LOL mcluvin you and I are probably the only people left on the planet still running Windows Home Servers. I am on my EX-475 with 2gb of ram. What a pain in the ass it was upgrading to WHS 2011 without a VGA out.

I have 4 500gb drives; I am running a cloudberry WHS plug-in which mirrors to OneDrive where I have an office 365 membership and 1Tb in the cloud.

Given windows home server is based on Windows Server 2008, I’m sure updates are gonna be shut off soon. I definitely want to keep my stuff both local and remote; I don’t trust the cloud won’t lose them (MySpace just nuked years of photos and videos in a storage move). I’ve heard great things about synology, it just sucks because my server is running just fine, hate to drop money on something new.

QNAP 12 bay (120TB) running Raid 6. I use it to stream all my BluRays, Music and TV Shows into the theatre room and around the house via PLEX.

I built a Raspberry Pi NAS for a Pinsider for his home network. He recently lost over a year of data for his business and currently has no way to automatically back up his files. Just using an old Model B+ and an IDE hard drive enclosure I have no use for. I was able to configure it for SMB and SSH, and gave it a custom host name in only 3 hours.

I have an Easystore external set to do weekly backups. My plan was to buy a 2nd external to leave at work and swap them weekly. Is there an easier way to do offsite storage?

Everything put in a box!

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Just a quick reminder to people to MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A(n independent) BACKUP! A single computer running any type of RAID setup IS NOT a backup, you need something else in a separate case, preferably located someplace else. (External drives, second server, cloud backup, choose your poison.) Here's my tale of woe / don't be like Korn...

I have a 12 drive RAIDZ2 setup as my main storage library. Thousand-mile-up view is it's a setup where I can lose *any* of the twelve drives and not lose any data. Once drive three goes, however, you lose the whole thing. The idea is that if one drive dies, you go to the store right quick and buy a replacement and you're covered during the rebuild in case another drive dies.

Which is great in theory, except in my case I had two drives "die" simultaneously. A Y power splitter spontaneously decided it didn't want to continue living anymore, and off-lined two of my drives simultaneously. Now in my case it didn't cause any actual data loss since I'm running Z2 and can tolerate two drives going bad/offline. But if any of my other drives had a problem the whole thing would have been gone Gone GONE. Anyone with a typical RAID-5 setup would have been toast from the moment that Y-splitter let go.

The point is *things happen*, and the gold standard against loss is to make sure you have a good backup! In my case I have a completely redundant server/library that I automatically replicate everything to every three days, so even if a third drive died I'd have been out at most two days worth of data. As it was I replaced the power Y, brought the array back up, and since neither drive had physically failed it rewrote the missing data to both drives. It's now back to full resiliency (i.e. two drives can die and I'm OK). But I *easily* could have needed to use my backup had things not gone so well!

eBay has used Synology DS411s (diskless) for $100-200, which is a great deal and a great place to start if you have no NAS. I mean, it’s all solid state so you’re probably good for another 10 years. And if it fails, you can move the disks to something newer. I run RAID10 with 4 disks and it’s plenty fast for me.

I plan to setup a media drive soon. What’s the best setup for this. Streaming movies to TVs around the house and stuff like that.

I mentioned (in a earlier post) I use Plex since I use it record OTA (over the air). Has apps for Roku, Fire, etc. Somewhat lacking w/respect to which format it plays if you burn (back up) a disc, so you may have to convert to a supported file format. Not nearly as flexible as Kodi, but easier to use if you are interested in OTA. Nivida Shield runs the Plex server, along with a Homerun tuner. Shield is plenty powerful enough to stream 4K. Seems to be a very popular combination.

One nitpick on Shield/Plex - every time Shield updates, Plex needs reset. So I need to shut off the Shield auto update. I think this is more of a Shield issue than a Plex issue.

Another option if you want to go the Plex route is to buy a NAS w/some CPU horsepower and just run Plex right from the NAS. Just keep in mind most low end NAS units have wimpy CPU's in them, which is fine for just streaming files but not when combined w/a media server.

Just my 2 cents. Plenty of other options, I'm sure others will chime w/their setups. Kodi is very popular, you should check that too besides Plex.

Thanks for the ideas. I do have a shield and might play around with that as I do some testing and learning

I don't have anything that is irreplaceable on my NAS, but it would take me a ton of time to rip everything again. Backing up 27TB isn't cheap...

... Nor fast!

Depends on what you're doing with the Synology. How is it going to be used? That's going to determine how you want it set up.

These days I have a ThinkServer that runs a headless Ubuntu server with ZFS on Linux. I use mirrored drives so I never have to worry about rebuilding if a drive goes down. I don't personally think Z5 (or Raid 5) is good for a home environment since rebuild times can be extremely long. I'd rather eat a few bucks and have mirrored drives.

I run a Plex server as well as some bots that automated downloads for me. It works great, but I'm also a full time Linux developer so it's a familiar environment for me. I used to use self built boxes with FreeNAS (now, nas4free) and it was rock solid... Just not as flexible as I wanted.

