ownership). I
have a dead netbook here and a dead Shuttle PC that both have perfect
hard drives in them. ;-)


Hmm, certainly in NAS boxes it has always been the drives I've had fail.
I've replaced several drives in 'duff' boxes and given them a new life.



Your idea is certainly workable. Better is a matter of
opinion.

Again, depending on how you run your NAS backups? RAID in any form
isn't a backup.

While I enjoy tinkering, there are things I want to work
seamlessly in the background without needing intervention etc. The NAS is
one of those.

Likewise, and I'd suggest there is more work fitting even a single
drive in say a DS119j than plugging a USB drive into a PRi or Shuttle
... and installing the OS still needs to be done on the Synology boxes
(and on the 2 x 4TB drives we had on the one I installed I'd say it
look longer than actually installing OMV on a Shuttle and configuring
the drive for use, albeit that it did most of it on it's own).

You can plug a USB into the Synology. The 218+ has 2 ports. Not sure
about the 119 I'd have to look (it is in the mh).


My 119 isnt used for backup, well not really. It is just a media store-
essentially I copy (nearly) all of our media library on to it and it feeds
the media system in the motorhome.

Then that might be an answer to my backup question, if it's just a
copy of the main files.

Useful when in bad weather ;-)

I can think of other things the Mrs and I would do, specifically if we
were on our own. ;-)


You forget, I know what you look like. Do YOU wear a paper bag ;-)



I
recently bought Senior Management an Amazon Fire Stick ( there is some
comedy series- Mrs Mazel? - she wanted to watch) and it works beautifully
with the 4G Wi-fi, Kodi, .....

Cool.

BTW, WD seem to have lost the plot with their NAS drives.

The 'My Cloud' things?

I have one which
is fine*, it must be 5 years old at least. It is dedicated to a particular
project now. When I wanted something for the motorhome, one of those with a
larger drive, would have been ideal. Sure enough they seemed to still sell
them, minor cosmetic differences but obviously the same series it
seemed....

Ok ...

The UI was a nightmare. Once the shares were set up they would drop off the
network willy nilly, everything was geared to setting up a personal cloud.

;-(

The old version offers remote access- which I have used in the past,
although I preferred my Linux based server- but it doesnt dominate the
operation.

I think that would be a 'handy feature' for daughter *if* it meant she
could access files from work, *without* having to install any software
at work (because she can't without IT doing it).

*World Book series or something similar. They are style to look like books.

I have seen them.

I hope to get a DS119j myself soon (I have enough Top Cashback
rewards) and already have a drive waiting to go in it. Once I'm
reasonably familiar with it myself and have tested the ar$e off it
(and a suitable backup drive / solution), I'll probably give it to
daughter. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

p.s. On the lines of 'you can manage what you can measure', I've been
briefly testing all the NAS's / FS's I have here using the little
Windows utility called 'LAN_SpeedTest' (I run an old / free version on
this XP box).

https://old.totusoft.com/downloads.html

You select a share and a test file size and it runs and gives you a
bunch of stats.

https://old.totusoft.com/lanspeed1.h..._PhotoGallery1[PhotoGallery1]/0/

Interesting to see if taking a USB3 shared drive from USB2 to 3 makes
any difference. I would be interested to hear how representative this
particular utility was compared with more sophisticated tests?

Windows- I can't run Windows SW easily.

(Not anti Windows, just don't use it.)

On 17/08/2019 13:01, T i m wrote:
Hi all,

Still playing with the idea of putting together a couple of NAS's, one
for me (because) and one for daughter as she want's to get all her
photos together in one place (or 'copies of' at least).

Reading to the end of the thread I didn't see anyone mention the
Backblaze surveys:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/

They have damn good stats on some drive types.

Andy

On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 21:16:15 +0100, Vir Campestris
wrote:

On 17/08/2019 13:01, T i m wrote:
Hi all,

Still playing with the idea of putting together a couple of NAS's, one
for me (because) and one for daughter as she want's to get all her
photos together in one place (or 'copies of' at least).

