I Built a NAS: One Year Later. EVERYTHING I Learned and the Mistakes
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- čas přidán 31. 05. 2024
- NASes are pricey but provide a level of robustness that a beefy external hard drive or cloud storage just don’t provide. In a NAS you can configure drives into an array, meaning drives can be combined to basically form a bigger super drive, by splitting the load of data across each of the drives, increasing the overall speed of the group, and using one drive as redundancy. So that if one drive fails, the whole thing doesn’t go kaput. So if we have more bays, we can consolidate more drives together to make even faster storage.
Affiliate Links to Products Mentioned:
Synology DS923+: amzn.to/3BZLFfn
10GBe Module: amzn.to/3N0eiPL
Synology DS1821+: amzn.to/428bapr
DS1821+ 10GBe Module: amzn.to/42dgxUz
Ubiquiti Flex XG: amzn.to/3C6dTVH
TP-Link 10GB Ethernet Pcie Card: amzn.to/3IInC8B
Samsung 870 EVO 4TB: amzn.to/3N0EYQA
Affiliate links to CZcams gear I use:
Sony a7siii: go.magik.ly/ml/1qb8i/
Sony A7c: go.magik.ly/ml/1qb8k/
14in M1 Pro MacBook Pro: go.magik.ly/ml/1qb83/
Mac Studio: go.magik.ly/ml/1qb8o/
0:00 Intro
0:48 Current NAS Setup
3:59 What Do I Use the NAS For?
6:30 My Issues with it
9:20 The Solutions
13:40 What would I recommend?
16:22 Conclusion
Some NAS have multi-gig ethernet out of the box, but with our Synology box, we have to install this 10 gigabit ethernet card, giving us up to 1250MB/s per second of data, which is fast. But there’s a catch, to use 10 gigabit, everything between the NAS and your computer, has to be 10 gigabit. So this means the network switch and computer this NAS is connected to has to have a 10 gigabit ethernet port and support those speeds. 10 gigabit is expensive, and replacing everything around the NAS and computer to be 10 gigabit could add up fast. Network switches with 10 gigabit start around $300 for 4-5 ports, 10 gigabit pcie cards for your PC costs around $100, and for your Mac, you gotta have it selected when ordered, or pay $200 for a bulky dongle.
A single NAS alone is not a back up solution, especially if it’s the only place I have my precious files on. For that, you’d want to follow the 3-2-1 rule of data back ups. Having 3 different copies, across 2 different types of devices, and 1 copy stored off site. Hard drives when paired together in raid, and all working together increases read and write speeds significantly, but a nas does not remove the Hard drive’s latency and poor random read and write performance. How long it takes to execute an action and find random files across a storage pool. Even a single SATA SSD is faster than 6 hard drives working together when it comes to random reads and writes. Video editing relies on a mixture of good sequential speeds, and good random speeds. With the 6 Hard Drives in SHR, opening folders and video project files took a few moments longer than if they were running off of my computer. So, really with this NAS I had 3 major issues with it. I’m not really following the best practices of 3-2-1 data backups, I’m running out of drive bays, and editing off of it, I introduced some annoying lag. How did I go about resolving these issues? Well, the first solution I thought of was to cut my losses, buy big jumbo sized hard drives, consolidate my data onto those drives and find a new purpose for those old hard drives. Then install an SSD into one of the drive bays, and use that for my video editing, and sync it to the big drives. Then I’d use a cloud storage provider, like backblaze to back up the whole NAS to the cloud. This would mean I could solve all of my issues. But cloud storage can get expensive fast. Then another solution appeared, why not add a new NAS, that will be all flash, nothing but SSDs to use as a nice, quiet and fast NAS dedicated to just my current video projects. And that’s what I ended up doing.
With this DS923+, I installed a 4TB SATA SSD. Which gives me plenty of space for video projects. By using such a large single SSD now, I can expand with other large SSDs when I need more space, or when video editing gets more intensive. So now I have a single small NAS for my current projects, a bigger nas for archiving purposes, some external hdds I’ve had laying around connected to that for another copy. While I keep these NASes in separate rooms, The really important stuff gets backed up to Backblaze, while less commonly touched files with lesser importance get updated on an external hard drive that I’ll store away.
With what I know now, what would I recommend for someone who’s looking at starting their own NAS journey? Get a good 4-6 Bay NAS and, splurge for 2 20TB drives run in SHR or Raid for redundancy and add more 20TB drives as needed. You could start off with just 1 20TB drive but you'll need a good backup solution in case it fails. So I’d really consider thinking ahead here and prioritize hard drive size over bigger NASes. It’s really my biggest regret. - Věda a technologie
Error on my part. The smaller NAS in the video is the DS923+ The number after "DS" in the Synology naming convention means how many drives it supports when you include the expansion units they sell. These add 5 drive bays. The larger 8bay one supports 2 expansion units for a total of 18 (DS1821+). In my mind, I kept thinking the smaller one had support for 2 expansions but it only has 1, hence me saying "14" instead of "9". Not sure how the 14 stuck through my script review. But everyone can enjoy my blunder now 🙃
Correction
I have 12 Bay Extension unit for synology
Don't be so hasty in stating things you may not know fully
You didn't mention about the nvme cache, that would help to speed up a lot of things. plus if u are using mac you should utilise the thunderbolt port. just get ur self a thunderbolt nvme external enclosure and connect to ur main mac or mac mini it will speed things up alot its actually faster then mac drive it self. then u can do a backup to your synology drive.
1. get your self a mac mini
2. daisy chain ur external thunderbolt nvme enclouser
3.share that drive too
4. do your back up to synology.
