Hi, Mark,

The only way one can truly evaluate something is to own it and use it
for an extended period. Making the jump to a new platform is full of
risk, and no platform is perfect.

With that said, I started into the NAS world in 2007 with Netgear Ready
NAS NV+ units. Overall, I have bought five of these. They are now
woefully obsolete and slow, but at least one (with four WD 2 TB Reds)
was still going strong when I put it on the shelf. One of the two 2007
units failed in 2015--perhaps due to lack of cleaning of the fans. It
was in a son's dorm room. The other one is still going strong in the
other son's dorm room. The other three are from 2010 and the Seagate 1.5
TB drives were awful, but the enclosures were fine. The original two had
server 500 GB drives, and only one needed replacement after a year or
two. The drives were still going strong in 2015.

In 2008, I bought a pair of Thecus N5200 PRO and they were fine until
the CPU fan went in one in 2015. These had Samsung 1 TB drives. I put
them away with a snapshot of the data as of last month.

Although I liked both Netgear and Thecus, all the research I did in
2013-2014 pointed towards QNAP as the best quality and value in this
space. In January 2014, I installed a five slot TS-569 PRO with 3 TB WD
Red drives in a RAID-6 configuration.

In October 2014, I installed a four-slot TS-453 Pro at a local non-profit.

In December 2015, I upgraded the 3 TB drives in the TS-569 to 4 TB
drives and used those drives plus some new ones in a new TS-853 Pro
frame. Alas, I received a defective frame, but after some back and forth
convincing myself and the vendor that it was defective, I received good
service via CDW.CA on the return and the head of Canadian
service/support was great.

The TS-X53 units are screamingly fast even with the slower WD Red drives
in them. I am seeing 100MB/s (that's BYTES) throughput to/from the new
TS-853 PRO on my wired gigabit Ethernet (80 % wire speed). I see bursts
close to 90 % wire speed. The X53 units come with FOUR gigabit Ethernet
ports (the X69 had two) and I use two on the main server here and at the
non-profit.

Note that 3 TB drives and more slots is less costly than say 5 TB drives
and fewer slots. I do spin the drives down after a half hour on the
backup unit but keep them spinning 24/7 on the main unit.

I did not add the cost of power in my cost analysis between more smaller
drives and fewer larger drives.

I did not get the 8 GB memory option as I am not running this as a
public server. I do write all my documents directly to the NAS unit, but
media ingest is to the local HDD and then pushed to the NAS (and then
cloned overnight to the second NAS).

Cheers,

Richard



On 1/27/2016 6:41 PM, Hood, Mark wrote:
> Hi Richard,
>
> Thanks as always for sharing your experience and insights on all of these
> topics.
>
> Would you be comfortable sharing the make and model of the RAID-6 NAS
> units you are using, and any comments about how well they have performed
> to your expectations?
>
> Thanks,
> Mark
>
> Mark Hood
> Associate Professor of Music
> Department of Recording Arts
> IU Jacobs School of Music
>
>
>
>
> On 1/27/16, 3:36 PM, "Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List on
> behalf of Richard L. Hess" <[log in to unmask] on behalf of
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Hi, All,
>>
>> I saw this thread and was going to ignore it, but decided not to once I
>> found out that RDX was HDD-in-an-otterbox merci, Henri, and thanks for
>> the image, Lou. Otters are wonderful--see "Ring of Bright Water" (The
>> book) and Point Lobos State Park.
>>
>> LTO was around while I was still doing broadcast consulting and, at the
>> time (late 1990s, early 2000s).
>>
>> I struggled long and hard about how to store things and realized if I
>> were going to become involved with LTO, I would need two drives (how
>> else can you be even remotely certain that your tapes are readable once
>> your single drive dies--I certainly saw that in the early days of PC
>> tape backup. At that point, the cost becomes excessive.
>>
>> My philosophy now is: Any data I want to keep does not live solely on a
>> PC.
>>
>> I have two in-house RAID-6 NAS units, one backing up the other; an ammo
>> case of 2.5-inch HDDs off-site (2 TB 2.5-inch USB 3.0 drives are pretty
>> economical these days and are USB-powered).
>>
>> One son has been migrated to the cloud where Dropbox backs up and
>> mirrors his two on-site laptops. Here, I harvest all new files (but not
>> updates to prevent pollution of existing files) and store them on my
>> RAID-6 NAS units to protect against a Dropbox failure or hacking. The
>> other son will do it soon, but the first one is potentially going far
>> away to school next fall for his Masters (Wichita and Edmonton are on
>> the list) so I wanted to get some closer-in history with the system.
>>
>> RAID-6 allows the failure of any two disks without losing data and the
>> data does not have to be chopped up into 1 or 2 TB chunks as it does
>> with HDDs.
>>
>> I do not keep CF/SD cards, I copy and verify the copy and then recycle
>> them.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Richard
>>
>> --
>> Richard L. Hess email: [log in to unmask]
>> Aurora, Ontario, Canada 647 479 2800
>> http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
>> Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.
>
--
Richard L. Hess email: [log in to unmask]
Aurora, Ontario, Canada 647 479 2800
http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.