Storage Options

J-Blake wrote in post #18963214
Do NAS box drives remain on full-time with the drives spinning constantly, or do the shut the drives off after a period of non use?

I think it depends on the NAS unit you are using has that feature, and if you enable it or not.

J-Blake wrote in post #18963214
Do NAS box drives remain on full-time with the drives spinning constantly, or do the shut the drives off after a period of non use?

You probably need to contact the manufacturer to ask the question of their sales/support staff.

I went on the web to look up Synology and it mentions for their DS218 that in normal operation it consumes only 14.99W and

"Wake on LAN/WAN and scheduled
power on/off can further reduce power consumption and operational costs. With HDD
hibernation, hard drives can enter the energy-saving mode automatically when the
system has been idle for a specified period of time."

...so it sounds like that means that drives can be (optionally, per schedule) powered down while in the standby (asleep) state or the network is id;e or until someone on the network pings it for data?!

Years ago I started out with 2 NAS boxes. I backed up to one of the NAS boxes and then every night NAS 1 backed up to NAS2. I was using RAID 5 but then realized that for my use case there was no point. The point of RAID is for high availability; if you lose a drive you can continue to use the NAS while you put in a new drive and the array rebuilds. But that wasn't really a benefit to me as, (unlike at my office where I ran RAID 10) I could afford the relatively small downtime that it would take to replace the drive and restore from the other backup. So I stopped using RAID and just went with JBOD. You could also argue that RAID gives you higher read/write, but in my home gigabit network I can't get any faster data transfers than A) The network allows, and B) The speed of the drive(s) I'm backing up from, so RAID offered little to no benefit there.

Now, I built my own NAS using Unraid (currently at 35TB of space available). Expanding the array is as simple as adding another drive (without having to rebuild the array). I backup to that using Veeam (free) and I also use Backblaze for my offsite ($5/month for unlimited data). If I lose my main computer I can restore from my local backup (= fast) and if I lose my whole house I can have Backblaze send me a hard drive(s) to restore from.

I have a nice 4TB WD ext.HDD for $89. I do use Google and M$ drive, just as a backup and cloud storage.

Wilt wrote in post #18963243
...so it sounds like that means that drives can be (optionally, per schedule) powered down while in the standby (asleep) state or the network is id;e or until someone on the network pings it for data?!

Yes, you can. Or your backup application can also wake it up to do a backup. Also, it can be connected to an appropriate power backup and be set to shut itself down cleanly when it senses it has gone to backup power.

Is there really much benefit in having drives shut down when not being accessed for awhile? I've always thought failure usually occurs at startup...
Having said that, I used a powermeter on my ML350G6 server & worked out it was costing approx NZD$520 per year to run (probably around USD$350)

joeseph wrote in post #18965608
Is there really much benefit in having drives shut down when not being accessed for awhile? I've always thought failure usually occurs at startup...
Having said that, I used a powermeter on my ML350G6 server & worked out it was costing approx NZD$520 per year to run (probably around USD$350)

I think that the benefit is saving about $1 a day. Power cycling does introduce some higher risk, but as many have mentioned, few have drive failures ever much less one a year. So why pay for power when you don't need it.

My interest in power cycling was about safety above energy cost. I'm old school with regard to computers but way back when if a drive was spinning it was more susceptible to damage than if off. 24-7 spinning would shorten the life of a drive vs being off and therefore cycling on when needed should benefit as well. And, that doesn't take into account the potential risk increase during surges which would be far greater with the drives on. (Not saying a surge couldn't cause problems anytime a drive is plugged in, but my question was about minimizing risk.) Unless things have changed drastically in the last 10-15 years or so.....

It may be worse here in CO, but lightning storms and surges are way more frequent than other parts of the world. They are my main concern.

J-Blake wrote in post #18965799
...It may be worse here in CO, but lightning storms and surges are way more frequent than other parts of the world. They are my main concern.

That's a huge concern here in Texas as well as the storms are truly scarry. A few year back we took a hit close by and it blew out a whole bunch of stuff. Lost the garage opener, a couple GFI outlets, our cable box, a TV, a phone that was plugged in, and a hard drive and couple other things I can't remember. Since then I have installed a house surge protector and I have all of out electronics on UPS surge protectors as well. We have had a couple of more severe storms with lots of lightning and so far, no additional loss.

The Mean-Time-Between-Failure statistical number is based upon the amount of hours the drive is powered up and spinning, even when idle and not reading or writing data.

Wilt wrote in post #18966080
The Mean-Time-Between-Failure statistical number is based upon the amount of hours the drive is powered up and spinning, even when idle and not reading or writing data.

One should be aware that hard disk technology has improved exponentially. You previously provided anecdotal evidence about your hard drive failures. For quite some time, platter drives have relied on improved air bearings for floating heads and maintain accurate tracking. It's also an example of how parking heads instead of letting them float can cause wear. The main hard drive failure I saw in my lifetime was when I booted up my Dad's old AT IBM when he had already backed up any data on tape and transferred on other computers well after I tried demoing it 15 years after. Its "Winchester" drive did have a failure, so no boot. No loss for anyone except my curiosity about an original PC. The main hassles I've had with data loss is rebuilding boot sectors (way back when my first computers were DOS). There were great strides in miniaturization from the earliest large mainframe platter HDs to the first PCs to now smaller platters that are much higher density. Miniaturizing heads while also maintaining an envelope where they stay above the disk surface. I myself am amazed how many external drives I'm amassing. Some 5.25 with external bricks, some portable with just USB 3. I have had instances where a portable will accidentally drop from my armchair to floor, and no loss in data. I recently bought a new MacBook Pro, and also decided to get an external SSD USB-C for backup/travel drive. I like it for portability and 2x speed compared to my other platter drives...but don't view it as any more permanent than platter at this stage. It would be irresponsible to completely discourage redundant storage. I have been doing redundant storage, but have yet to need to restore (within 20 years).

Is there a substantial loss of speed using NAS over an internal HD setup? Can anyone quantify this in relative (third grade) terms? I'm using a Google Wifi for a network router and mainly processing photo's though they can be quite large on rare occasion (4 GB and over). How about if I were processing video's? Is this a viable solution with regard to speed?

J-Blake wrote in post #18966792
Is there a substantial loss of speed using NAS over an internal HD setup? Can anyone quantify this in relative (third grade) terms? I'm using a Google Wifi for a network router and mainly processing photo's though they can be quite large on rare occasion (4 GB and over). How about if I were processing video's? Is this a viable solution with regard to speed?

Wifi is significantly slower than Ethernet, so Ethernet is preferable. If you have enough RAM, Photoshop or Premiere Pro can be given enough of it to haul even large files over and work on them from RAM. If you've got even larger files than 16, 32, or 64 gigs of RAM can handle, you can install an M.2 NVMe drive (either your motherboard will have a socket or you can mount one on a PCIe card) and put the Adobe scratch drive on it.

RDKirk wrote in post #18966820
Wifi is significantly slower than Ethernet, so Ethernet is preferable....

It depends on the outer. These new 802.11ac routers that support bean forming and MIMO are way faster that the wire that feeds it. And now with 802.11ax just coming, throughput is improving again.

gjl711 wrote in post #18966830
It depends on the outer. These new 802.11ac routers that support bean forming and MIMO are way faster that the wire that feeds it. And now with 802.11ax just coming, throughput is improving again.

You seldom get the Wifi speed they advertise.

And then there is also now 10 gig Ethernet.