NAS or SAM-SD?
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@dafyre said in NAS or SAM-SD?:
I am building this box for reliability... so RAID10 is a given... Which is better in RAID10 to improve the reliability? A few big drives, or several smaller ones?
IE: 4 x 8TB drives... vs 8 x 4TB drives?
All other things being equal, larger drives are almost always better than more drives. Each additional set of drives that you add increases risk. Bigger drives adds risk, too. But not as quickly. More drives means more failures and higher risk of double failure. Larger disks causes longer rebuild times. But the later is generally safer than the former.
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Of course there are weird thresholds. For you, you are in small numbers so bigger drives gives you the granularity to minimize unnecessary risk. If you were in huge numbers, the opposite might be true.
Example:
You have 24 2TB drives in RAID 10 for 24TB usable. You need 25TB usable. Going to 26 2TB drives is probably a lot safer than increasing all drives to 3TB.
But if you have two 6TB drives in RAID 1 and you need 8TB. It's safer to go to two 8TB drives than to go to four drives.
You are on the later side of the scale.
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For the Build we are going for, it will likely be the Synology DS1515 and 4 x 8TB drives, if it's not required for us to have a Rackmounted system...
If it has to be rack mounted, the R510 kills on pricing, so I'd probably build that with 4 x 8TB drives...
For a system like this, what brand of drive should I go with? I know the WD Red Pros are out there, but those things are $550 a pop.
Any reason to not use a Seagate 8TB drive, for instance?
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WD Red are not bad. They are $326. Still a lot more than the Seagates.
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@scottalanmiller https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/
Higher capacity drives seem to have a lower failure rate. Do you know why?
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@wirestyle22 said in NAS or SAM-SD?:
@scottalanmiller https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/
Higher capacity drives seem to have a lower failure rate. Do you know why?
Newer engineering. They are more mature designs, so that is expected. Nothing, or nearly nothing, in a higher capacity drive would result in higher failure rates and really high capacity drives with helium would lower it.
You expect newer cars and aeroplanes to be more reliable than those designed years ago, same thing here. We get better at making drives over time and so the biggest drives with the latest designs have the best reliability.
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@wirestyle22 said in NAS or SAM-SD?:
@scottalanmiller https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/
Higher capacity drives seem to have a lower failure rate. Do you know why?
Funny... one billion hours and counting. The RAID study that I did was nearly 3 billion drive hours! I had no idea that my study was three times the size of Backblazes to date!
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Also, their larger drives are newer, so less opportunity for failures.
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Their smallest drives also have 0% failures. Small sample sizes aren't useful. One failure would throw it all off.
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@scottalanmiller said in NAS or SAM-SD?:
@dafyre said in NAS or SAM-SD?:
@Breffni-Potter said in NAS or SAM-SD?:
What do you need for recovery time for that box if there is a hardware fault.
Also, I bet you can get a better performing server chassis for that money.
The trade off is, time to build and configure a server, versus an out of the box Synology with a higher risk factor.
This is only going to be for a Photo Archive, so recovery time is not a huge concern as far as I am aware.
Building a server is easy.
Not for people who buy NAS. People buy NAS because they believe that building or managing a super generic file server is somehow super hard. That's why NAS exists. You would not believe how many people think that "right click and say 'share' is hard."
I chose a ReadyNAS for home use over building out a SAM-SD simply because of the ROI for 'Personal Use'.
Business use is something different.
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Well, it looks like I settled on a Build for this...
Consdering list prices with no discounts, it'll run me about $3,800 to build:
Synology RS2416RP+
8 x 4TB Seagate Drives (32TB Raw, 16TB Usable in RAID10).Or...
For ~$2,600 build...ReadyNAS 3138
4 x 8TB Drives (32TB RAW, 16TB Usable in RAID10)Then I have to explain to the users that this is NOT a backup, lol.
Edit: Added the ReadyNAS build.
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@dafyre being entirely for a photo archive I would have went with 5 Google Apps Unlimited accounts (in your case Google for Education is free and has unlimited storage as standard) and had users store photos in Drive. If you had to pay anything, for $50/mo that be pretty competitive pricing and no drives to worry about replacing ever. Plus, add in the features Google Photos has built into it that would be a nice benefit for users for their photo archives.
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@larsen161 said in NAS or SAM-SD?:
@dafyre being entirely for a photo archive I would have went with 5 Google Apps Unlimited accounts (in your case Google for Education is free and has unlimited storage as standard) and had users store photos in Drive. If you had to pay anything, for $50/mo that be pretty competitive pricing and no drives to worry about replacing ever. Plus, add in the features Google Photos has built into it that would be a nice benefit for users for their photo archives.
Cloud is not always an option, this could be one of the reasons he had chosen a NAS. For me, there are always privacy concerns. Using Gdrive myself, but with personal data encrypted.
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@larsen161 said in NAS or SAM-SD?:
@dafyre being entirely for a photo archive I would have went with 5 Google Apps Unlimited accounts (in your case Google for Education is free and has unlimited storage as standard) and had users store photos in Drive. If you had to pay anything, for $50/mo that be pretty competitive pricing and no drives to worry about replacing ever. Plus, add in the features Google Photos has built into it that would be a nice benefit for users for their photo archives.
Flickr is pretty awesome for that and is free up to 1TB.
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@larsen161 said in NAS or SAM-SD?:
@dafyre being entirely for a photo archive I would have went with 5 Google Apps Unlimited accounts (in your case Google for Education is free and has unlimited storage as standard) and had users store photos in Drive. If you had to pay anything, for $50/mo that be pretty competitive pricing and no drives to worry about replacing ever. Plus, add in the features Google Photos has built into it that would be a nice benefit for users for their photo archives.
Actually @larsen161 -- I hadn't even considered that. But due to state regulations, I doubt we'd be able to do cloud storage for this anyway. It would definitely be cheaper... I mean Amazon Cloud Drive is $60 per year in the US...but they'd probably fuss at us for taking up 10 TB of storage right away, ha ha ha.
Still I'll mention it and see what the boss says about using Google Drive or what-not. We do have Google Apps for the campus... but even thinking about it now, as @thwr says, I probably won't be able to go that route.
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@dafyre Amazon Cloud Drive won't blink at 10TB. They say that they expect people to upload their video collections in HD. But it's for personal use only.
