RECOMMENDATIONS FOR A RAID 5 ARRAY FOR DESKTOP

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jerrylwatson said:
The reason I joined in on this thread was people who did not have NAS were discouraging getting it. I just wanted to give my experience that has been good. I am a retired software engineer and still write programs for myself. So I also use it for backing up versions of my code. Good Luck
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A clarification, my rambling above was an attempt to give my understanding of how some of this stuff works to the broader audience. As you own a Synology, I assume you know more about its capabilities than I do, and since you also have a tech background that is assuredly true.

Adding a tidbit that slightly amused me ...

As I was looking at more stuff today, I noticed that Apples APFS filesystem has snapshots, but they are mostly hidden, used I think as the basis for TM incremental backups and as a recovery point for system upgrades. You can drop to the command line and create your own snapshots, but I can't tell yet if you can easily access files in a snapshot (at the very least, you have to mount the snapshot). They are not exposed as a general purpose, easy to use file recovery mechanism without invoking Time Machine and using the actual backups.

Just a minor tidbit ... filesystem snapshots are cool.
 
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PhotoLover said:
A clarification, my rambling above was an attempt to give my understanding of how some of this stuff works to the broader audience. As you own a Synology, I assume you know more about its capabilities than I do, and since you also have a tech background that is assuredly true.
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Totally understand. Do I really have to have the NAS, no. But it is nice to access my data from everywhere we travel. Which is a lot these days.
 
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My advise to you is to avoid Seagate! i have two LaCie raid drives 40tb each ( each one cost me 2500 Canadian plus 15% in tax) and after three days of backing up my data, they both fail one after the other. They are now at the Seagate lab to retrieve my data since two months and have not received any news from them. I wrote to their CEO after using every possible way to contact them with no success. The CEO did not reply either. The only way to contact them is by Chat and even the agents are nice, but they can’t do much to help. I don’t have any ideas where my drives are and what happen with them. Really use any system except LaCie and Seagate.
 
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I'm using a Qnap TS453 4 bay, RAID 5, connected to an unmanaged switch. Lightroom directories and backups are on the desktop data hard drive. As gigabit ethernet between desktop and NAS is slow, I ingest files to the data drive, then perform lightroom import. Then copy data folder to the NAS and point LR to the NAS. The NAS is being upgraded to add 2.5Gb. Lightroom works well with this current setup.
 
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It was interesting to read about other people's experiences. I recently went with an upgradable Synology 5-disk NAS (https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS1522+). Each disk is 4TB 3.5" HDD. I can add two NVMe drives and more RAM later if needed. I can also bump up the drive size. I'm using RAID 6 to get protection against up to a two disk failure. It gives me about 11TB of storage.

I'm a newbie to all this, but had a plethora of various drives scattered about. My old work laptop could barely function due to a full HD, I had a small micro sd of 1TB in an extra slot that I considered very vulnerable, a full 4 TB Seagate external ssd, and I was backing up onto an external 8TB Seagate HDD.

I'm still moving data to the NAS. I really like having a central storage solution so I don't have to plug in this or that drive to access data, or have to worry about filling my local disk on my laptop. I plan to use the 8TB HDD to back up the NAS after it is all set up.

So far, it seems to be working well. I went with Synology because a family member has used them. He's a MAC user, a landscape photog, and really likes his Synology 8-bay. (I'm a Windows user). My next hurdle will be file management, making sure my years of data is organized in a logical way. I'm still using NX Studio but plan to move to LRc once I upgrade my computer. I think I'll be able to afford a better GPU in a new laptop because I won't need as much storage onboard. Also, the larger more powerful graphics cards take more space, which doesn't leave room for a 2nd ssd. I'm hoping to also upgrade to a high quality monitor.

I decided to go to a NAS for a home solution because before I retired, my work used a large NAS. It was very efficient with many users in a CAD/CAM environment, in multiple locations. I'm using Windows machines mostly because that is what I am familiar with from my CAD/CAM background. All the software we used at work was Windows based.

So far, so good with the NAS, but like I say, I'm new to all this.
 
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There are only two NAS companies I would recommend both for their operation and long term customer support and they are QNAP and Synology. In most cases they are on par but the 2-drive QNAP boxes have had a lot of failures and so best avoided.

For drives one should be using NAS specific drives, either the Seagate IronWolf or the Western Digital Red drives. I started out with the WD Red 7200 rpm drives. I later switched to Seagate IronWolf 560 rpm drives. I discovered that the 7200 rpm drives ran 20 degrees F hotter than the 5400/5600 NAS drives and heat shortens the life of electronics. People should not confuse issues in the past with standard drives with current NAS drives that are built differently for maximum reliability in a RAID array enclosure.

What most folks do not appreciate is that it is the hardware (CPU, RAM, Operating system) that determine throughput with a RAID array. In your cost calculations allow for a 9% loss of total capacity with drive formatting and the overhead for the RAID array. With a 4-drive setup the total capacity is 3x the individual drive capacity and with a 5-drive array the overhead is 20%. Also the option of doing RAID5 or RAID6. With RAID5 one drive can fail with no loss of data and with RAID6 two drives can fail with no data lost.

www.omnicalculator.com

RAID Calculator | RAID Performance Calculator

This RAID calculator will help you decide which configuration of disks (RAID level) is right for you, based on usable capacity, fault-tolerance, performance, and cost.
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What also varies is the data output of the different enclosures in terms of type, USB, Firewire, or Ethernet, and speed. Only a few support 2.5GB or 10GB Ethernet which can limit their utility in a network, home or office.
 
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