Synology NAS ok for non-technical user? Or is there a better solution?

[Kentuckienne]

My photographer friend has ~35 TB of images saved over four or so different RAID arrays from G-Technology. Some of the older ones are no longer supported, and the newer ones are set up as logical drives on RAID 0 arrays. One array is failing. Luckily he is backed up 3-2-1 (bare drives with Super Duper locally, Backblaze to the cloud). I was ready to push him to replacing them with a Synology NAS…but I’ve never had one. Is it plug and play enough for a non-technical person? I’d like to set him up with RAID 5 storage, which he can still back up locally, if it won’t be complex to maintain. I don’t think Synology can back up to the regular Backblaze service… would be nice to get him started with a new storage system before something goes haywire.

 

[ruka.snow]

It isn't hard. They have a really 'Windows' like UI on the NAS IP address and a startup wizard. Once setup you just keep shoving more drives into it and it just works as a giant external hard drive (at least how mine is setup). I believe they are probably the easiest to use on the market just now and there are abundant tutorials and guides.

For mine I have a 8 bay rack mount version with 8x10TB Seagate IronWolf Pro HDD's and 2 m.2 drives in the optional 10 Gbps NIC. I have it set up on the default raid recommendation where I can just swap in and out drives on a whim. And I added two of the apps for the UI's store to run virus scans and AWS Glacier backups with the UI making it really easy to schedule these for through the night. On my Mac it just shows up as an external drive and I am happily editing 45 MP RAW files directly of it. If you have 1 Gbps only then when you are finished for the day you can just drag and drop the files onto the disk.

Also of note: It was dead easy to set up another user and volume on the NAS to have a Time Machine backup for my non image files.

 

[HDFan]

Is it plug and play enough for a non-technical person? I’d like to set him up with RAID 5 storage, which he can still back up locally, if it won’t be complex to maintain.

NAS setup is not "plug and play". You have to assign disks to storage pools, create volumes, shared folders if you want to access from another device. An SSD cache might be needed and configured depending upon how the device is used. There are setup guides and utilities which guide you through this process, but it is important to understand what they are doing as you make changes over time.

Look at your long-term storage requirements. If might make sense to buy a unit with more drive bays than you currently use so you can expand later if you need to. I started with a 4 bay, went to 5 bays and now that my 5 bay Synology is maxed out I'm in the processes of getting an 8 bay unit.

Remember that pricing normally doesn't include hard drives. If you want to have RAID 5 you need at least 3 drives. Using Synologys' RAID calculator you only get 32 TB of storage with 3 16 TB drives so with 35 TB of pictures you would need 4 drives to get 48 TB.

RAID Calculator | Synology Inc.

Use this interactive tool to estimate the storage space of your Synology NAS when paired with different size hard drives and RAID levels.

www.synology.com

Best price I've seen on a Seagate Ironwolf Pro 16 TB is ~$440, so that would require $1760 in hard drives.

Synology is probably easier to use, but personally I prefer QNAP. OLED status screens, voice "Thunderbolt device is connected", faster processors are available, thunderbolt and 10 GB ethernet without having to purchase an expansion card. QNAP software has more features, but tends to be rather buggy and more expensive as has more features, Synology is, in comparison, the bargain brand and I have never had any software problems, other than Time Machine.

I have found that NAS units tend to be much slower than attached thunderbolt storage. Since you are usually using SMB for the connections that introduces another layer of complexity. QNAP, for example, currently has an open bug about slow Thunderbolt connections via SMB.

Both support Time Machine, but since these backups tend to fail something like Carbon Copy Cloner is better.

Looks like you know that for a Synology or QNAP Backblaze backup you would have to use their B2 service, which is $5/month/terabyte, or $175 a month.

Synology Cloud Backup - How to Backup Your NAS to the Cloud

Discover why backing up your Synology NAS to the cloud is critically important and learn how to easily do it.

www.backblaze.com

Don't want to scare you but thought you should be aware of some of the issues. If you are reasonably technical should probably be a breeze setting it up once you understand storage pools, volumes and shared folders. Once it is setup then your friend likely will be OK.

 

[Kentuckienne]

NAS setup is not "plug and play". You have to assign disks to storage pools, create volumes, shared folders if you want to access from another device. An SSD cache might be needed and configured depending upon how the device is used. There are setup guides and utilities which guide you through this process, but it is important to understand what they are doing as you make changes over time.
Best price I've seen on a Seagate Ironwolf Pro 16 TB is ~$440, so that would require $1760 in hard drives.

