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NAS and home network advice
#1407801
01/02/2013 00:15
01/02/2013 00:15
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Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479 Lightwater, Surrey
DaveG
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Club Treasurer Member 311
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OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
Je suis un Coupé
Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479
Lightwater, Surrey
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I've been thinking of getting a twin disc NAS for all the music/photos/videos we have plus backups, and seen the Zyxel NSA325 on offer at ebuyer and the 3 TB Seagate Barracuda HDD's seem good value at under £100 (so I was going to get a pair). What's the best way to transfer the 1 TB or so of data I have at the moment scattered around various external HD's and PC's? (I want lots of room or expansion with all the old 35mm negs to scan, LP's to rip, etc.) The external HD's all have USB connections but are old and maybe only USB or USB 2. The NAS has a gigabit socket but I have nothing else with it, is it worth getting a gigabit ethernet card for a PC, or will the USB connection be the bottleneck? I would imagine the external HDD's are not SATA-III like the 3 TB drives. Anyone else think the NAS+3TB drives are good value? The modem/router is still only 54g but all PC's can do wireless-n 150 Mbps (apart from my old laptop with 11 Mbps PCMCIA adapter) and I have several 200 Mbps HomePlug adapters (some of which show a low speed due to the house wiring ) but I could do with a faster modem/router. I used to use MAC address filtering but have more than the max of 16 devices so switched to WPA2 (which my old laptop couldn't do but I just found an Edimax EW-7711UTn adapter which I'll have to try) but I'd like additional features like being able to lock the kids out of the internet at certain times (bed time ) I know other forum-ers have Zyxel stuff, and it mentions Squeezebox which I want and those drives are listed as being compatible, so it seems good value compared with basic 2 bay stuff from Synology, QNAP or Netgear. Other stuff I'd like to connect is a PS3 and a Humax FoxSat PVR. The maximum phoneline Broadband speed is 4 Mbps on a good day, but 3 Mbps more typically Any recommendations for a modem/router? No point in getting too advanced or I'll have to update all the PC's etc.
1996 Portofino 20vt & 2000 Pearl White Plus 2008 Ferrari F430 & 2017 Fiat 124 Spider
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: DaveG]
#1407842
01/02/2013 09:32
01/02/2013 09:32
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Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479 Lightwater, Surrey
DaveG
OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
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OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
Je suis un Coupé
Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479
Lightwater, Surrey
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Proliant, hmmm, a little more costly than I was hoping for, but the main problem is that the hp badge is the mark of the devil in our house. As for the different RAID types, I haven't the faintest idea what you're on about, other than I think RAID 1 will suit me OK?
1996 Portofino 20vt & 2000 Pearl White Plus 2008 Ferrari F430 & 2017 Fiat 124 Spider
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: DaveG]
#1407849
01/02/2013 10:03
01/02/2013 10:03
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Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 21,071 Chertsey in the Thames
bockers
Hon Club Member 007
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Hon Club Member 007
Forum Fossil
Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 21,071
Chertsey in the Thames
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My ZYTEL also has an eSATA socket. But the one you linked has a USB3 input so get a USB3 card for your PC and jobs a goddun.
The interface for the drives is SATA I or II so your 3TB SATA III drives will be fine but won't be working at full whack, but they rarely do anyway even with a SATA III interface.
Last edited by bockers; 01/02/2013 10:08.
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: DaveG]
#1407860
01/02/2013 10:32
01/02/2013 10:32
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Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 33,674 Berlin
barnacle
Club Member 18 - ex-Minister without Portfolio
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Club Member 18 - ex-Minister without Portfolio
Forum Demigod
Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 33,674
Berlin
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@DaveG:
Raid 0: data is placed onto two drives, half on each drive. That means you can get it back twice as quickly but if either drive dies you lose everything.
Raid 1: data is place onto two drives, the same on each. Capacity is the same as a single drive, but if either fails, you've still got a good copy.
Raid 5: data is placed on n-1 of n drives - I'd be looking at 3 of 4 - and a checksum of the n-1 drives is placed on the remaining drive. If any one drive dies it can be recreated from the remaining drives.
There are more sophisticated combinations: raid 5.1 mirrors two raid 5 drives and allows any two discs to die, for example.
If you have a NAS box with two drives, your only options are raid 0 or 1. With more than two drives, you can consider raid 5.
With four (e.g.) 2TB drives:
raid 0 = 8TB capacity, fastest, risky raid 1 = 4TB capacity, standard speed, reasonably bombproof raid 5 = 6TB capacity, medium speed depending on chipset or raid software, pretty bombproof.
Of course, if you're *really* concerned about availability of your data... one of the last jobs I did in the Beeb was the radio audio servers. Raid 5.1 in one rack of discs; a second copy in another rack on the same controller; a third copy on a different OS on the server. Duplicate that in a different server room on different power and network supplies. Then copy the whole lot in a different city... you could drop a meteorite on London and Radio 4 will still work.