5.clean up your external thunderbolt nvme files when u no longer use it. just treat it as a scratch disk.
A bit confusing… so in a few sentences what would be your recommendation looking back? Less bays and higher capacity drives plus a cloud copy and an off-site copy? Also go with a NAS that uses M.2 SSDs to speed up workflow?
Does it work on Xbox?
You Really should check out the HighPoint SSD7540 PCIe 4.0 x16 8-Port M.2 NVMe RAID Controller ... 64TB storage 55 GB / sec reads 52 GB sec writes.
If that's a bit pricy for you, they also have the HighPoint SSD7105 PCI-Express 3.0 x16 4-Port M.2 NVMe RAID Controller for one third the price.
I have a suggestion:
1. Build a NAS type device at a relative's house with WoL.
2. Backup the data.
3. When you need to update the data, send WoL signal to turn the machine on.
4. Connect to the device
5. Update the data slowly via internet (cus it's long distance).
6. Turn off the device remotely.
7. Realize you forgot something and start again from step 3.
There’s one thing I’ll say. It’s nice to have the large storage capacity but if your HDD fails and you have it in raid for redundancy. It would take almost 3days to rebuild that 20TB and if any of the other HDD fail while it’s rebuilding for 3days you loose all your data. VS if you had 8TB it could be rebuilt in Hours. I’m pretty sure i heard this from somewhere before but all those cloud storage companies use 8TB instead like a 16TB or 20TB bc of how expensive they are and how long they take to rebuild your data. Thanks for an amazing and informative video Jimmy!😊
I have an unraid machine set up. I always worry about this when the idea of having to rebuild from parity comes into my head. I know unraid and your scenario are not a 1:1 analog, but still… the fear is real haha.
Who sane is running RAID5 on anything bigger then 2TB array
RAID6 is absolute minimum for that size
@@WizardNumberNext tell us more about this please:
RAID is not a backup. Keep your data in an offsite backup to protect from fire, flood, or theft. It will be inconvenient to load on a new NAS, but not lost.
How fast your array is rebuilt depends on the hardware running it all and what raid configuration you go with. You can also set up more than just redundancy for a single drive. You can set it up for failure of any number of drives depending on how much capacity vs redundancy you want, and depending on the number of drives. Typically though, multiple drives don't ordinarily fail within days of each other unless there's something else going on. And rebuilding your array doesn't prevent you from using it in the meantime.
If you use SHR-2 system (and you really should on larger Synology NAS as it gives you 2 HDDs worth of redundancy), you can upgrade your drives and this way increase available capacity as you need it, without investing a ton of money upfront. I also recommend having an extra HDD configured as a hot spare so that NAS would automatically begin restoration of redundancy in case of HDD failure, removing an urgency of buying a new HDD after a failure. For your video editing, add SSD cache and upgrade RAM on your NAS to 32 GB, and your experience with change dramatically without the need for extra NAS as it uses free RAM as a disk cache too. I also have DS1821+, loaded with 6 HDDs of various capacities (some were leftovers from my prevous NAS DS1512+. which served me well for over 10 years!) for a data storage, and one more as a hot spare. When I get close to running out of space, I buy two new larger HDDs and replace two lowest capacity ones I had, this way I get more capacity, save some money (as HDDs get cheaper over time) and reduce a chance of failures because my HDDs are newer on average than they might've been if I would've followed your advice and invested into a few huge drives upfront. Over my ~13 years of owning Synology NAS (DS1512+, then DS1821+) I had 5 HDD failures, and none of them caused any data loss.
Would love if you have a link of how this "external hot spare" and auto restore process was explained, it sounds great.
This is the kind of information I was expecting from the video. Thank you for share.
I went the DIY route and for the networking went SFP+ + DAC cables. The NAS (running truenas) cost me about 300 before drives and mellanox cards + DAC cables about $90. Throw in a switch for another $200 and I was set. Currently rebuilding my little home lab and picked up an Epyc CPU/mobo and some ram to replace my NAS and VM box with one machine. I totally get the convenience of using Synology and understand not everyone wants to DIY for something like this though. In the end so long as you get to where you want to get it's all good.
How is the power consumption?
@@trrjecto4459 It's honestly been years since I've measured power consumption so I honestly don't remember but TDP for the CPU is 65w and it's 8 spinning drives + 2 ssd's. Power consumption is not high on my list of priorities though, if it was I could switch to a Xeon L and get TDP down to I think 35w and set the drives to spin down to save a bit more. I'm still testing the EPYC system but TDP on that is around 125w iirc.
Was using a Synology DS218+ for general storage and Plex for a few years, then moved to a DS418 for just file storage and the DS218+ for a dedicated Plex machine. Both are being backed up to Backblaze B2. Also have a DS220 for video projects for the day job. I'm definitely a Synology fan. haha
Duuuuude! Thanks a lot for taking the time. Im starting now with the NAS journey and your video help me a LOOOOOOOT
Great video! I started out similarly. Got a DS1621+ as my main NAS, but almost immediately got the 1821+ when released a month later. It became my primary and the 1621+ became my backup. I had (7) 14TB drives and a 2TB SSD for VMs, but recently replaced it with another 14TB drive with the intention of using one of my NVMe drives as a storage pool when I upgrade to DSM 7.2. I use SHR2 on the 1821+. On the 1621+ I have (6) 14TB drives using SHR and it’s now my backup NAS for my 1821+ which includes PC backups along with data. As for and offsite backup, I got a 920+ with (4) 16TB drives using SHR and keep it at my daughters house. I do as you mentioned. I have two storage pools, one I backup my 1821+ to and the other I give to her for storage. I also backup her data to my 1621+ to return the favor. I will also eventually hang a HD off my 1821+ for critical data and store it on my safe. So, I think I’ve more than covered the 3-2-1 strategy. 😊
One critical thing I would mention to your subs is absolutely, positively get one or two UPS’s. They can be a NAS lifesaver! 😉
An Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is a requirement in my experience.