Looks like you know that for a Synology or QNAP Backblaze backup you would have to use their B2 service, which is $5/month/terabyte, or $175 a month.

Synology Cloud Backup - How to Backup Your NAS to the Cloud

Discover why backing up your Synology NAS to the cloud is critically important and learn how to easily do it.

www.backblaze.com

Don't want to scare you but thought you should be aware of some of the issues. If you are reasonably technical should probably be a breeze setting it up once you understand storage pools, volumes and shared folders. Once it is setup then your friend likely will be OK.

First, thanks for the advice, this helps. Once the NAS is configured, does it require much messing with? I have some experience, which is outdated, from my time in the IT salt mines. I was hoping to get this set up for him and then he could just not have to think about it.

He uses Lightroom for everything, and I am guessing I would set the entire unit up as a single RAID 5 array, then carve out logical drives with the same names as his existing drives and use the local backup drives to restore data to them. He really should rename logical drives but the process of moving files so Lightroom can find them is apparently laborious, and he is afraid of losing data. By keeping logical drives to the size of the available externals drives he can keep making local backups.

I have looked at the B2 service and that’s a steep monthly fee, which is another reason I hesitate to encourage him to move to a NAS. He lives in an earthquake and fire risk area, so offsite backups are important. Is there a recommended less expensive cloud backup that would work with a NAS?

 

[sweetandsour1]

My photographer friend has ~35 TB of images saved over four or so different RAID arrays from G-Technology. Some of the older ones are no longer supported, and the newer ones are set up as logical drives on RAID 0 arrays. One array is failing. Luckily he is backed up 3-2-1 (bare drives with Super Duper locally, Backblaze to the cloud). I was ready to push him to replacing them with a Synology NAS…but I’ve never had one. Is it plug and play enough for a non-technical person? I’d like to set him up with RAID 5 storage, which he can still back up locally, if it won’t be complex to maintain. I don’t think Synology can back up to the regular Backblaze service… would be nice to get him started with a new storage system before something goes haywire.

I used to have a Synology NAS for backing up the images from my professional photography business. It's not difficult to set up, but it's definitely not "plug and play" I found the included disk management software had way too many endless layers of options, 99% of which I did not need and many of which related to managing several different users. It was fine, but not so fast and just ok. And I seemed to have to deal with almost daily updates to all the little included apps for managing your music, photos, mail colllections etc that I didn't need (because those are already managed on my computer)

About a year ago I replaced it with a Promise Pegasus RAID drive https://www.promise.com/us/Products/Pegasus/Pegasus32 This was a massive improvement for my particular needs. Whilst you still have to initialise the RAID setup, it's as close to plug and play as you can get. And for my needs with just one user (but several computers) it's really fast to get going and it is just a huge, fast external drive/server. It was accessible straight away over my wireless network (via the main Mac its connected to, the drive itself isn't wireless) so I can access it from other machines around the house too. It's a little more expensive perhaps, but not much. In my particular use case I'd recommend this 100% over Synology NAS.

 

[Kentuckienne]

Thanks, Sweetandsour1, I will research the Promise. I like Synology, but cloud backup of that much data is over $2K a year. Could set up a second NAS offsite and use Hyperbackup..but I don't have any idea where we could put the second NAS in this situation. Some people say they mirror their NAS folders to local external drives and back those up to Backblaze, but there are many opportunities to screw that up.

 

[kingtj1971]

This is one of those areas where I think the market is really under-served; people needing large amounts of fast network storage that can be used as backups or as additional disk space for active use.

A long time ago, Microsoft dabbled in this market with the "Windows Home Server" product, but they discontinued it.

I solved it myself by purchasing an older, used HP Proliant rack-mount server that had 14 drive bays in it and installed a copy of the free, open-source "TrueNAS" software on it. Now, it works as a Time Machine backup target, a Plex media server with plenty of storage allocated for all my media Plex shares/streams, a standard "Samba" (SMB) drive share, and runs a couple of virtual machines for other utilities like "HomeBridge" (links some of my home control devices to Apple HomeKit that aren't normally HomeKit compatible). But this is NOT remotely a "plug and play" setup! In fact, it's downright user-hostile to fight through many, many hurdles to get it all working smoothly.

I think QNAP or Synology do a pretty decent job of making an easier-to-use alternative to a TrueNAS server that you purchase as a "ready to go" piece of hardware. But sure, you're still going to have to partition the drives in one and create shares with security permissions set appropriately, etc. etc. And the physical quality of the boxes are a bit suspect, from my past experience. (Had several of the plastic slide-out hard drive trays break on me in the Synology.)

