I will shut my NAS down, but its under my desk, so not a pain to turn it back on. Iâve had some WD red disks for like 4 years.
Absolutely. Turning things on and off is annoying and error-prone. In particular, my SSHFS setup doesnât deal well with disconnects, and NFS is not much better either. If you do do that, wake-on-LAN is a good avenue to considerâŚ
HDDs are designed to keep running. Itâs counter-intuitive, but spin-up/down can impose more stress on the drive than just the regular spinning. As for the actual numbers, this is usually part of the specs, and also includes how much data is written to the drive.
For example, the Seagate IronWolf 8TB has the following specs, according to Newegg:
- Workload rate of 180TB/year.
- Always-on, always-accessible 24Ă7 performance.
- 1M hours MTBF, 3-year limited warranty.
If we would be to believe those specs (and if my math is right), it would mean the drive could run continuously for 114 years. Notice how that stands in stark contrast with the 3-year warranty.
Those drives are designed to stay on and keep a load. You do pay a little more, but if youâre going to be building a NAS anyways, I think itâs worth the cost.
The real problem with drive is random, out of spec failures of all sorts. Some drives will just die earlier than those specs for no reasons: you can return them, get a RMA and a new drive, but your data is still lost. This is why checksums and/or backups and/or RAID or so critical to data integrity and/or reliability and/or high availability. Ultimately, things fail, if only because cosmic radiations will flip a bit on the disk or the controller and damage your data.
Keeping your drives running at least allows you to monitor their health continuously. The real trade-off, for me, is not reliability, but power usage and the associated environmental impact. Then you need to make other calculations regarding the power usage at spin-up/down time and continuous use, which are much harder because less clearly specified.
Yes, turning such stuff on and off reduces its operating life. Thereâs inrush current that stresses the electronics, and more significant, there are friction and mechanical stress dynamics associated with getting masses such as disk platters spun up.
All of this points to having a well-considered redundancy strategy. And itâs not mirrored RAID, especially with same make/model/purchasedate HDDsâŚ
I think RAID is about availability not redundancy.
Depends on the mode. RAID 1 is âmirroringâ, where the identical data is written to at least two separate drives. That is redundancy supporting availabilityâŚ
Certain RAID modes are also about performance, spreading the head movement to access data across multiple drives. This was actually the original incentive behind the concept.
RAID ( Redundant Array of Independent Disks , originally Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks )
I have never used a NAS but I want to try it. I have a Raspberry Pi kicking around and was thinking to start with something very simple like an RPi with two external HDDs over Samba (shared folder). I will be backing up the HDDs to another drive via rsync once in a while. The main application will be hosting the image collection for digiKam. I also develop the images I like the most using darktable.
The host (RPi) will be connected over 5.8 GHz wi-fi but I can hard wire it if required. The clients are two laptops (one with Linux, the other one with Windows 10) and possibly a desktop PC (Linux). Both laptops support 5.8 GHz wi-fi.
I donât think I will ever need to access the collection from outside of my home network.
Do you think the setup is going to work well? I suspect it to be a bit slow but I hope the speed will be acceptable what what I do.
wifi can be a bit slow, and 5GHz can especially be problematic if you have walls to cross. That said, Darktable has a âlocal copyâ feature which you can use to keep a local copy of photos that you are currently working on, so that you donât hit the network all the time.
It should be fine. If itâs not, try wired, and if itâs not, replace the raspi with something more powerful.
I hard-wire anything that doesnât move, save the wifi for the tablets and cellphones. On a given channel, youâre competing not only amongst your devices, but anyone else in the neighborhood on that same channel.
Even with a wired connection, I think the bottleneck on your RPi will be the USB interface. I have six RPis around the house (sprinkler control, experimenting with camera control right now), but I do my âNASâ on PC builds with SATA HDDs, wired ethernet. rsync works great; I just run a script with a rsync command every time I upload images from my camera and everything gets put on two machines.
My oldest son has a few.