I was going to suggest the same thing: use a lower powered Synology at a family member’s house as your offsite backup. I saw you mentioning Ubiquiti equipment. I use a site-to-site VPN and use Hyperbackup to do an rsync across (I just keep one remote copy). Locally, I have two Synology’s, one as a backup, both with external drives hanging off of them for more local backup. I’ve found that for my photo editing light video editing, I use local drives, use Synology Drive for some files, and rsync to the NAS for others. The lag you mention is real. I like the idea of a small pool of SSDs. I need to try that. :)
I think I've just found the perfect channel to help me with a lot of the recent ideas I've been having. Big thanks
eeyy, saw that LTT screw driver ! Also dude you are so chill, its refreshing to watch your videos. Youre kind of a upper end regular tech nerd that people can still relate too.
I purchased Synology 213J with 2 WD Reds, probably 7-8 years ago. Still rocking without any problems. Synology makes such a great devices :) Now it's time for upgrade...
Thanks for sharing your experience with us.
I'm still rocking a 213J as well. awesome piece of software. very reliable for file transfers.
@@leoguevara9303 I cannot achieve promised 100MB transfer speed. LAN or wireless, it is always 40-50MB/s.
Not sure is NAS too slow or disks are dying :/
Just be sure it's backed up too. See my experience posted above...This was after about 6-7yrs. Drives died consecutively before they could be replaced. RAID corrupted and lost it all.
and...........drum roll please....what are you going to purchase now , to update your present system....please and thank you !!
perfect view timing!! was going to purchase another WD external hard drive and stopped short of doing so...just came across your vid; new inspiration b/c wanted to do this RAID type storage years ago...nice
What I did for backups: my synology is attached to a cheap small micropc with a celeron and 32gb of ram. I installed Ubuntu and then mapped the storage to it, with a good password. Then I have crashplan for small business running and backing it up. Wayy cheaper then backblaze. Now I am also planning to get a second nas to keep at my mom's house as a second nas.
My synology also has nvme cache, with 2 256gb ssds wich made it snappier for my lightroom collection.
I was thinking of a similar solution. But I don’t follow completely. When you say “attached” what do you mean? Over the network or via USB? Can you talk in more detail how this is done? Thanks.
Incredible video. Loved how you introduced them sending in the product (they are seeing this video the same time you are). I have been using a single TB external SSD and was on the fence about purchasing a NAS system. This video was extremely helpful. Subbed
Your explanation on speeds is so true, remember when Fiberoptics first came out people were paying through the nose for it not realizing that some where wasting ther money because although those speeds came to their Home ( the pole on the street in front of their home) it is the internal part of their home that also had to be able to fully support the fibre optics which at that time pretty much no homes were
You didn't build anything - you just bought a NAS off the shelf, slapped some drives in and configured it. I was expecting you would build a NAS from components, install Proxmox, FreeNAS etc with a title like that.
agreed. he clickbait us
Bro is butthurt fr
😂 Yo
This guy didn't build a shit 🤦🏻♂️
Does building a computer mean I should be soldering?
Thanks for sharing your pros and cons of Synology units. Your video helped solve a few questions I had.
Good video, Jimmy. I use Synology exclusively at the office for editing I have about 18, 1821+ at this point. I just started adding 1221+ rack units. One thing that is really important with the Synology NAS is to increase memory. I typically add a 16 GB memory chip but in my last build I added 32. Every unit gets 10 GbE cards for network performance, and we are able to edit massive amounts of video through the Synology without lag.
This right here plus the internal NVMe slots.
Hi Brian, quick question for you. You're telling me you edit video, without lag using: Synology NAS, updated 16gb (or 32gb) RAM, and Synology E10G18-T1 10GbE PCIe expansion card? Are you running HDD with 7200RPM? Thanks - really need help on this!
@@OrigEntertainmentOfficialAre you using the internal NVMez as cash or extra storage? 😊
@@MarkMcCabeMarkMcCabeVideoI would assume editing off an ass for anything higher than 1080p is going to be lackluster. I use an NVMe for the render and work drive and then offload it to sata after. I am getting a NAS soon but I'm still undecided on the drive sizes as it is very expensive
@@pizzlespettime as the cache.
12TB drives are the best bang for the buck size right now for a 4-5 bay NAS. In case anyone was wondering. I got 8TB drives due to not wanting to go too big, but now wish I got the 12 TBs as the total size of 4x8TB in RAID 5 is filling up shockingly fast and not much room for expansion (I have 5 bays). 3x12TB would have cost me the same with lots more room to expand in the future. Seagate Exos are currently the best in price/performance, if you don't mind the noise. You should have the NAS in a separate room anyway so it shouldn't be a big deal.
I think most people way underestimate how much space they need. I did the same, bought 12TB drives and now replacing those with 22TB ones.
@@micker9830 I'm worried about going that big. In case of failure it takes a very long time to rebuild. You'd want to have 2 drive fault tolerance RAID array if you're going that big on drive capacity.
I know RAID is not a backup, but for many people it kindda is as they're not that good doing actual regular backups.
@@BlockThrone I just replaced a drive with a 22tb drive and it took one day to rebuild.