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: DaveG]
#1407891
01/02/2013 11:49
01/02/2013 11:49
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Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479 Lightwater, Surrey
DaveG
OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
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OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
Je suis un Coupé
Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479
Lightwater, Surrey
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@barnacle I feel suitably edd-you-kate-edd, but does that mean that Radio 4 is all just recordings?
@bockers, yes I thought about sticking the existing drives in the NAS. not sure how easy they are to dismantle though. I only have one laptop with USB 3 I think. I envisaged copying over several nights, I have done that before using the Homeplugs to get a lot of stuff off the Humax box. But AFAIK the Zyxel NAS is SATA-600 (same as SATA-III?) which is the same as those 3 TB drives. But with the Homeplugs I found that the speed at the Humax connection was sometimes dropping below 10 Mbps, pretty poor for what is supposed to be max 200 Mbps. The Humax is plugged into some new sockets in the lounge, a lot of new sockets were added, but just the other side of the wall is an original socket on the same circuit as the router, and plugging into that gave me closer to 100 Mbps, so I just ran a cable through the wall and joined the circuits (they are on the same fuse). Elsewhere in the house the Homeplugs give 100-150 or so if on the same circuit. I was disappointed to see how poor the Homeplugs could be on different circuits.
That's why I thought that a direct gigabit-to-gigabit connection might help, but the files to copy are scattered over multiple old HDD's and PC's, so it won't help unless it all gets copied to the PC with a gigabit card, then copied again to the NAS, which seems like a waste of time.
Thanks all!
1996 Portofino 20vt & 2000 Pearl White Plus 2008 Ferrari F430 & 2017 Fiat 124 Spider
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: DaveG]
#1408100
01/02/2013 23:15
01/02/2013 23:15
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Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479 Lightwater, Surrey
DaveG
OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
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OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
Je suis un Coupé
Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479
Lightwater, Surrey
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Well maybe...but perhaps I'm better off just getting to grips with a twin version and RAID 1 for now. I have to say that now because I've gone and bought the Zyxel plus 2x3TB discs. Watch out for my 'help needed' thread in a weeks time...
1996 Portofino 20vt & 2000 Pearl White Plus 2008 Ferrari F430 & 2017 Fiat 124 Spider
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: DaveG]
#1408103
01/02/2013 23:18
01/02/2013 23:18
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Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 9,729 Zele, Belgium
Kayjey
Club Member #10
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Club Member #10
Je suis un Coupé
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 9,729
Zele, Belgium
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I don't 'really' get the fuzz about RAID-5. I've used it and... 1/ writing data (which you kind of do a lot for backups) was s l o w compared to my RAID-1 2/ one of the disks failed after a year and then another one failed while trying to recreate the array (disks off the same batch tend to fail after about the same time) Generally, I now just go for RAID-1 for the speed (well I did, I now have a small SSD running my system which is the best move I've done the last year together with a 24GB RAM upgrade) but I have a double backup system as well: all gets copied on a daily basis to a big drive in the PC itself + an external drive on eSATA. I also always make sure my RAID-1 drivers are perfectly matched but my other drivers are completely different. They will fail on different types. That said I only had drives fail once so I'm not buying WD's again. And even now I'm still not feeling very safe. I'd like a remote backup in case of fire or lightning strike. Then again, I'm talking valuable data of customers here. Oh and pictures. Ideally... I don't know what would make anything bombproof. Remote backup sounds rather okay. As long as you check it. And as long as the connection is REALLY fast. My problem is I often create a couple of Gigs a day so the backup can take a while. Oh and then I also have "ARCHIVE" disks. This is a backup on DVD. Err... twice. I store them in different locations in the house. And then those archives also get archived on two different hard drives. Yeah... it became a bit freaky after those drives failed and it took me 6 months to recreate a lot of work for customers.
- Kayjey -
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: DaveG]
#1408121
01/02/2013 23:45
01/02/2013 23:45
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Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479 Lightwater, Surrey
DaveG
OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
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OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
Je suis un Coupé
Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479
Lightwater, Surrey
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Yes, you tend to learn the hard way. Starting with 5" floppies, then 3.25", then CD's, etc., one copy is never enough, and when you start to hear funny clicking noises from a hard disc, don't ignore it...
One of the PC's has gigabit ethernet and eSATA apparently, but only USB 2. The hard disk has nearly 0.7TB free so I'll probably copy all the stuff from multiple HDD's over to it as a first step (might need to do it 2 or 3 chunks).
To get it all on the NAS, I assume I would need a gigabit router to connect the PC to the NAS via gigabit, I can't just connect them directly?
The PC also has firewire (as do some of the other PC's), can I connect PC's directly together by firewire cable?
Once I've got the all the files on the NAS, I'll have a look at upgrading the modem/router.
