Media NAS
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I am looking to buy a NAS specifically for media content (music and movies). It will be connected to my router. What are the benefits in buying a NAS that has the drives built in or buying a diskless? What brands do you suggest? Drives do you suggest? HELP I know nothing about NAS's!!
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ReadyNAS and Synology are the only two brands that I would consider. Both have built in media serving.
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I prefer diskless and then buy appropriate Western Digital drives. I've used Green and Red in mine, work great.
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For home media you likely want a two bay unit in RAID 1. This makes Green drives a good option. Super low cost. This two bay need rules out most vendors as many like WD and Seagate don't make options that small.
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You have a ReadyNAS there in the lab that you could test out right now.
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Can't argue with Scott as those are good. I've received review copies of Western Digital's My Book Live DUO and EX. Both are good and not as horrible as some reviews say. SLOW would be the word but they rarely cause stuttering when streaming to my media center in the living room.
I also have an 8TB Seagate Business Class NAS running Windows Storage Server 2012 and it is my primary NAS...
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@garak0410 said:
Can't argue with Scott as those are good. I've received review copies of Western Digital's My Book Live DUO and EX. Both are good and not as horrible as some reviews say. SLOW would be the word but they rarely cause stuttering when streaming to my media center in the living room.
I also have an 8TB Seagate Business Class NAS running Windows Storage Server 2012 and it is my primary NAS...
I got one of those Seagate Business NAS's for our secondary location... I have had nothing but issues with it... One of the biggest things is that it restarts once or twice a day. Which isn't so bad since it is just a file share... but for a VM workload that would be brutal. Support has basically told me they can't do anything about it and it may be a firmware issue (which has been happening on a couple different versions... they basically washed their hands of it.
I have had good luck with Netgear... don't go with QNAP had one at a previous location and the performance was abysmal, it was purchased as a file share but we had to relegate it to an archive drive for things that we didn't care if we lost.
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@coliver said:
@garak0410 said:
Can't argue with Scott as those are good. I've received review copies of Western Digital's My Book Live DUO and EX. Both are good and not as horrible as some reviews say. SLOW would be the word but they rarely cause stuttering when streaming to my media center in the living room.
I also have an 8TB Seagate Business Class NAS running Windows Storage Server 2012 and it is my primary NAS...
I got one of those Seagate Business NAS's for our secondary location... I have had nothing but issues with it... One of the biggest things is that it restarts once or twice a day. Which isn't so bad since it is just a file share... but for a VM workload that would be brutal. Support has basically told me they can't do anything about it and it may be a firmware issue (which has been happening on a couple different versions... they basically washed their hands of it.
I have had good luck with Netgear... don't go with QNAP had one at a previous location and the performance was abysmal, it was purchased as a file share but we had to relegate it to an archive drive for things that we didn't care if we lost.
Wow...hate to hear you have problems with your Seagate. Mine at home has been so good, I ordered one for work and it is our primary backup repository for VEEAM. Has worked great.
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@garak0410 said:
@coliver said:
@garak0410 said:
Can't argue with Scott as those are good. I've received review copies of Western Digital's My Book Live DUO and EX. Both are good and not as horrible as some reviews say. SLOW would be the word but they rarely cause stuttering when streaming to my media center in the living room.
I also have an 8TB Seagate Business Class NAS running Windows Storage Server 2012 and it is my primary NAS...
I got one of those Seagate Business NAS's for our secondary location... I have had nothing but issues with it... One of the biggest things is that it restarts once or twice a day. Which isn't so bad since it is just a file share... but for a VM workload that would be brutal. Support has basically told me they can't do anything about it and it may be a firmware issue (which has been happening on a couple different versions... they basically washed their hands of it.
I have had good luck with Netgear... don't go with QNAP had one at a previous location and the performance was abysmal, it was purchased as a file share but we had to relegate it to an archive drive for things that we didn't care if we lost.
Wow...hate to hear you have problems with your Seagate. Mine at home has been so good, I ordered one for work and it is our primary backup repository for VEEAM. Has worked great.
Good to hear I just got a dud unit. Although I probably won't be purchasing another one due to the support.
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@coliver said:
Good to hear I just got a dud unit. Although I probably won't be purchasing another one due to the support.
Support is the biggest factor with business class products. If support isn't great, what are you paying for? Anyone can make a device that seems nice. It's supporting it that is hard and what we pay for.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I prefer diskless and then buy appropriate Western Digital drives. I've used Green and Red in mine, work great.
Someone else who understands how awesome WD Red drives are?
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@Mike-Ralston said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I prefer diskless and then buy appropriate Western Digital drives. I've used Green and Red in mine, work great.
Someone else who understands how awesome WD Red drives are?
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2014/05/understanding-the-western-digital-sata-drive-lineup-2014/
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@scottalanmiller That article doesn't mention Purple's, hmm...
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@scottalanmiller And extremely reliable from what I've heard. But, back on subject, after little hands on experience with NAS systems, I can say that the ReadyNas that I've only been using for a few hours is already up and working nicely.
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If I were going to set up a 2-disc RAID set for the media server, I'd go with RAID-0. No critical data there, so let's get performance. It's not like I don't have the DVD for most of the media as a backup. Or a copy on my iPod.
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@art_of_shred said:
If I were going to set up a 2-disc RAID set for the media server, I'd go with RAID-0. No critical data there, so let's get performance. It's not like I don't have the DVD for most of the media as a backup. Or a copy on my iPod.
In this scenario, RAID 0 will only add performance for writing, not reading. For watching the movies you get the same either way. Typically write performance is not a big deal for something like this as it is a rare thing and often constrained by the performance of the source media anyway. But having to recreate several terabytes of media, even if very possible, remains very annoying.
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@scottalanmiller In that case I would still do RAID-0 for the capacity. No need to waste half the space for redundancy.
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If you're doing it for the capacity then a separate RAID-0 volume for each disk would be the way to go.
If a disk fails all data on RAID-0 volumes using that disk is lost.
I would still recommend using a redundant volume. If the capacity on a single disk is an issue then with a 4-bay NAS you can get 3x the capacity of a 2 disk NAS, using RAID-5 with 4 disks compared with RAID-1 with 2 disks.