@@micker9830 that's not too bad. What sort of NAS do you have?
@@BlockThrone Synology 920+ 4 bay.
I found SFP+ cards and switches years ago when I built my NAS. I think I spent around $300 on the networking side and got a 4 x SFP+/gigabit eth switch, along with 4 SFP+ PCIe cards, and all the cabling.
Later on I’ve picked up other switches with a mix of SFP+ for cheap 10gig and SFP+ to 24+ port gigabit networking.
Been keeping things cheap while hardlining everything that stays in one spot. My next network upgrade will be when 100gb gets cheaper.
My NAS is an old full tower currently running TrueNAS. with 10 x 3.5” hard drives, 8 x 2.5” SSDs, boots from mirrored intel optane drives, and has a couple PCIe Cache SSDs(Sun/Oracle F80s), handling metadata, read cache, write cache, etc. and 64GB of DDR4.
Thanks for the tips! NAS' are so costly to setup, so this video was helpful.
Great video with all the details, regrets and possible solutions for the problem. Thank you very much for this!
Thanks for the update. Viewed your previous video on NASs a little while ago when doing research on what to get. So a few weeks ago I set up my DS1821+ with currently 5 14TB drives for all my storage and editing (with 1 drive redundancy), and 1 x 14TB without redundancy for the media server. That means I have 2 bays empty, ready to be filled for more storage in the future. Actually planning on using one bay for surveillance once I decide on the right cameras I need to keep an eye on my dog while working in the homeoffice lol. And what I also did was added 2 x 1TB NVME SSDs in a read/write cache which makes the whole experience lightning fast... the speeds over 10Gbit network are amazing, nothing lags and basically viewing/editing 4k footage is smooth as butter. There is that initial delay when all the footage is loaded, but 750GB of cache will keep things around when you are working on something longer than a minute.
The 3-2-1 backup problem I havent also solved yet, but as a first action I'm thinking of running those hard drives I migrated all my stuff from to the NAS as backup drives. These are WD 2-drive RAIDs that in RAID0 will have 16+20TB (36TB - plenty for now!) of space for that first backup of most important stuff, just in case the NAS gets fried. But yeah they will still be in the same house and connected to the NAS via USB. Even if I could have a wall between the actual devices... still not ideal. Backblaze seems like an option but will get a bit expensive. Will have to see. If you find a good affordable solution in the mean time, let us know ;)
PS, Maxed out RAM To 32GB - which also helps when running multiple things on the NAS.
I have a 4 bay QNAB NAS, and I definitely agree with you about HD size. I made two mistakes. 1st I bought 4 8TB drives. NEVER thought I’d run out of space within 4yrs. And, unlike Synology, QNAB doesn’t allow you to mix drives. So, I have to replace all of my drives before I can use all of the drive capacity. The 2nd mistake was going with QNAB over synology. It works, but for my use case the user friendly OS from synology would’ve been the better choice.
Unless you use disk striping (RAID0), it doesn't matter what hardware you use, you cannot use all of the drive capacity when you mix drive capacity. Whether you have a Synology or QNAP, you will have to upgrade all your drives to the same capacity.
@@pavelbuchnevich1229 With Synology you have SHR though. With this you can mix hard drives with different capacities. On the website there is a raid calculator where you can simulate the whole thing.
There will still be unusable storage, but it is significantly better than with a normal raid.
Remember 4 years may be the end of life of your drives so you made the good choice. I have lost a lot of old drives. Age matters.
I ran across your channel last night. I like your humor and you're right on par with the things I've been working on. I started using Synology a few years ago with a 5-bay (DS1019+), but I have the same one you set up a year ago and donated my 5-bay to my church. Eh... free off-site backup location... I didn't do the 10Gbps card, since I didn't want to re-purchase my equipment. I am building a house within the next year and the plan was to get the 10Gbps equipment there. Thanks for the videos and I'll look forward to many more.
Yr video was awesome. Really appreciate yr sharing. I own a small PC repair company I just bought a small two bay synology I have been backing up by creating images of my clients PCs externally. So now I plan to use synology
So I got the 8 bay Synology NAS and put eight 4TB WD Blue SSD's in it, there was a killer deal for Christmas about a year ago on those drives. I get some amazing speeds doing that, however at the cost of adding a larger storage pool. SO, enter the 5-BAY expansion unit for the Synology, I plan on a later date, getting that unit and populating it with 20TB drives and using that as my backup and catchall since my 8bay SSD solution is only 20TB total usable pool storage. I do love how the only sound from that setup are the fans. So quiet and I get 821 MB/s write and 1126 MB/s read! Holy smokes! So I am ready for that 8k edit!
Stellar video Jimmy!! Peaked my interest - I’m a fan ❤. Subscribed. Thank you for making and putting your time into this video. Very informative. ❤
I have a DS1520+ which I’ve bought at least 2 years ago. My need for extra large storage space wasn’t as huge when I bought it, but it was still a need to back up a lot of media files I had. Instead of buying like large capacity single 20 TB HD drive which 2 years ago was extremely expensive. I just bought smaller drives, all 4 TB HD drives and populated all 5 drive bays for total 20 TB. I did the raid option that allowed in future replacing any drive with a larger capacity drive. That allowed as drives got cheaper over time I could buyer larger capacity drives at cheaper prices each going into the future and slowly increased the DS storage capacity as needed and as prices got much cheaper. With just 1 large drive, you have no backup. I don’t make vids or anything, but my DS1520+ sits on my computer desk. I hardly even notice it’s even there and running unless I don’t see the blue lights to even notice it’s not even on from a power failure.
