Home NAS with SSDs

[TheGreenBastard]

I concur regarding Seagate, absolute shambles from my experience, HGST however have been rock solid.

At home I have a pretty simple FreeNAS setup 4 HDD (RAIDZ) fronted by 250Gb SSD cache. Different RAID levels can amplify reads/writes performance; seek time's crap with HDD but when fronted by a fat cache like 250Gb SSD your most recent stuff is going to fly.

[d000hg]

Are you thrashing your NAS to get these failures, because even in a home PC I'd consider a drive failure unusual and NAS grade are supposed to be better?

[eek]

Are you thrashing your NAS to get these failures, because even in a home PC I'd consider a drive failure unusual and NAS grade are supposed to be better?

Manufacturing issues - as I said earlier either purchase drives over a period of time or use different manufacturers so you don't buy multiple drives made at the same time from the same batch of parts.

[Hobosapien]

One benefit of SSD that is often overlooked is they generate much less heat than HDDs and are silent, so you can get away with using a silent enclosure. i.e. no fans whirring away.

This is more important if the NAS is in the living room as you will hear it if watching a quiet scene and the ambient temperature is high enough for the NAS fans to kick in.

[Platypus]

Are you thrashing your NAS to get these failures, because even in a home PC I'd consider a drive failure unusual and NAS grade are supposed to be better?

The drive failures I saw were not in a NAS but a stand-alone PC, 3 drives in a RAID 5 config, or perhaps they were mirrored, I don't recall. There was no thrashing... in fact I'd say they were barely used. Windows partition on an SSD and "Data" mostly "My Documents" on the Seagates, plus a few TB's of movies.

To be slightly fair, these drives quickly gained a reputation for being bally awful. I'll never buy Seagate again. Or WD.

[b0redom]

Another vote for FreeNAS. IMO ZFS > ext3/4/BTRFS.

I use RAID Z2 on mine. SSDs are pointless for me. It will saturate the gigE, and lives in a cupboard under the stairs.

[unixman]

For storing and viewing movies, a Raspberry Pi connected to a big disk might work better than an old laptop. The laptop will require significant power, aside from the disk power requirements. (My own laptop takes 50W - including the internal disk, or course). The Pi will need just 6W or so. Full NAS software isn't really required for just storing files. The Pi is able to share disks without additional software, and it can do RAID if needed (using LVM).

The latest Pi, model 4, can saturate a gigabit lan for reading, and gets about 50% saturation for writing. The Pi 2 is limited to fast ethernet speeds (about 10 megabytes/s in practice) and the Pi 3, despite its gig interface, maxes out at about 15 megabytes/s I believe.

According to my tests, streaming humble SD and HD video takes network bandwidth of about half and 1 megabyte/s respectively. 4k will be much more, I haven't tested it.

Attach a large USB memory stick to a Pi, and you can have a "NAS" of bizarrely small capacity (<= 512GB) but requiring 6W or less. An external 2.5 USB disk will add only a couple of Watts I think.

[Snarf]

I have a decade old Netgear Stora with two 500GB seagate disks configured in RAID1.

Ive had two disk failures in 10 years.. one because I dropped the disk enclosure while powered up from the above head height shelf that it sits on and once just through general aging of the disks...

Realistically I'd consider that to be one disk failure in 10 years which is pretty good.

Its been a while since I opened it up but I think that its Seagate low power disks that I have in there, no complaints (Well except that the amount of storage is pitiful by today's standards.

I cant see the benefit in using SSDs for a home/small office NAS - the performance isnt needed, the reliability is about the same and the cost per gb of SSD is considerably more.

[unixman]

I agree SSD disks are pointless in a domestic NAS. They are sweet in a laptop though, really make it fly.

[sal]

Full SSD NAS is waste of money, there are HDDs with equal reliability at a fraction of the cost. If you still want to splash out make sure, that the OS supports SSDs. Lack of Trim and similar functions will shorten the life of your SSDs dramatically.

Personally I prefer my own box, rather than paying a massive price premium to the likes of Synology and QNAP. I have 2 gen8 HP microservers NAS boxes running for over 6 years without issues. Popular OSes for homebrew NAS boxes are FreeNAS and unRAID. I'm using the latter as it allows for complete mix and match of disk sizes and can be expanded on demand, unlike the ZFS used by FreeNAS (and most other) which once build is rather rigid.