News I set up the ultimate home NAS with over 100TB of storage

[AC News]

I used over two dozen NAS servers over the course of the last decade, and I just switched to a new media server that's ridiculous.

I set up the ultimate home NAS with over 100TB of storage : Read more

 

[fuzzylumpkin]

Weird flex, but OK.

 

[moogoos]

So you bought a 6 bay underpowered overpriced NAS that complains if you dont use their proprietary hardware and loaded it with 6x20TB HDDs and call it ultimate? CLICK BAIT nonsense.....

 

[funkyd]

I hope you have backups of your backups and also a backup of your media if it's important to you. If you do a quick search on the Veeam backup forums, you'll find plenty of users who get file integrity errors when saving large Veeam backups to Synology NAS devices. Nothing to do with the backup software or source and everything to do with the backup target.

In a corporate environment, we've used Synologys in the past for remote offices. They have chewed through disks like nothing I've seen before. SMART errors on multiple disks that appear at the same time, and after removing the disk and running a dedicated SMART scan they come back clean. A Synology running a lab environment lost it's array completely with healthy disks, and all Synology support could say was "hmm.. that shouldn't happen."

The thing is, most people use these devices for media consumption... what is a few bad bits in a 4K video? Maybe some distortion or skipped frames, and only in the unluckiest of cases would the file be unplayable. Bad rip? Bad download? Unless you have a checksum for the file, you'll never know if it's your Synology randomly corrupting data.

At the $6k price point you can buy a white label SuperMicro server with a JBOD controller loaded with disks running TrueNAS with no overpriced relabeled hard drives or other "supported" components to worry about. 100TB+ on a Synology is just a disaster waiting to happen...

 

[Jorsher]

I know a lot of people that use Synology and are happy with them. I understand some people just want something simple, compact, and relatively low energy to store lots of data. It sounds like your use-case, and this is perfect for that use-case.

My previous NAS was almost as compact (U-NAS 810a case), also 8 bay, had dual 10gbit NICs, onboard LSI3008 for the 8 disks, a SAS3 16i HBA to connect external JBODs, 64gb of ECC RAM, a server-grade motherboard with IPMI, and a Xeon with iGPU (sufficient for transcoding 4k remuxes), and despite buying it ~5-6 years ago -- still came out cheaper than the Synology listed. I literally just finished a new 'NAS' (more server) and for the same cost as the Synology in the article, I got a 64-core EPYC, 512gb RAM, and another server-grade motherboard.

$650 for a single 'Synology' hard-drive is insane. It sounds like they give you the option to use other hard-drives, but to put things in perspective I typically buy 16tb for $160 and 18tb for $180. They are manufacturer-recertified drives, but I've had 0 failures out of >24 recerts over the past year, and depending on vendor the warranty ranges from 2-5 years.

I use TrueNAS, but typically recommend Unraid to others since it's a bit more flexible with expansion. I was surprised that your first NAS was FreeNAS, then you moved to Synology, since if you had the slightly-higher level of skill and effort required for FreeNAS -- you could have handled it a second time.

I think most people would have been more interested in an article about how to build a low-cost Unraid or similar NAS.

 

[jgle490]

I manage a Synology NAS for a small non-profit that I support. Nowhere near as much storage that the OP is using. The subject says "Home NAS", but it sounds like a home business application. So, yeah, have a backup and restore solution for a NAS in that context, beyond whatever recovery is built into the installation RAID (or whatever); especially with the any issues being experienced, like the OP.

 

[NaCl]

Meh. I built my first "real" NAS out of a Power Edge 2950, 2 Norco SAS expander 24 bay enclosures, and 48 Seagate 4TB drives back in 2014/2015 w/FreeNAS 9.04.


Since...I have updated to a fully "pimped" 3990X running 2 fully populated MD3060E enclosures (10TB, 12TB, and 14TB WD drives) right around the .7PB area. Running TrueNAS Core. Backup duties handled via a jail running P5 Backup to a Scalar i3 w/2 LTO8 mechs and 1 LTO 6. I have 2 SuperLoader 3 LTO6 units but don't use them to reduce licensing costs from Archiware.

Large capacity NAS units, even DIY aren't magic/special. Anyone w/rudimentary knowledge and some funding can throw hardware and cash at it and end up with something workable. The devil is in the details of the "care and feeding" wrt config, data safety and curation.

My use-case is I enjoy owning my own movie collection. After such a thing gets to a certain size threshold it becomes quite unwieldy. Where was movie/TV show X in the boxes/shelf/stacks again? Do we have movie/TV show Y, what all is available? Did children screw up a particular disc the last time they used it? Did they even put it back? After running into some/all of these, and/or streaming service license losses in the middle of a series binge, my goal was to get to a point where all of my media was accessible to me from any device anywhere. This involves full quality .iso and .mkv's of/from those .iso images. The curation/post processing involved represents a substantial amount of time/effort. Losing that would be a mighty blow; hence the backup solution/expense.

So again..."care and feeding" is the specialness. Your backup solution, as others have pointed out, is not ideal. I also have a DS1821+ that gets backed up of its data exposed via NFS mount to the Threadripper NAS.