Reading to the end of the thread

Thanks for that Andy. ;-)

I didn't see anyone mention the
Backblaze surveys:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/

They have damn good stats on some drive types.

I've had a good read but I'm not sure what I can take from it?

By that I mean like many things there isn't really any way you can
sure that version E of something *will* inherit the good
characteristics of version D or that it's baby brother is even the
result of the same parents!

Like badged displays where it's not worth a company making say sub 23"
screens so they just rebadge someone else's (for better or worse).

At least with a (cheaper) 'white label' drive you know you could get
anything and it could be something good or not. It's frustrating
spending more on something that is supposed to be from a 'good' stable
only to find out that it's not (or is the black sheep of the family).

It's like the drives in my old WHS are probably 10+ years old now (I
thought they were Hitachi but WHS device manager tells me they are
500GB Samsung HM501II's):

https://www.hdsentinel.com/storagein...NG%20HM 501II

So I'd love to replace them with 3 x 1TB Samsung drives of the same
build / design as the existing but what are the chances of finding
such a thing?

Cheers, T i m

"T i m" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 18 Aug 2019 21:16:15 +0100, Vir Campestris
wrote:

On 17/08/2019 13:01, T i m wrote:
Hi all,

Still playing with the idea of putting together a couple of NAS's, one
for me (because) and one for daughter as she want's to get all her
photos together in one place (or 'copies of' at least).

Reading to the end of the thread

Thanks for that Andy. ;-)

I didn't see anyone mention the
Backblaze surveys:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/

They have damn good stats on some drive types.

I've had a good read but I'm not sure what I can take from it?

By that I mean like many things there isn't really any way you can
sure that version E of something *will* inherit the good
characteristics of version D or that it's baby brother is even the
result of the same parents!

That's specially true of Seagate that bought the Samsung 3.5"
HDD line relatively recently and has a tradition of continuing the
operations they bought and just rebranding what they produce.

Like badged displays where it's not worth a company making say sub 23"
screens so they just rebadge someone else's (for better or worse).

At least with a (cheaper) 'white label' drive you know you could get
anything and it could be something good or not. It's frustrating
spending more on something that is supposed to be from a 'good' stable
only to find out that it's not (or is the black sheep of the family).

It's like the drives in my old WHS are probably 10+ years old now (I
thought they were Hitachi but WHS device manager tells me they are
500GB Samsung HM501II's):

https://www.hdsentinel.com/storagein...NG%20HM 501II

So I'd love to replace them with 3 x 1TB Samsung drives of the same
build / design as the existing but what are the chances of finding
such a thing?

I do in fact have quite a few of them myself. None have ever failed.

On Mon, 19 Aug 2019 10:54:43 +1000, cantankerous trolling geezer Rodent
Speed, the auto-contradicting senile sociopath, blabbered, again:


I do in fact have quite a few of them myself. None have ever failed.

OBVIOUSLY it has been different for other people, you self-opinionated,
senile asshole!

--
addressing nym-shifting senile Rodent:
"You on the other hand are a heavyweight bull****ter who demonstrates
your particular prowess at it every day."
MID:

On Mon, 19 Aug 2019 10:54:43 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:
snip

By that I mean like many things there isn't really any way you can
sure that version E of something *will* inherit the good
characteristics of version D or that it's baby brother is even the
result of the same parents!

That's specially true of Seagate that bought the Samsung 3.5"
HDD line relatively recently and has a tradition of continuing the
operations they bought and just rebranding what they produce.

And I'm not sure if you could ever tell what was actually under the
label? I have bought some White Label RAM where it's just that, a
label over some branded product but I think it might be easier to
're-brand' a HDD as you could overwrite the firmware than some RAM
when you probably can't.

snip

It's like the drives in my old WHS are probably 10+ years old now (I
thought they were Hitachi but WHS device manager tells me they are
500GB Samsung HM501II's):

https://www.hdsentinel.com/storagein...NG%20HM 501II

So I'd love to replace them with 3 x 1TB Samsung drives of the same
build / design as the existing but what are the chances of finding
such a thing?

I do in fact have quite a few of them myself. None have ever failed.

