I currently have a 18TB HDD in a external enclosure connected to a raspberry pi 4 via USB cable. Soon I’ll get a second 18TB for redundancy.
I use it to store mostly media and use it as a plex server, and going to make it a cloud service with nextcloud.
I’ve been looking at the QNAP TR-002 (~150€) solution, which can make it a RAID 1 configuration without much hassle, and I assume I’d reconnect it to the PI and use it as I’ve been doing it, but should I look into another solution? Like a Synology DS220j (~190€) or DS220+ (~360€) or a QNAP equivelent?
The TR-002 is the most affordable, but I’ve never had a proper NAS solution so I’d like to hear some input on the matter.
I’ve been thinking about the same thing lately. There are down sides to both approaches: a DAS wouldn’t be reliable because I’ve red just horror stories about the controllers inside, even when using the JBOD mode.
A NAS would be limited by the gigabit interface on the Pi.
I guess you could try to find a decent DAS with a good controller that does mirroring decently and see if it’s stable enough.
Haven’t read any horror stories like that about the DAS.
Don’t really want more headaches as I had to already accept the disk to be NTFS and not EXT4. But that’s another story.
If it were a NAS, the plex server and nextcloud could be in the NAS itself, no? This way probably wouldn’t need the PI for this specific project and maybe I could think of a 2.5G NAS… even though it would start to be a bit out of budget.
Well make sure to find a good quality ones. When I was shopping for a dual 2.5" adapter there were lots of bad reviews. It was some Orico one if I recall correctly.
Why NTFS over EXT4?
Exactly, you won’t need a Pi anymore. Unless you bought a very simple NAS would be nice to offload the Nextcloud istance on the Pi 4.
Currently the 18TB is on a ORICO 3139U3 enclosure, but since I’d be a QNAP TR-002 I’d assume it would just work? (no idea what i’m talking about)
I’ve tried formating it to EXT4 with the pi, set up plex, samba, nfs, but when I rebooted the PI and tried to automount the drive through fstab, it would fail and say something like the partition was’nt properly mapped, and so I couldn’t even mount it. Tried several other times, but always failed with the reboot test. So tried with ntfs, and worked kinda properly (have a script to stop plex, smb, nfs and unmount the drive before rebooting). Tho this was a later solution, so probably could try ext4 again eventually.
Could use the PI for PI hole and nextcloud, for sure.
I’ve owned the QNAP TR-002 for a couple of years now as a RAID1 backup DAS on a Windows 10 machine. I haven’t used the hardware RAID switch on it, but have been using the software instead. I’ve had no issues with it whatsoever.
That being said, I don’t believe the QNAP software works on Linux, so you would be limited to using the hardware RAID switch. As with all hardware RAID solutions, you run the risk of the hardware dying and having to buy the same exact hardware in order to recover your array. Software RAID in Linux may be feasible, but I haven’t tried it. I’m also not sure the Pi would handle it as well as a full desktop does.
Nice to get a word from a TR-002 owner!
I read somewhere that the way the RAID 1 is implemented on the TR-002, you could simply remove a disk, as it is hot-swappable, connect it to a windows machine and read from it no problem. After reading this the TR-00 won some extra points in my head, but who knows if it was real.
If I had extra HDDs lying around I’d be happy to test that out, but sadly I don’t. If that is the case, though, that would be cool for sure. I had never intended to use the hardware RAID as my system is plenty powerful for software RAID, but like you wanted an affordable solution.
If I didn’t have 10TB of data in backups I’d happily do it.
If it DOES work that way I’d switch it to hardware RAID in a heartbeat as I plan on switching to Linux in the near future, so if you do end up getting it that info would be invaluable and appreciated.
I just upgraded my HDD capacity and tested the swap theory with both software and hardware RAID1 modes with the TR-002 and I’m pleased to say that it works! I placed both old hard drives that were in software mode into an external dock and all data was present on both. I did the same with the new drives in having them in hardware mode; all data present.
EDIT: I should also note that this was tested with Windows 10. I can’t test other OSes at this time.
I too finally got my TR-002 setup. Had to replace one of the drives I ordered with the TR-002, as it was DoA, and that took a long while.
And yeah! The hardware raid 1 totally works, take both disks into diferent bays and they have the same data, awesome!
I have it connected to the raspberry pi and use it with SMB, works flawlessly. Since I’ve had troubles with ext4 and windows and yada-yada… I use it in NTFS. I feel like it’s a bit slow, transfers range from 60mb/s to 30mb/s, enough for non intensive use.
Anyways, awesome that the TR-002 solution works!
I’m happy for both of us!
Awesome! Good to know that it works with RPi. Those speeds don’t sound normal, though. Are you doing sequential or 4k random transfers? If the latter, those speeds actually could be normal; if the former, I wonder if it’s possibly a limitation of the RPi or SMB? That’s a bit beyond my knowledge level.
My daily backups are large, sequential writes and get close to the max for 7,200 RPM drives, anywhere between 180MB/s to 220MB/s.
Never used a DAS, besides if you could call USB HDDs a DAS (which technically it is, but…). So I am biased towards NAS.
This time I went with the approach to have a NAS doing NAS things and a separate device using that as storage backend and doing server stuff. I haven’t finished tinkering after 5 months, but that’s because I have a problem myself. The setup is split between an Odroid HC4 (NAS) and an Odroid N2+ (server). If I would have seen this 2 months ago, I would recommended to combine an HC4 with the Pi. Run NFS and Samba on the HC4 and Plex and NextCloud on the Pi.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach, but it gives you some redundancy. If the NAS fails, you still get to use the server after you get a new NAS and put in the drives. If your server dies, all your data is still there on the NAS. But depending on your situation, you may need a switch with more ports, or just simply another switch. I planned this from the beginning, so I knew what I was getting myself into.