I've also tried doing a RAID5 tower that attached to my Mac Pro via Thunderbolt in the past. That was as easy to use as attaching any USB external drive, really -- so that part's great. Problem was, it started to suffer from problems with noisy and failing cooling fans after the first year. And then, the circuit board in it handling the hardware RAID started having issues. I think a lot of these are built and sold by smaller companies who are basically assembling them from Chinese parts in someone's garage or basement and they just don't meet the standards Apple users expect.

I never owned the Promise storage unit but they've been around a long time selling various mass storage/network storage solutions and I think they'd be a good gamble.

 

[Infinite Vortex]

If all you're after is local file sharing to a Mac, or Macs, the Synology NAS extremely pretty simple to setup and manage. The difficult parts usually come about when you wan to put the thing online and accessible from outside of the local subnet.

The most difficult parts in reality is firstly choosing a disk array strategy. If you're using HDD then I would highly recommend RAID6/SHR2 (RAID6 will give better performance but SHR2 will give more flexibility). And secondly, you need a backup/recovery strategy as NAS devices themselves can breakdown, building/homes burn down etc etc.

This is a page written by Backblaze to backup a Synology NAS to Backblaze B2…

Synology Cloud Backup - How to Backup Your NAS to the Cloud

Discover why backing up your Synology NAS to the cloud is critically important and learn how to easily do it.

www.backblaze.com

We went for a full 2nd offsite NAS as our primary contingency due to its extremely low recovery period (the moment we decide we need to "go there" we can fully replace our primary server in about 3 hours) and the fact that we have 1Gb symmetric FIOS connecting them but there are plenty of ways one can do this that are far more cost effective, like Backblaze. You just need to consider what a recovery looks like. For instance, getting 35TB off of any online service is not exactly a trivial matter.

Going with DAS, the likes of a Promise Pegasus, is a simpler matter but you still need to plan to move forward with either storage sizes and/or the DAS itself. With Synology you can simply pull out the drives out of the old NAS and then shove them into a bigger new one, if you're after more bays, and it will just take over where it left off.

Additionally, you need to consider how long it take to recover from a failed drive. I don't know if a Pegasus offers a 2 disk redundancy in their RAID choices but without it, and with say 18TB drives, your ass in in the air as your data is then vulnerable for quite some time while that RAID set rebuilds.

At the end of the day you get what you pay for.

 

[Kentuckienne]

But this is NOT remotely a "plug and play" setup! In fact, it's downright user-hostile to fight through many, many hurdles to get it all working smoothly.

That's hilarious. I feel like I should do the Garth and Wayne "I'm not worthy!" chant in the face of such supreme McGyvering. RESPECT. I'm partway through my research, and right now what stands out to me most is the offline backup element. This is earthquake country. Without an online backup, all the data could be lost if there is fire, theft, other damage, or multiple drive failures. Synology can back up online to various providers, but 36-ish TB of data will cost over two thousand dollars a year. Having a second NAS at a different location is not practical in this person's situation. So even an easy to use, non-hostile setup will be a problem if it doesn't allow for low cost online backup. Right now all the person's files are backed up with Backblaze, so I will look for storage devices that can work with that.

 

[phrehdd]

Synology is a fine choice. I would also investigate cloud storage.
Some of us are QNAP fans but for many, I suggest Synology as many perceive it as being 'friendlier."

You could of course be old school - investigate magnetic tape and also, archival discs. Archival discs were popular years ago with some CD and DVD discs (later BD) having a suggested life of 50 years.

 

[Kentuckienne]

Synology is a fine choice. I would also investigate cloud storage.
Some of us are QNAP fans but for many, I suggest Synology as many perceive it as being 'friendlier."

You could of course be old school - investigate magnetic tape and also, archival discs. Archival discs were popular years ago with some CD and DVD discs (later BD) having a suggested life of 50 years.

Nothing wrong with optical discs. I've seen discs that claim 100 years life, under good storage conditions of course...at least with photos, making copies of a few GB at a time and sending them to offsite storage isn't a crazy idea. I think it's a good idea, actually.

 

[HDFan]

About a year ago I replaced it with a Promise Pegasus RAID drive

Can't give enough praise to a Pegasus32. Rock solid - never had a failure. Setup is rigid as compared to a NAS. Have to start from scratch and rebuild when adding drives. Can't add a larger drive to get additional capacity. Pegasus 32 has a 128 TB capacity limit, higher on Pegasus Pro. Remember that available capacity is always lower when using RAID.

