Advice on disk management systems

[BlackRockArt]

Hi y'all.

I have been looking at options for tidying up my external drives, I wonder how you guys do it. As of now, my home network is made up of

a) 2 Synology NAS: 5-Bay and 2-Bay, each has 8-TB drives inside.

b) 1 standalone 12TB external drive, offline, quarterly backup of important files.

c) the messier pile of external drives : 1 x 16TB, 3 x 12 TB, 1 x 8TB, 1 x 5TB, 3 x 4TB.

d) I would like to tidy up the 4TBs & 5 TBs as these drives heat up in the summer.

e) dozens of 2TBS & 500GB laptop drives.

Over the years I have accumulated these drives due to the video production storage requirements; my lack of foresight caused the headache today.

I have looked at the NAS options, there are QNAP and Synology, I am not familiar with QNAP though.

Does anybody have similar setups?

Thanks in advance.

Oliver

PS: pictures for attention.

You can only see EXIF info for this image if you are logged in.

 

[tomfranic]

Pic got my attention, beautiful it is.

 

[Patrick M]

Also Synology. 15Tb 4-bay DS923+ and an old DS211j for its backup. the backup is in my detached garage. I have used Synology for over a decade, and their support has been first class.

my computer is an iMac 27” with 3Tb internal fusion, and I’ve linked it, on my NAS to my Pc , an HP Pavilion 550 also with a 3 Tb hdd. So the internal drives get everything off the sndisk sdd on my return. Following purging etc, the remaining images go to the DS923+

 

[BlackRockArt]

Thanks, Patrick. I have a mix of Mac, PC, IPhone, Android and a few other networked devices, NAS is the most sensible option.

I guess I will just get rid of the small drives and combine everything into another NAS unity.

Oliver

Also Synology. 15Tb 4-bay DS923+ and an old DS211j for its backup. the backup is in my detached garage. I have used Synology for over a decade, and their support has been first class.

my computer is an iMac 27” with 3Tb internal fusion, and I’ve linked it, on my NAS to my Pc , an HP Pavilion 550 also with a 3 Tb hdd. So the internal drives get everything off the sndisk sdd on my return. Following purging etc, the remaining images go to the DS923+

 

[Patrick M]

Thanks, Patrick. I have a mix of Mac, PC, IPhone, Android and a few other networked devices, NAS is the most sensible option.

I guess I will just get rid of the small drives and combine everything into another NAS unity.

Oliver

That’s pretty much what I had to do. I had half a dozen external hard drives standing around, accumulating dust as I could only access them individually.
One plus of the disc station is built in checks and the ability to just replace a bad drive - it happened just once in the past 5 years!
Also not dependent on any external iCloud. I can access my drive from anywhere I can get the internet. Nobody has my data but me.
And if I need more storage, I can get bigger drives or add more!

 

[JP Onstwedder]

I use external drives for Capture One catalogs (so I can move from desktop to laptop more easily) and store RAW and exported images on a different external drive, which is synchronised to a Synology NAS. That works quite well: it is much faster to access the (large) RAW files on an attached drive than on the NAS. With the synchronisation, using Synology Drive, files are backed up and accessible almost immediately. It sounds like you have tens of TB of files and accessing solely from a NAS could be very slow.

 

[JP Onstwedder]

That’s pretty much what I had to do. I had half a dozen external hard drives standing around, accumulating dust as I could only access them individually.
One plus of the disc station is built in checks and the ability to just replace a bad drive - it happened just once in the past 5 years!
Also not dependent on any external iCloud. I can access my drive from anywhere I can get the internet. Nobody has my data but me.
And if I need more storage, I can get bigger drives or add more!

You've been lucky with hard drives! In perhaps 7-8 years of using NAS, I've had failure of ~20% of all hard drives, all of them Western Digital Red NAS drives. I've switched to Toshiba in the hope that those work better.

 

[BlackRockArt]

wow, a 20% fail rate would be considered catastrophic in my line of work. Did you send the failed drives away for a forensic report? What's the sample size? During the last 20 years, I have had 5 failed drives; then again I never use hard drives for more than 5 years and have Hard Disk Sentinel running all the time. I replace the hard drives typically around the 4 year mark.

Oliver

You've been lucky with hard drives! In perhaps 7-8 years of using NAS, I've had failure of ~20% of all hard drives, all of them Western Digital Red NAS drives. I've switched to Toshiba in the hope that those work better.

 

[JP Onstwedder]

wow, a 20% fail rate would be considered catastrophic in my line of work. Did you send the failed drives away for a forensic report? What's the sample size? During the last 20 years, I have had 5 failed drives; then again I never use hard drives for more than 5 years and have Hard Disk Sentinel running all the time. I replace the hard drives typically around the 4 year mark.

Oliver

3 of 16 over the past ~8 years, all in Synology NAS systems. A fourth one is giving SMART warnings but is still working.

The setup is fairly typical of home users, I would think: living room in the middle of London, no A/C, so fairly dusty and with temperature fluctuations from ~15C to ~25C. The NAS is primarily a backup system, so it's on 24/7 but in sleep mode most of the time, being woken up 3 times (1am, 3am, 5am) for various backup tasks. I also synchronise new images using Synology Drive, so every week or so the system will be busy for an hour or two as I load new images, or as I finish processing a photoshoot and export finished images.

All failed drives have been Western Digital Red, mostly the 6TB and one 10TB. Unsurprisingly I've now replaced them with Toshiba NAS drives, in the hope that those are more suited to my operating environment.

I'm planning a major computer and storage upgrade next year (I have all the cameras and lenses I want, so what else would I spend money one, right ?) so I'm debating whether to stay with the NAS solution or not. In some ways its brilliant (easy to access securely over the internet, for example) but it's high maintenance and frankly not very reliable.

 

[Calson]

I have a 5-bay (actually 9 if I count the 4 SSD only bays) QNAP as my primary NAS. I have a 4-bay QNAP NAS and it is my backup and I do a sync once a month so new files are backed up to this NAS. If my primary NAS fails in terms of its electronics or power supply, then I can switch to the backup NAS and be up and running in minutes.

My active working files are on a dual NVMe 2TB modules configured for RAID1 that are inside the workstation. Only drawback is that when one fails the only way to know which is bad is to swap them out one by one. The failure rate on the Samsung NVMe internal M.2 SSD has been roughly 1 failure every 18 months which I can live with as part of the cost of this approach.

When traveling the backup NAS is dropped off at a neighbor's house for safekeeping in the event of a fire or burglary at my house.