I use Synology's C2 for my encrypted off-site backup, and the cost is quite reasonable.
You can also configure your larger NAS to provide a Time Machine target to back up your Mac.
One tip for helping keep your closet gear cooler is to put it on shelves near the floor, where the air will be cooler. You could put vents in the top and bottom of your closet door, as well. This is what I do and it keeps everything quiet and cool.
Great video, very insightful given my own similar experience. I have 3 2-bay NASs each with more capacity (HD size). I finally moved to the DS920+ which will last me for a while but lie you I am looking at purchasing a second (perhaps bigger to support 2 volumes equal to my 920+). I had free storage with Google Cloud through my University however they are ending that program next year so I will be scrambling to get my own secondary backup in place!
One idea you didn't mention, place the backup drive/nas in a firebox/safe (to survive house fire) taking it out periodically to update it!
Thanks again I now know I am not alone in the mistakes I have made (mostly financially motivated).
Just before I recently retired, I got a QNAP TS-1635AX, and a few 12TB and 14TB drives, planning a big re-design of my multi-computer network. My dream of lots of spare time in retirement is slow coming, so also is my incorporation of the NAS box. I appreciate videos like this one to help me understand the finer points of what I'm getting myself into.
definitely going to try and get a NAS going once I'm out of college since I will most likely need it for all my complex electrical simulations and projects. This helps a lot to get a good handle on how they work and their pros and cons.
Thanks for the video. This 'One Year Later & Lessons Learned' is a great idea!
Very helpful video. Appreciate the effort put in
Great video! I also purchased the DS1821+ and super happy with it. I have x6 - 10TB HD (Raid 5) and x2 - 4TB SSD installed (Raid 0) (Yes i have nightly backups to external drives). I updated the RAM from the standard 4GB to 20GB and used a dual port 10GB NIC I already had to install in the expansion slot. Runs great but I am not stressing it very much, the larger array serves all my ripped blu-ray movies. The smaller array is for photos, music and data files.
I used to run a custom built Ubuntu server, learned a LOT but in the end the maintenance of it was overwhelming at times (botched updates, incorrect command entries by me!) and the giant server box was just too much (x14 - 2TB drives!). Synology makes it all so easy, very happy with my purchase.
so 2 volumes as well? The SSD one for photos, music and data while the other houses the rips?
Built is a pretty strong wording here :)
Although nice video, I love how happy you seem by adding this to your workflow.
Brilliant overview Jimmy. Thanks
Great video Jimmy. I'm running a DS920+ with 40tb. Backing up my pc, plex along with 10 other friends cell phones, "photos," and 2 friends pc's. I have a 16tb external NAS drive for backup plus a friends NAS at her place. I was using C2 but it was going to cost more so I stopped it. am looking to get a larger NAS when Synology comes out with an intel version.
Thanks for the great video! I have an older DS416play for backups which has 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Port, but going up to 10gigabit sounds great. I also use the Synology surveillance app and have some IP cameras connected to it so I have local video surveillance in addition to a cloud based option.
4:00 Also another thing to point out is that having a 10GB connection to your router or main switch is useful if you have for example 10 devices using 1GB/s. So having a faster connecting from the server to the router could be advantageous even if you don't have 10GB on your devices but instead have multiple users connecting to the server and pulling or uploading data.
Thanks for this comprehensive but digestible tutorial:).
I really like the way you started off of this video I really need help deciding what to do and how to work with my first NAS. I ended up getting the you green on Kickstarter and I have not ordered the drives yet or received it
Hey! I saw you were talking about expensive cloud storage, what I would recommend is using a deticated server from hetzner in a storage box, it is a quite slow connection but works great for offsite backups.
Amazing breakdown. Nice job.
As for cables, if your runs are less than 37m, then you can get away with CAT6 which is way cheaper than CAT6a (required if longer runs are needed up to 100m). My Synology 1010 is still chugging away nicely.
I have a 8-bay NAS with total usable storage of 24TB, which I only use for archiving. I had the idea of using it as my personal cloud storage, but the noise and heat makes it less practical for keeping it running all the time. Thanks for sharing the idea of using a smaller NAS with SSD for stuff that are fequently access. I'll have to look into whether it can be run quieter and cooler with SSD, maybe my a solution for me if it can.
Big beefy external HD in a small safe deposit box is what I'm doing for off site back up. My total data archive footprint fits into a 14 TB or bigger single drive, so a single drive works for me. I update it every 6 months.
One thing to think about is having at least 3 of the backup drives that you rotate. You don't want all the drives in the same place at the same time. And protect against what would happen if lighting struck while freshening up the external drive backup.
2:57 "giant gaping pipes" - toilet humor has never been so advanced. subscribed.
i love my DS920+. I plan on getting the Synology 1U server NAS with SSD harddrive as soon as i get more funds. I do hate the latency delay at time.
Fantastic video Jimmy! Just subscribed.
Awesome video Jimmy, thanks so much.
I don't technically have a NAS, but I do have a server running Proxmox and I can set up a NAS in a container or VM in a handful of clicks.
I am considering a NAS though, any streaming whatnot can be done via the cloud, that's what it's there for.. so the NAS doesn't need many features, it only has to be reliable.
Great video, thank you so much!
Great video! Would like to see a video with more details on all of the software you use on the nas
Such great info. Thanks 🙏 so very much.
This is so cool. I am so glad you are trying the world.
Great video with some insights for somone who wants to start a NAS journey. Thinking of building one with PC components or buying one off the shelf. Missed the part where you explained, why you preferred not to build one yourself.