1996 Portofino 20vt & 2000 Pearl White Plus 2008 Ferrari F430 & 2017 Fiat 124 Spider
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: DaveG]
#1408154
02/02/2013 00:35
02/02/2013 00:35
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Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479 Lightwater, Surrey
DaveG
OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
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OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
Je suis un Coupé
Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479
Lightwater, Surrey
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Yes, but I'm just thinking that PC to NAS can be done via Gigabit (with crossover cable, or apparently supposed to be smart enough to use normal patch cable and do a "software" crossover) for up to 1,000 Mbps compared to Firewire at 400 Mbps and USB/USB2 (not high speed) will be the slowest.
And going over the network as it is now will only be up to 54 Mbps with the old wireless router, and only up to around 100-150 Mbps using Homeplug.
1996 Portofino 20vt & 2000 Pearl White Plus 2008 Ferrari F430 & 2017 Fiat 124 Spider
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: DaveG]
#1408168
02/02/2013 00:56
02/02/2013 00:56
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GrahamL
Unregistered
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GrahamL
Unregistered
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For RAID5 you really want a hardware RAID card so that the parity can be calculated by a dedicated logic chip on the card, rather than in software on the host system, otherwise it's sloooow indeed. Even then writes are slower than reads 'cause it has to read all the strips to calculate parity before writing. I run 10 x 2TB drives in an external box as RAID6 (like RAID5 only with 2 parity drives, so you can have 2 fail at once) on an Adaptec card and performance is excellent. Of course if you're running a Mac hardware RAID probably isn't an option as the most common cards (Adaptec and LSI) have no driver support for Mac.
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: DaveG]
#1408321
02/02/2013 19:00
02/02/2013 19:00
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Joined: Jul 2009
Posts: 2,617 SE Essex
charlie_croker
I need some sleep
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I need some sleep
Joined: Jul 2009
Posts: 2,617
SE Essex
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Raid 5 is available here http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00620CM0I/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00Its a 4 disk RAID, and its pretty good, 2xUSB3.0 Ports, 1x USB2.0 , gigabit networking, fairly quick and a bargain at the price. I have just streamlined our home NAS drives, getting rid of 2x Buffalos, 1x:Lacie, 1xLinkSys, (in fact you can have the 2bay Linksys for £25 delivered if you want it., no drives supplied though) http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/servers_storage/linksys_by_cisco/media_hub_nmh-305/280272Am down to using the Qnap TS219 Pii, the Apple TimeCapsule and the Netgear. As for the Mac using RAID 5, thats only if you connect the RAID Array directly to the Mac, I thought poster was planning on using his network? There are MAC Raid cards available, I know because I have one in my Mac Pro http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/MXPCIE6GRS/
Happy
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: charlie_croker]
#1408330
02/02/2013 19:50
02/02/2013 19:50
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GrahamL
Unregistered
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GrahamL
Unregistered
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Proper raid 5 cards tend to be pricey (multiple hundreds £s) though dont they? I've picked up quite a few used Adaptec or LSI cards on ebay over the years for £100-£200, about 1/4 of the new price, so not excessive cost wise considering the performance gains. If you don't go for the current range there are some bargains to be had. Again it depends on your needs I am guess your is used for work as well as personal? Yes, but just for backups, it's mainly used for storing HD movies. Even these new gigabit NAS boxes will totally bottleneck the performance of a decent multi-drive RAID0 or RAID5/6 array , DAS (Direct attached storage) with hardware RAID will easily perform 4x faster and it'll remain that way until 10Gb ethernet is much more common. There are MAC Raid cards available, I know because I have one in my Mac Pro
That card doesn't implement RAID in hardware so would perform no better than software RAID. I'm not sure if proper hardware RAID5/6 cards are even available for the MAC at all, I've never seen one.
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: DaveG]
#1408417
03/02/2013 00:57
03/02/2013 00:57
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Jef_uk
Unregistered
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Jef_uk
Unregistered
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I'm building a ZFS FC 8GB/s SAN. But I am a Nerd. Got a Brocade Switch. Software raid will P all over any hw raid 5 card. But it does have 32 GB ram and 8 cpu cores
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Re: NAS and home network advice
[Re: whatmoretyres]
#1408801
04/02/2013 14:37
04/02/2013 14:37
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Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479 Lightwater, Surrey
DaveG
OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
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OP
Club Treasurer Member 311
Je suis un Coupé
Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 8,479
Lightwater, Surrey
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Dave, are you on cable broadband or bt? BT I haven't asked them about fibre optic broadband, I'm with Utility Warehouse and they won't be upgrading for fibre optic for a while now. But TBH I'm not that fussed, we don't stream movies and as long as it works for BBC/ITV iPlayer it's OK, but that's not to say we won't want it in the future...
1996 Portofino 20vt & 2000 Pearl White Plus 2008 Ferrari F430 & 2017 Fiat 124 Spider
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