I have sent his comments as PM to you.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
I agree 100%. I will play around with the Pi and will upgrade to something else if needs be. I have seen some single board computers with SATA interface. I just hope I can keep mainstream and wonât have to deal with systems with custom linux kernel, etc.
Right now, Iâm configuring a RPi as a camera image collector/controller. Connected to the camera with USB, running QDSLRDashboardâs ddserver to make the camera controls available on the WiFi to my tablet running QDSLRDashboard. Works, as far as I have tested it, and a whole bunch cheaper than Nikonâs product to do this. Next to try is using gphoto2 alongside this software lashup to capture raws, process them to small JPEGs and post them to some album.
Later, if I decide to pursue some sort of astrophotography, the same box would be a candidate to control the mount. All just good funâŚ
On my desktop pc I have a RAID1 for my home partition. Iâm using restic to backup to my NAS system (RAID1) and to a SSD every 6 month with the most important data. The SSD has a friend of mine.
I donât think there is a better tool than restic for backups! A backup is only a backup if you can verify that the data can be restored!
Interesting that I didnât read any responses the mentioned Amazon Prime backup.
My set up is as follows:
- SD transfer via Rapid Photo Downloader to
- Synology 2-bay NAS
- Mirrored 3TB drives
- NFS wired networking
- Synology synchronization with Amazon Prime backup for images
Whatâs interesting to me, is that JPG and raw (CR2) files do not count against any storage limits in Amazon Prime photo backup. Video does count.
Are you doing that with their Windows client tool?
Synology has an Amazon sync tool, itâs part of the NAS. I think it runs on their BusyBox Linux variant. So, all the configuration is on the Synology NAS to Amazon side. I use, of course, the Rapid Photo Downloader to transfer directly from Ubuntu workstation, to the NAS (mirrored drives), and the Amazon Prime synchronization kicks in immediately. I have spent a lot of time trying out different combinations of cloud backups, and this is the one that has stuck.
The only hitch, is that I chose NFS for networking and it requires raw user ids (e.g. 1026) rather than user names (e.g. mike). The GUID and UID had to be set to match up. Somehow, I convinced myself that I absolutely needed the NFS transfer rate. Glad to have it, but in hindsight, Iâm not sure itâs worth the setup.
My benefit is that I get a quick mirrored backup, over NFS, and then a cloud backup for all CR2, JPG, TIFF and XCF. Depending on the amount of data Iâm transferring, the upload to Amazon will be running in the background.
I wasnât aware of that. Thatâs great. The windows Amazon prime photos client was truly awful when I looked at it a couple of years ago. It was the most badly written program Iâd seen for many years! It used vast amounts of CPU and even managed to trash some of my photos (seriously). What a nightmare. I was able to restore my trashed pics from local backup, fortunately.
Damon, maybe thatâs why Amazon Prime media backup isnât widely adoptedâif the general UI is poor. As for trashing photos, years ago I had my backup drive fail and my desktop was incomplete (I was not being organized). After paying too much money for a clean-room recovery I was much, much more motivated to get everything right. Final comment on Synology: I was leaning to building a FreeNAS, but the support on Synology has been more than worth the price.
Iâm using an HP Microserver Gen 8 (4 drive capacity) running Rockstor. I started with 2 x WD Red in raid 1 but had one die and I think the other is getting that way. So Iâve added a pair of Seagate Iron Wolf drives and started migrating the important stuff that way.
Rockstor supports Docker containers. Apart from some media server containers, I also run Duplicati. This automatically backs up my chosen data to BackblazeB2 (cheaper than Amazon for me).
My main PC doesnât have a lot of storage, so I usually try to delete rejected raw photos then use rsync to copy them along with sidecars to the Rockstor NAS.
BackblazeB2 is a terrific price. What I canât figure out, is the real-world pricing when all my updates are being constantly resynched. The bottom line, for me, is that the Amazon Prime is about $120/yr for unlimited photo storage (not video), and then I get the extra value of shipping discounts, Prime movies, etc. (which have nothing to do with the apples-to-apples comparison).