Great video and advice! Thank you!
Jimmy if you have the budget, I would look into Tape backup and store the tapes offsite in a safety deposit box or with family. Definitely post a video if you go that route!
wow, great video! literally hit everything
I'd recommend considering AWS S3 deep archive for your remote backup. It's
If looking for a much cheaper NAS solution, look into old workstations! While not the easiest option, forcing you to learn another OS like TrueNAS or Unraid and losing the ease-of-access that comes with prebulit hardware and software, it is a much more budget friendly option. I bought a refurbished Dell optiplex 5040 with an i5 and 16gb of ram just as an intro into the idea of running a NAS, and the original system came out to like $180 USD for the system and a SATA expansion card to connect more drives. Might not fit everybody, but it's a way to get into using a NAS without spending 5-600 $ on something from Synology or another company. Also allows for you to drop in something like a graphics card to make a media server at home possible with hardware transcoding! Worth checking out if for nothing else other than experimentation.
Thanks for the review... I just jumped in with a synology entry level DS220j with a pair of 18TB in jbod.
I just wanted it as a media server for movies. I have everything on it backed up on a stack of internal HD's that I connect temporarily with a HD dock.
I do this once a week... and store them in a media fire safe.
While off site is the best solution.... buying a beefy Fire Safe is the next best thing
(Keep in mind a proper media firesafe will run you over a grand!) don't just buy one from Target.
I have unraid 6.12 and I basically have what you have but in one computer case. I have an unraid array of 4 HDD and then a pool which is a ZFS array of 4 SSDs for basically anything that needs fast access too like network cashe, media library, etc... this is a nice video, I enjoied it !!!!
Nicely done!
I set up a Synology NAS in the past year and found a lot of the same benefits, getting off cloud drives was goal 1...done, having local storage that's always available for my home network...done, consoldating media on one shared device...mostly done, backups of local PC's to a local server...done. I have it connected to Cloudflare Zero Trust networking, so that's cool. I could not get Hyperdrive to stop backing up to Backblaze S3. It seemed like it was always running, driving up my bandwidth and finally just shut it off. I have a three drive backups, one local to the NAS and two external drives I swap. I may install Duplicati in a docker image on the NAS and try again as having a remote backup has always been a goal.
The suggestion to put a large capacity fast SSD in one bay, I didn't really consider doing that but it's an interesting idea. My two bay NAS suits my data storage needs, easy on the budget, but a pit pokey on the network. Great video, very useful and the discussion of ways to get faster network bandwidth is spot on.
Brilliant. At the moment, I just have one DS418 that I keep in my room next to my PC that I have turn off each evening at 11pm and on again in the morning at 7am using it's Power Schedule allowing me to sleep. Currently, use it to store my Photography and Videograohy but understand a backup is needed just incase. Will contact my friend in swizerland who also uses a NAS and see if we can share files together to backup
Thanks for the video. I just discovered your channel and have subscribed. Yes, I have a Synology drive and use it in kinda in the reverse of the 3-2-1 scenario; meaning, I have my cloud services Google Drive, OneDrive and others duplicated on my Synology. Therefore, if something happens to my cloud drive, I have the Synology and if something happens to my Synology, then I still have my Cloud drives. Thanks again for the videos and God bless,
I got the 1821+ with eight 14TB drives, 32Gb RAM, and a 10G card. 85GB usable...Love it! (Also two WD Black 1TB NVME drive in RAID1 for cahce
Great explanation
Good video although a bit deceiving because building a NAS implies that you went out or on line and purchased a case, mother board fans, ram, and an OS from one of those sites on line that offer that kind of thing. NOT an off the shelf complete unit Like Synology or QNAP. OK, now that I got that off my chest, lets move on. SSDs are a great solution if you're going to use them as part of your 3,2,1 backup solution. I had considered that at the time I got my 918+ in 2019, but further investigation suggested that I wouldn't gain a noticeable increase in speed. Also continuous read and writes have been found to cause premature failures and unexpected crashes on the drives. But they are a great back up solution. The only complaint I have with my NAS is that the video station doesn't work as well as I would like it to, and I find more often than not that I have to download my movie from my library stored on my NAS to my computer before I can watch it. Now I'm at 78% on my NAS and I'll start to worry about increasing my capacity when I get to 95%. Maybe by that time I might also need to replace my NAS too cause they don't last forever, so I'll rest more easy once I get my SSD drive and back up all my current data. Have you given any thought as to what you would replace your 8 bay with if and when it does fail? Sorry for the long winded comment.
My first experience with a NAS was when I built my own FreeNAS from old hardware just to try it. Second was my homebuilt custom FreeNAS taht worked well until a bug in a chip made the motherboard up and die. The data was still there, it was just the NAS-box itself that died so it was fine. Next one was my new homebuilt FreeNAS, this time using second hand enterprise parts (dual Xeon in a 2U rack-case with 12 bays :D It's been off for a few years now since I have no power where I want to run it (it gets loud, 12 drives + small fans makes a lot of noise even in a somewhat silenced rack cabinet!) so for now I'm on an old D213Air that chugs along happily. Only 2 4TB drives in SHR-mirror though, so I got an old ReadyNAS as well but that one is also loud so yeah :D Once I have power in the walk-in closet though I'll fire them both up and see how they work, might need to re-paste the Xeons :p The plan s to use one smaller one for smaller files and backup to the other one (or two, depending on how things go) and then backup some of those files to Backblaze as well. No storage except for software (games/programs) on the computer
Hey Jimmy, love your video, just an idea regarding the fire harzard prevention. Maybe place the whole NAS underground and add some monitoring system to cut the wire and shut it off and block it underground with fire resistent cover. It wound't be cheap and a lot of DIY too maybe. However, someone might have thought of the same idea.