Really fast access as directly connected via Thunderbolt. Wouldn't want to use Lightroom with media on a slow NAS connection, even a NAS with Thunderbolt. Unfortunately you have to buy the Pegasus units populated with disks. Since they overcharge for disks I now have 8 4 TB disks (the cheapest configuration I could find) which I pulled and replaced with 16 TB ones when I set up an R8.

Checking the Pegasus website they have a new product - the Pegasus Pro which has thunderbolt AND 10 GB ethernet.

Very expensive as this is basically an enterprise level product. Saw one quote for a Pro ~$10K, but you can get smaller configurations, such as a 16 TB Pegasus 32 R4 for ~$1600.

I don't know if a Pegasus offers a 2 disk redundancy in their RAID choices

They support RAID 6.

Right now all the person's files are backed up with Backblaze,

My solution to the B2 cost is to backup the Pegasus, my main storage device, to Backblaze, currently on sale for $70 a year. 52 TB with no problem. Restoring all that data would be, however, rather interesting even if they mailed me the disks with the data to restore.

If this is going to be a backup, with the files available on the main system via attached storage, not sure why you want to backup via the NAS.

investigate magnetic tape

This is a recommended solution for things like large video projects. Not good for random access, and you may have to update tapes when new standards emerge.

 

[Kentuckienne]

My solution to the B2 cost is to backup the Pegasus, my main storage device, to Backblaze, currently on sale for $70 a year. 52 TB with no problem. Restoring all that data would be, however, rather interesting even if they mailed me the disks with the data to restore.

This is exactly the info I need. I started doing this with near-total ignorance. Have since learned that a NAS is an actual computer, with processor, OS, etc. and that's why Backblaze doesn't work with Synology. Backblaze is a MUST ... he has over 34 TB backed up there now ... so I began looking at DAS devices, which function like attached storage and will be backed up with Backblaze. Right now there seems to be a shortage of Pegasus devices at large capacity, so the next step might be to look at a Thunderbay device from OWC. I don't know how the current crop of hard drives stack up in terms of reliability.

I assume I can replicate the existing drive structure inside the Pegasus? Either create a RAID 5 array and multiple logical drives, each one with the same name as one of his existing drives, or mount as JBOD and create logical drives within the physical drives? I'm not familiar with it but it seems that Lightroom expects files to be in a certain place, and renaming drives has caused people to lose data.

 

[HDFan]

Right now there seems to be a shortage of Pegasus devices at large capacity,

Not sure if "capacity" means drive bays or disks. Again it might be cheaper to purchase a low capacity unit and replace the drives with larger ones. Pegasus drives are a bit of a pain to replace as they are screwed to the carriers, but after a few changes you get the hang of it. The Pegasus utility takes a bit of understanding, and may take a long time to do the format - > 24 hours for very large arrays. However once setup you never have to look at the utility again, assuming no failures.

Pegasus units are often shipped to your directly from the factory rather than the dealer so I'm unsure how to actually determine when an order would be shipping. Guess you would have to trust the dealer.

so the next step might be to look at a Thunderbay device from OWC. I don't know how the current crop of hard drives stack up in terms of reliability.

Thunderbay devices (I have 2) use SoftRaid, which is a software solution. As it resides on your main system it is subject to system software issues. A NAS unit or a Pegasus are pretty much independent of the main system since they have their own cpus and operating systems or firmware. You only have to worry about drivers.

In terms of reliability I would rate them, best to worst order, Pegasus, NAS, OWC or any other software RAID solution. I had a lot of Softraid problems with a Thunderbay 8, but this was with the beta of version 6. It does seem to work OK now, but after my experiences it does make me nervous so I don't count on it.

You might want to look at the Drobo 5D also, a direct connect Thunderbolt solution that has the drive flexibility of a NAS. I have had a number of failures (covered under Warranty or DroboCare) so am going to sell mine.

Hard drive reliability has improved significantly. See the latest Backblaze drive report:

Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2021

By September 30, 2021, Backblaze was managing a whopping 194,749 drives. Here’s a deeper look into the SSD and HDD drive stats for Q3 2021 at Backblaze.

www.backblaze.com

I assume I can replicate the existing drive structure inside the Pegasus?

Either create a RAID 5 array and multiple logical drives, each one with the same name as one of his existing drives, or mount as JBOD and create logical drives within the physical drives?