There is no "rebuild" time with mirrored drives, that's the whole point. If one disk goes down, the other disk has a full copy which can be accessed immediately. I believe you are referring to replacing the bad disk and the mirror being copied, but that's very different than a Raid or Z5 rebuild... As your data is still 100% accessible and you can even write to the disk...

When Raid 5 goes down, you have no access to any data and you have to wait possibly days for it to rebuild during which a power outage or crash would cause your data likely to become completely lost. I just don't feel it's a good option for home use.

This thread got me looking into next steps for my NAS, since my 4 drives are all 4+ years old. I decided I’m going to replace my RAID10 setup with a RAID1 using two 8TB drives:

https://serverpartdeals.com/seagate-st8000nm0055-8tb-7200-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-256mb-512e-internal-hdd/?

My logic is that if I need more storage down the road, I can always go back to RAID10 with two more 8TB drives. I’ll use the old 4TB drives for local and remote backup.

I just don't think most home users who are sold the benefits of Raid 5 are actually equipped to handle it should a failure occur. The only real reason to use it over a mirror is to save money and be able to sell pre-packaged boxes as having more disk space.

EDIT: I edited my original post because I realized I was incorrect that Raid 5 data is lost until the array can be rebuilt.

I thought about getting NAS box but insead I just I upgraded PCs around Christmas time. I then used my old PC as a MAME box and for network storage. I got 20+ terabytes available for media storage I can playback on android tv boxes or whatever (Serviio for DLNA service).

The "NAS" boxes are overpriced anyway, that's the better option.

There’s nothing wrong with using an old PC as a NAS. I really like the whole Synology software package, though. And I could never get my Windows PC to sleep right.

Well, Windows shouldn't be the OS used for anything important

Same exact machine DS412+. Love it

Had the old Windows Mediasmart EX490 with a USB 4 bay connected when I started. What a mess. Over 13TB that was always getting corrupted due to the unique “tombstone” type file management. Glad that is over - Synology software and hardware is simply awesome

I should add that twice per year I do incremental back ups to dedicated hard drives using a hard drive toaster. I store these off-site

I'm running a custom built 4U FreeNAS server, with 16 3.5" and 6 2.5" hot swap bays. Currently I have 80TB of magnetic storage, and 4 TB of solid state storage

I'm using a Xeon 12 Core CPU, with 128Gb of ram. I use for critical files storage with sync to the cloud, Virtual Machines, and a Plex server.

Out of curiosity, what kind of files are you backing up that requires 80TB of storage? I guessing a bunch of 4K Blu-ray rips?

pr0n

4k rips, or could be a photographer/cinematographer.

That's an Enterprise grade server he's running lol.

Definitely pr0n

Who saves pr0n on a hard drive in this day and age? Lol

With inexpensive 4K streaming services such as Amazon and Netflix, and inexpensive music streaming like Spotify, plus sites like xhamster, what are you guys filling up a NAS with, much less 40TB

All that stuff is here today and gone tomorrow. I prefer to have my own server with my media that no one can take away right when I am looking to watch/listen to it.

Also, if you have a high end setup, streaming is noticably worse than locally stored rips in original quality.

IDK... I was pretty impressed with Synology. I did something stupid... and they got me all fixed up after a couple of remote sessions. I haven't seen any data loss because of it.

I'm in the process of transiting from SHR+BTRFS among 4 qty - 4TB NAS drives to 2 qty 10TB NAS + 2 qty 4TB NAS drives... for 18TB w/ 10TB of protection. Standard old Raid5 would have been only 12TB with 4TB of protection and 12TB of waisted space.

I'm very glad I went with the DS916+... the techsupport was phenomenal.

Home movie editor? Maybe he has an army of chat-er-bate minions he needs to video edit for?
Maybe it's a lucrative business model?

Ok Reality_Studio how much data we talking about to edit porn and what kind of NAS/SAN editing suite do you run if you don’t mind me asking as I think you are in that biz, if not please feel free to correct me.

Blu-ray and 4K rips.

A 4K amazon stream is nothing compared to the quality of a 1 to 1 4K HDR rip.

No. I didn't get a sale.
One was a WD 10TB "shuck"... the other is a 10TB IronWolf Pro which appears to not be compatible with the Synology.
It's probably going back to Amazon sometime this week. I have another 10TB "shuck" candidate; that will probably get that done to replace the 10TB Iron Wolf which is incompatible.

Photography is a hobby of mine, so I've got about 15 years of RAW files, plus about 5 years of JPG shot before then. I use the NAS for Time Machine backups of 3 separate Macs, and a back up of 3 different PC. I also have video footage I've shot, document backups, etc. I have about 1TB of high quality rips I've made from my old CD collection, and an assortment of Blu-ray and 4K content.

That does make sense actually.

But, we really wanted it to be pron