Started with a 2 bay Synology with 6TB (x2) netting 6TB (SNR raid). Then shelved the 6TB and put in 12TB (x2) netting 12 TB. Close to outgrowing that, got a DS918+ (4 bay expandable) and used the 6TB (x2) + 12TB (x2) netting 24TB. Eventually shelved the 6TBs and went to 12TB (x4) netting 36 TB. Lived haunted by no backup. Got a Raid PRO 4 bay USB enclosure. Increased NAS to 16TB (x2) + 12TB (x2) netting 40TB. Put 12TB (x2) + 6TB (x2) with raid 0 (JBOD) and netting 38 TB for backup. The era of my 4 bay NAS has a maximum drive size of 16TB. So I can only expand the NAS another 8TB without buying the expansion case. I'm at 40% utilization so I won't see a problem soon. I doubt ever, but I also thought 6TB (x2) was enough at the beginning. The raid capable USB enclosure was huge as a backup solution. Low cost enclosure using demoted NAS drives. I don't have offsite backup, but if/when I do, it will likely be an inexpensive multi-bay USB enclosure. Understand a USB enclosure is NOT a NAS. It's just raw storage. Any services using that storage must be hosted/run in a different device. For me, it's just a 38TB drive on my desktop. Having a NAS is a learning experience and well worth the effort. I couldn't live without one now.
Great video. I'm at the point in my YT career where I need more storage. I'm currently filling small external Samsung SSDs and trying to find the point where I feel the price justifies having a single central backup. The DS923+ is what I'm looking at when I decide to bite the bullet.
Thank you for this video!
I came here because I want to buy a Nas now I need two
problem with synologie is that they are pushing their own drives.
My (starter) recommendation is that you spend money on good quality drives and buy a reasonably recent (2~4 years old) second hand Synology NAS.
Synology has very good long term support, even for older hardware.
Even just a 2 bay model is a good starting point for basics and getting you used to the workflow etc.
My current setup is a new 2 bay model (DS220+) with a media transcoding & docker capable CPU (2x4TB in RAID0 for 8 TB of quick access, I now wish I sprung for larger TB drives), and a second hand 8 bay (DS1817+) that's ~5 years old with a 5 drive expansion box (2x 36TB volumes in various combinations of disks, RAID 6 on the 8 bay and RAID 5 on the expansion box).
The smaller NAS is my "work in progress" machine, the big one is "The Vault".
My "cloud drive" folders, file shares, Plex, PC backups etc all happen on the small NAS.
The small NAS is backed up every night to the vault, along side my servers (for website/game hosting etc) backup nightly to the vault.
Select important files are also backed up to Backblaze2B with immutable copies setup with a month long retention time (meaning they are undeletable for at least a month) at ~1$USD/month cost. Those same files are also backed up to a NAS at my parent's house via the hyperbackup thingy, while their important files are backed up on my box.
The vault also holds a "media archive" for when I run out of diskspace on the smaller NAS.
The big one is on a power on/off schedule to save power/heat/noise, it reduces wear, reduces possible attack surface (since its not on the network when my PC/laptop is on). It can be powered on via Wake-on-lan via my router if I need to access the archive for some reason.
Actually, the DS1817+ is still capable of decoding some media files, but can struggle with H265 or super high bitrate formats, so I don't usually even have to copy stuff back to the DS220+ if I want to re-watch something old.
All of this hardware was built up over quite a few years, but man does Synology make it easy to stick with them once you're used to it.
The one downside IMO is the lack of native high-bandwidth connections. Now you have to choose to give up your SSD cache slot for faster ethernet. I would love to see at least a 2.5G port become standard...
As a sidenote: Their surveillance station is also quite usable, although for more than 2 cameras you need additional (perpetual, one time cost) licenses.
I use the second ethernet jack to hook the cameras into their own dedicated POE network, so it doesn't interfere with the rest of the network.
Great Video!!
Great overview, it saved me from buying a 5 bay nas for video editing. I don' think the synologies are tested for 20TB drive compatibility, think it maxes out at 16tb.
I had similar issues when considering offsite backups. I like to be the one in control of my files so I decided to back up everything on a flash device and store in onsite but in a Waterproof/Fireproof safe. The likelihood of something happening to the safe itself where the safe goes missing is low in my area such as a tornado coming through and picking up my safe and tossing is miles away. So if there was a fire or flood, I should still be able to locate it afterwards.
I don't quite want want to spend that much on a NAS at the moment. I'm a photographer and currently using two DAS units from OWC for my storage solution, which i bought used for pretty cheap. One is a Thunderbay 4 Mini with 4x 2TB SSDs for a total of 8TB for my main external storage of my photos in RAID 0. The other one is a Thunderbay 4 with 4 x 4TB HDD for a total of 16TB in RAID 0 for a backup of the other RAID drive.
Currently they're both daisy chained via Thunderbolt off my Thunderbolt Display and use my MBP with that. I recently wired my garage with Cat6 ethernet cabling and a third Apple Airport Extreme for my mesh network. I have an older MBP that I'm not using it, so I plan on using that as a server with my larger DAS attached to it, all in the garage. I don't work with large video files, so gigabit ethernet should be plenty fast for me. I can keep my smaller and quieter DAS with SSDs in the house attached to my Display. Technically it's not offsite storage BUT, my garage is separate from my house, so I think the chances of both going down is somewhat smaller.