Not sure since I haven't tried it. With the Pegasus when you create a logical drive you specify a RAID level. If you need a lot of logical drives and you want raid 5 for each you would need have 3 x #logical drives disk slots. After setting up a Pegasus I go years without looking at it so maybe someone else can better answer this question.

As far as JBOD goes by definition each JBOD drive is a logical, mountable drive. Would not have redundancy.

You could of course use folders on a pegasus, but they wouldn't mount as logical drives. A NAS would probably be the better solution, at least in terms of having multiple mountable volumes protectable via RAID.

I can understand your friend's concern about changing drives since Lightroom keeps internal pointers. I'm just wondering if it would be the time to byte the bullet and move everything to one logical volume. I guess that would mean creating new folders in lightroom and moving the files to the new folders. There are utilities that can make sure that you haven't lost any files, but not so sure about how to verify the Lightroom metadata. One way to do this is when you get the new system copy all of the drives and lightroom catalgoue and do the reorganizing. Use it a while to make sure everything is OK, then replace the main Library and files. Not that much of an expert on Lightroom though.

 

[Alameda]

Not sure if "capacity" means drive bays or disks. Again it might be cheaper to purchase a low capacity unit and replace the drives with larger ones. Pegasus drives are a bit of a pain to replace as they are screwed to the carriers, but after a few changes you get the hang of it. The Pegasus utility takes a bit of understanding, and may take a long time to do the format - > 24 hours for very large arrays. However once setup you never have to look at the utility again, assuming no failures.

Pegasus units are often shipped to your directly from the factory rather than the dealer so I'm unsure how to actually determine when an order would be shipping. Guess you would have to trust the dealer.



Thunderbay devices (I have 2) use SoftRaid, which is a software solution. As it resides on your main system it is subject to system software issues. A NAS unit or a Pegasus are pretty much independent of the main system since they have their own cpus and operating systems or firmware. You only have to worry about drivers.

In terms of reliability I would rate them, best to worst order, Pegasus, NAS, OWC or any other software RAID solution. I had a lot of Softraid problems with a Thunderbay 8, but this was with the beta of version 6. It does seem to work OK now, but after my experiences it does make me nervous so I don't count on it.

You might want to look at the Drobo 5D also, a direct connect Thunderbolt solution that has the drive flexibility of a NAS. I have had a number of failures (covered under Warranty or DroboCare) so am going to sell mine.

Hard drive reliability has improved significantly. See the latest Backblaze drive report:

Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2021

By September 30, 2021, Backblaze was managing a whopping 194,749 drives. Here’s a deeper look into the SSD and HDD drive stats for Q3 2021 at Backblaze.

www.backblaze.com

Not sure since I haven't tried it. With the Pegasus when you create a logical drive you specify a RAID level. If you need a lot of logical drives and you want raid 5 for each you would need have 3 x #logical drives disk slots. After setting up a Pegasus I go years without looking at it so maybe someone else can better answer this question.

As far as JBOD goes by definition each JBOD drive is a logical, mountable drive. Would not have redundancy.

You could of course use folders on a pegasus, but they wouldn't mount as logical drives. A NAS would probably be the better solution, at least in terms of having multiple mountable volumes protectable via RAID.

I can understand your friend's concern about changing drives since Lightroom keeps internal pointers. I'm just wondering if it would be the time to byte the bullet and move everything to one logical volume. I guess that would mean creating new folders in lightroom and moving the files to the new folders. There are utilities that can make sure that you haven't lost any files, but not so sure about how to verify the Lightroom metadata. One way to do this is when you get the new system copy all of the drives and lightroom catalgoue and do the reorganizing. Use it a while to make sure everything is OK, then replace the main Library and files. Not that much of an expert on Lightroom though.

I do a lot of RAW photo editing and I always do the RAW and Photoshop editing from local storage. A spinning disk array is going to get you 150 MBs maximum, which isn't close to the speed of internal storage, which can be 20 or 30 times faster, maybe more.

I've tried opening folders of RAW images on external USB 3 storage and it's just painful. My usual workflow is to dump the 128 GB memory card to internal storage, do my edits, then move it to the RAID. If I want to go back to it, I copy it back to internal storage.


But that's just me and maybe others do things differently.

 

[Infinite Vortex]

But that's just me and maybe others do things differently.

Yes ~~~> 10GbE between the Mac and a Synology all SSD RAID.

