Ahhh, it’s starting to make more sense now. At the moment, I’m just considering a setup for home use only. Although having access wherever I go sounds very cool and could come in handy when traveling. Leaps and bounds better than my current method of filling USB drives and using an OTG adapter! Thanks.
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Well in that case, let me recommend a Synology box. If all you want to do is serve files over SMB, it will work great. I know this because I’ve used a DS413j for the past 5 years to do just that myself.
They are bulletproof, zero maintenance, they just work. If a disk fails it beeps and you get an email, then you slot it in and it rebuilds the RAID.
Also it doesn’t really matter, but the Synology UI is unmatched. Nobody else even comes close in the NAS space.
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Yeah, I’ll second the Synology.
I’m a huge advocate of ZFS for the DIYers out there, but if you’re looking for an inexpensive all-in-one solution, the Synology really is the best choice.
Do you know what it uses as it’s underlying storage system?
I believe Synology uses BTRFS now.
gulp
Okay.
I don’t know if I trust BTRFS quite yet. It’s nice and flexible, but it’s also got a nasty habit of eating data for lunch.
I’m guessing the Synology uses ZFS lol. It is PERFECT for my immediate needs actually, but if I choose to expand the capabilities of my setup, this will always be a NAS. Although that may be years from now. This plus four 8TB MyStore drives will cost a little over $1000 with current pricing. Good thing Black Friday is coming up.
Nope, looks like it’s BTRFS.
https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/Btrfs
TBH, I wouldn’t worry too much about it, I’m sure they wouldn’t use it if they weren’t confident in it.
Synology only uses BTRFS for its filesystem, it doesn’t use BTRFS RAID. It uses its own system SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) on top of BTRFS. SHR is great, it splits up each disk into chunks allowing you to use disks of different sizes and still benefit in your end volume.
If you don’t want BTRFS you can still choose EXT4, but you lose the automatic checksumming and copy on write features, which are pretty nice for a NAS. Snapshots too.
I don’t know of any Linux-based products that are shipping with ZFS out of the box, due to legal ambiguity about licensing terms. Linux’s GPLv2 license forces you to license everything it touches as GPLv2 (it’s a viral license), while ZFS’s CDDL doesn’t allow you to license the code under a different license. The ambiguity is around what exactly constitutes “touching” (these are not the actual terms used, just illustrating).
Just bought two 10TB EasyStore’s today that I plan on shucking. I’m gonna go with the Synology DS418j it looks like. I have another question though. Since I don’t need but 4TB at the moment, I was going to put them in RAID 1 until it got close to filling up, then add another mirrored set of 10TB’s. If there was a way to just add a mirrored set as I run out of space, that would cut down on drive wear until they are needed and allow me to expand two more drives. However, that would just be too awesome to work. Would I have to backup the first mirrored set, then turn the two mirrored RAID 1 sets into RAID 10 before copying back the data? I’m thinking that’s what I’d have to do.
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Good choice. Just use SHR (synology hybrid RAID). It will let you add disks as you go and automatically expand your set with redundancy. Writes will be a bit slower as it uses parity, but if you’re just storing media that won’t matter.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/What_is_Synology_Hybrid_RAID_SHR
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Sounds ideal. Thanks.
SHR is a major advantage of using Synology and extremely cool for home users. I started out with 4 2TB drives in my DS413j 5 years ago, then over the years as disks failed or there were sales, I replaced them with larger ones. First a 3TB, then two 4TBs. It wastes less space by cutting up each disk into blocks then RAIDing those rather than the entire disk, preserving redundancy with less waste.
Does that do anything more than just creating partitions? MD can raid partitions too and you want to do that over using the entire drive anyways, so you can waste some space to make sure your replacement drives partition can be the exact same size. If nothing else Synology is easier to use than MD though, Id imagine.
It uses mdraid and handles all that stuff for you. SHR is just their name for the orchestration layer.
I am reviving this topic with an update on some of my decisions. When I made this original post, I was suffering from a couple of things: tech envy (wanting something just because it’s cool) and not knowing exactly what I wanted/needed. I also made the decision that 4k video for my entire movie collection just isn’t worth the massive storage requirements and replacing all of my current 1080p content.
I had purchased four 10TB EasyStores with the intention of putting them in a RAID 10 array. However, sanity prevailed and without the need for all that space or redundancy, I returned two of them. I decided against a NAS and went with a Dell T1700 with a Xeon E3 1265L V3 CPU & 16GB RAM. I installed a spare 250GB SSD for a boot drive and one of the shucked 10TB drives in it. The 2nd 10TB EasyStore I left in it’s enclosure and backup any changes or new movies every week. I believe this method will provide me with the longest use of my drives.
I currently use Kodi on my FireStick 4k and only play my movies/shows at their native resolution, so transcoding isn’t an issue right now, but the workstation has enough power for a couple of transcodes using Plex if I ever decide to go that route. The T1700 also has built-in RAID support should I ever need to employ that. Currently, I am only using 4TB of the 10TB drive so I have a way to go.
I thank everyone for their comments and suggestions and welcome any additional comments or concerns with my current setup.