I wish the 3rd option for the NAS would've been considering other companies. Something like Truenas mini lineup. It uses open-zfs filesystem which uses ram as read cache and you can even add nvme drives for a level 2 read cache. Which both would be faster than your DS923+. You can fill it with large capacity drives and it caches the most recent written files as well as the most common read files intelligently and automatically. Have you considered that way to get more speed?
The 923+ supports using NVME as read or read/write cache. He should have mentioned it.
@@danielmcgowan9534 True, can you create a pool with those drives with any regular nvme drives tho?
External backup, store a NAS in a purpose built water & fire resistant box, outside the property, possibly even underground, keep it connected via cat 5. It’s more likely, if you survive a fire, the fire department will put the blaze out and you can rescue your data. Just make sure the cables are coming out of the box from the bottom side so water from the fire truck won’t penetrate the box. Obviously much more thought would be needed but the option is there
oh wow I didn't know that Synology NAS supports Home Assistance. I have it running on the Rasp Pi. I prefer to have clean integrated setup definitely going to give it a try. Thanks!
Be sure to add a UPS (and connect the Monitor USB to the NAS)
Up sizing a drive is easy in a RAID set, Simply replace one at a time and let it rebuild. Repeat.
Cool /vent that closet. Heat is hard of drives. (my middle drives on my ds416slim run hotter) A bathroom exhaust fan in the ceiling and a slightly larger gap at floor level will work wonders)
Thanks for sharing yourn experience ! I think I'll go for a 2x1TB NVMe as a new volume for fast access to these types of files... thanks!
IMO when starting, id invest in getting a nas that has a few more slots. Most users eventually nees to grow and the most costly thing to do is have to buy another nas. If your planning to use 4 drives, get a 5,6 or 8 slot nas. The diff is not that much. Id also invest in getting a unit with the pci-e expansion slot. Alway good to have a path to improve, add a 10g card or a m.2 card or both. Plan ahead, specially if your a video editor or data junkie!
Thanks for sharing.
Helpful thankyou! :)
Hey Jimmy thanks for the video! One question: How do you handle the new NAS with the ssd in your workflow? Let´s say you are coming home with fresh footage on your SD-cards, how will you store the footage? Of course you need it in your archive NAS so you´ll copy it there but you want it on your SSD as well to edit it soon. Hence you have to copy it twice right? Or is there a job running that automatically copies everything from your SSD onto your HDDs? Since your video editing project files are also stored on the SSD they also need to be backuped to the archive NAS. How do you do this without having the manual effort to copy everything twice?
Thanks for your answer! :)
I have settled on a schedule of replacing my home office NAS about every 5 years. When I get a new NAS, the old NAS become a backup NAS. The primary NAS runs 24/7 for years at a time without reboot. The back up NAS only turns on a couple of hours per week to run the weekly back up of the primary NAS.
For my needs, a four bay NAS is plenty of disks. As much as I dislike synology's business practices. I really like the ability to replace hard drives. Typically, I get one new drive every 12-18 months to replace the smallest drive on the NAS with a larger one. Then that disk replaces the smallest disk in the back up NAS. With a little thought and planning this results very stable setup at a reasonable cost and power consumption.
This usage might make the heads of any storage purist explode... but it has worked very well for me.
Note: The backup NAS is located off site. I am really looking forward to the add/upgrade single drive feature to become stable in zfs and TrueNAS so I can finally dump synology.
I really like your video! Can I ask why did you go with an off the shelf nas, rather than building one? Products like Synolgy boxes like to skimp on things and charge a lot for the power that you get.
That toilet analogy was the shit!
I have a video production company and we use the Synology 1821+ for our editing needs with 12TB Iron Wolf drives. We use 2.5Gb connections to four M1 mac minis and one M1 mac studio via a 2.5Gb switch with one 10Gb connection on that switch for the NAS. We do not experience any lag for the most part even when editing 4K projects on all the machines at once. But we did add 4TB internal PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 Internal SSD and maxed out the memory on the NAS. I missed if you mentioned upgrading these on your 8 bay. This will be key to help you improve editing performance over the network. Also, not sure what kind of cables you are using. I think you need a minimum 5e in order to have enough speed over the cable. We are using Cat8 though I know that is overkill. We have a really short run so I didn't mind the expense.
It's so surprising that so many people don't know between bits and Bytes. Even with all those 10Gb lan, the bottleneck is the hard drive at max 6Gb (ideal). One thing I learned is don't settle for a cheaper one, or you'll regret the performance. Go big or go home for this one.
I built a NAS running Truenas Scale this last winter. My usecase is mostly bulk storage without having to have multiple external harddrives. I’m not that happy with it, it becomes unstable (web-ui freezes) if the zfs-arc is filled up. It should scale back it if the system needs the ram, but apparently it does not. I can work around it by limiting zfs-arc size quite a bit, but I need to do that everytime I boot it or starts or stops a vm, since it’s reset at those times. Truenas scale does not want you to do these customizations so there is no official way to fix it.
If I where to redo it, I’d either buy a Synology or run Truenas Core, which is much more well tested.
If you let your harddrives spin down, truenas scale won’t report on the hdd temperature. That being said, it does not work for me anyway anymore.
One HUGE feature of the 1821+ you didn’t mention was the two MVMe bays to setup for cache to assist in the delays in writing and retrievals of files. I have 8 16tb drives in mine with 4 VM’s running with little issue. Also, you can group the 4 NIC’s built in together and do a LAG for 4gbps to a switch. I see you use Unifi, and that is possible very easily.