I think when I built the server I considered what make of drive I'd
never / rarely seen faulty and also looked at the drives the local PC
shop was often replacing ... and hence why I chose the Samsungs.

Years ago I can remember seeing (and having) several dead Maxtor
drives but that could have been party down to them being cheaper than
most at the time and so appearing in greater quantities.

So I need to hope that Seagate carried on making the Samsung drives
the same way Samsung did but just stuck their badge on, if I'm looking
for a 1TB Sammy spinner. If so then I can get 3 x 1TB Seagate
spinners for the price of 1 SSD.

Did Samsung make a 1TB 2.5" pre 2011 (when Seagate took that product
line over), if I was looking for NOS? ;-)

I wonder if it's more likely I could find a (or 3) 1TB external USB
2.5" drive that still uses a std drive and interface as they can often
be found cheaper than a bare drive and I can use the enclosure for
smaller drives (or the old Samsungs as backup / portable drives).

Cheers, T i m

"T i m" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 19 Aug 2019 10:54:43 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:
snip

By that I mean like many things there isn't really any way you can
sure that version E of something *will* inherit the good
characteristics of version D or that it's baby brother is even the
result of the same parents!

That's specially true of Seagate that bought the Samsung 3.5"
HDD line relatively recently and has a tradition of continuing the
operations they bought and just rebranding what they produce.

And I'm not sure if you could ever tell what was actually under the
label? I have bought some White Label RAM where it's just that, a
label over some branded product but I think it might be easier to
're-brand' a HDD as you could overwrite the firmware than some RAM
when you probably can't.

snip

It's like the drives in my old WHS are probably 10+ years old now (I
thought they were Hitachi but WHS device manager tells me they are
500GB Samsung HM501II's):

https://www.hdsentinel.com/storagein...NG%20HM 501II

So I'd love to replace them with 3 x 1TB Samsung drives of the same
build / design as the existing but what are the chances of finding
such a thing?

I do in fact have quite a few of them myself. None have ever failed.

I think when I built the server I considered what make of drive I'd
never / rarely seen faulty and also looked at the drives the local PC
shop was often replacing ... and hence why I chose the Samsungs.

Years ago I can remember seeing (and having) several dead Maxtor
drives but that could have been party down to them being cheaper than
most at the time and so appearing in greater quantities.

So I need to hope that Seagate carried on making the Samsung drives
the same way Samsung did but just stuck their badge on, if I'm looking
for a 1TB Sammy spinner. If so then I can get 3 x 1TB Seagate
spinners for the price of 1 SSD.

Did Samsung make a 1TB 2.5" pre 2011 (when Seagate took that product
line over), if I was looking for NOS? ;-)

Seagate only bought the 3.5" line, not the 2.5" line.

I wonder if it's more likely I could find a (or 3) 1TB external USB
2.5" drive that still uses a std drive and interface as they can often
be found cheaper than a bare drive and I can use the enclosure for
smaller drives (or the old Samsungs as backup / portable drives).

Dunno, I don't bother with 2.5" drives, I buy the 3.5" drives and 8TB drives
most recently.

On Mon, 19 Aug 2019 19:54:42 +1000, cantankerous trolling geezer Rodent
Speed, the auto-contradicting senile sociopath, blabbered, again:

I wonder if it's more likely I could find a (or 3) 1TB external USB
2.5" drive that still uses a std drive and interface as they can often
be found cheaper than a bare drive and I can use the enclosure for
smaller drives (or the old Samsungs as backup / portable drives).

Dunno, I don't bother with 2.5" drives, I buy the 3.5" drives and 8TB drives
most recently.

Like WHO gives a **** what you buy or don't buy, you senile asshole!

--
"Anonymous" to trolling senile Rot Speed:
"You can **** off as you know less than pig **** you sad
little ignorant ****."
MID:

On 18/08/2019 13:57, T i m wrote:

USB drives are faster
than a gigabit lan, so no need to worry about the lack of SATA.

Even USB2?


No, but the Pi 4 has USB 3.

True but I was thinking more the drive (bay) itself if only USB2.

I use this USB 3 Its only £5.99.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01N2JIQR7/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1