Every now and then old projects need thinning out to a way bigger, but way slower, NAS that's actually at another site. Its automatically sent using Synology Drive Sync it just needs moving to the right place at the other end (which removes it from the front line NAS). But who cares about speed once something is off to archive. And the speed at which you can get something back out from a snapshot has proven especially handy at times. 1GbE internet is fast enough for archive and/or recovery and isn't enough bandwidth to slow anything down at the important end.

 

[an-other]

My reply is going to mirror the other thoughts. I've had a fantastic experience with Synology. My prior experience before purchasing was a tick past being able to spell "network attached storage." The fact you can quote Raids shows you have more knowledge than I did when I started. Every potential module or decision point seems to have a youtube video to explain. I have no experience with QNAP, however it appears there's equal love for their Product.

Synology has some modular capability to add additional banks of drives to an existing system. That may be a consideration down the road.

I also find their mobile apps to be surprisingly useful. I suppose others have them, too.

I'm sure someday I'll take advantage of the option of backing up my synology directly to the cloud.

I guess I'll sum up my rambling message with a there's good options out there. I chose Synology, and am delighted with my choice. I doubt the learning curve will be an issue.

 

[HDFan]

A spinning disk array is going to get you 150 MBs maximum,

??? I get 10x that on my Pegasus: 1522 MB/s write, 1511 MB/s read.

 

[Geoff777]

I'm a techno-dufus (which is why I went with Macs so long ago!) and I've been using Synology for about 4 years.
I remember set-up was pretty straight forward, even for me. I think it asked a series of questions you answered and it did the techie stuff for you.
Has a great app called Synology Drive which I've set up to replace Time Machine.
Using it as "cloud" storage is easy too. You give the disc a name and a password and then use phone apps to connect to it from anywhere in the world.
My family all have their own folders, is easy to set up what can and can't be accessed by different users.
Above all, it's pretty logical.
Sure it used to have Backblaze as a backup option but can't see it listed today....!

Good luck with whatever you choose.

 

[Kentuckienne]

So much helpful info.

Backblaze is a must. This is earthquake/fire country, and we can’t risk everything being local. Backblaze personal won’t work with Synology because a NAS is a separate computer, and the supported B2 service is prohibitively expensive. The large Pegasus units are out of stock, 32 TB is all that’s available.

OWC Thunderbay can be configured at various RAID levels but they have reports of Lightroom crashing when catalog is opened from RAID 5 and advice to use RAID 4. Any idea if this is a real problem? Is anyone getting problems running Lightroom from a raid array?

 

[Alameda]

??? I get 10x that on my Pegasus: 1522 MB/s write, 1511 MB/s read.

Spinning disks?

 

[HDFan]

Spinning disks?

Yes

Is anyone getting problems running Lightroom from a raid array?

Assuming you are asking for other opinions, but as I stated I have had no problems. There are a lot of RAID arrays out there so I would stick with 1st tier vendors and do the research.

WC Thunderbay can be configured at various RAID levels but they have reports of Lightroom crashing

As stated earlier I did have problems with OWC SoftRaid. Sounds as if you are doing the appropriate research.

The large Pegasus units are out of stock, 32 TB is all that’s available.

Pegasus charges ~$9300 for an 8x16TB
Pegasus charges ~$3200 for an 8x4TB
8x16 TB Ironwolf Pros run $3432 @$429 each

Total cost of an 8x16 with my own disks was ~$3432+$3200=$6632. Saved almost $3K.

Used the excess 4 TB drives for JBOD backups to be put in the bank vault.

Savings will be less with fewer drives. The 16 TB Seagate pricing has been crazy this last week or so. A camelcamel Amazon watch reports it at $429, but by the time I click on the link it had gone up to $450. Happened again yesterday, $429 for just a short period of time. I was able to grab one within the timeframe.

 

[Alameda]

Spinning disks?

Which drives do you have that gets you that kind of speed?

 

[HDFan]

A spinning disk array is going to get you 150 MBs maximum

??? I get 10x that on my Pegasus: 1522 MB/s write, 1511 MB/s read.

Which drives do you have that gets you that kind of speed?

A Raid 5 array of 8 Seagate Ironwolf Pro 16 TB drives. Each drive is rated between 215-240 MB/sec by QNAP's storage test.

 

[phrehdd]

Has anyone here with these very large drives done a test for a restore? Pull out one of the drives and insert another to rebuild? I ask because 16 gig drives being integrated into perhaps a raid 5 or 6 will take a long time and there is always a chance that the rebuild will fail.