Once again thanks to y'all for your knowledgeable input! I looked at Synology products but finally opted for a WD 8 TB "My Cloud" NAS. The price and small form factor were appealing, and I understand that these now are equipped with WD red series HDDs. My experiences with WD products has been good in the past. Another factor in my decision was that the WD has gigabit Ethernet as opposed to the 100 Mb of the Synology. This looked to me to be the best bang for buck. A smaller disk size would probably have worked for my needs, but the additional cost for the larger size was not much. The 8 TB was actually cheaper than the 6 TB. I'm not sure that the remote access features are needed for my family, but then I don't need to enable them.
I will provide follow up on this if any of you are interested. Greg -----Original Message----- From: Mercedes [mailto:mercedes-boun...@okiebenz.com] On Behalf Of Dan Penoff via Mercedes Sent: Friday, December 05, 2014 8:19 AM To: Mercedes Discussion List Subject: Re: [MBZ] OT: Secure Storage, was Transcoding LPs to Digital I agree with Tim. After researching storage options to a level of detail I never planned, I came to much the same conclusion. If I was going with an off the shelf solution it would be Synology. FreeNAS was really attractive, given the high level of configurability it offered. Since I had an existing NAS, a DLink NAS-345 running five drives in RAID 5, I have continued to use it. However, realizing that a single volume RAID 5 setup did not provide the redundancy and setup I desired, I wiped it and went to four drives in a Mirrored RAID configuration with two volumes. So I have two separate volumes, each running on two mirrored drives. This gives me the integrity and redundancy desired for my files for now. It also gives me a performance gain over the previous single volume RAID 5 arrangement as well. Not perfect, but it meets my needs. I pull the mirrors once a month and rotate them out with another drive. The current drives go in the fire safe. Dan Sent from my iPad > On Dec 5, 2014, at 9:18 AM, Tim Crone via Mercedes <mercedes@okiebenz.com> wrote: > > On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 11:23 PM, OK Don via Mercedes > <mercedes@okiebenz.com> > wrote: > >> I copy (via automatic program) all changes to the folders I'm >> interested in (photos, documents, music, etc.) from the primary disk >> to a second disk in the PC, then again to an external disk. and on >> one of our PCs, to a second external disk.. Very cheap and simple, it >> all happens when I'm asleep, and I have three or four copies of >> everything. when one disk dies, I just replace it, and it gets auto >> brought up to date. I fought with SANs, NASs, and RAID at work for years, didn't want to mess with it at home. >> > > I used to do something similar, but recent viruses have taken to > destroying files in all online storage devices (then charging a > bitcoin ransom for the recovery key, which may or may not work). I > have thought about investing in a tape drive (which is ironic given my > employer :) but in practice I just keep a USB disk offline, and bring > it up occasionally to do the replication. The problem with rotating > storage is that it needs to be spinning to keep working, so I can't > leave it in a drawer and expect it to work. There were some good > deals on 64G USB sticks last week, but I didn't buy any since I don't have a good plan for using them. > > Anyway, given the state of viruses, I would definitely recommend > keeping a solid-state backup - flash, or DVD, or an offline disk - > rather than depending on a system that uses Windows shares. > > To the original post, Synology is a good choice for low power, low > noise, high configurability, reasonable cost and reliability. If you > roll your own, I have to agree with Dan that FreeNAS is the way to go. > If you are willing to lose some abilities, many of the 802.11ac > routers have USB ports that will accept a USB drive (or even multiple > drives) and expose Windows and NFS shares. > > Merry Christmas to all, > Tim > _______________________________________ > http://www.okiebenz.com > > To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ > > To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: > http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com > > All posts are the result of individual contributors and as such, those individuals are responsible for the content of the post. The list owner has no control over the content of the messages of each contributor. _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com All posts are the result of individual contributors and as such, those individuals are responsible for the content of the post. The list owner has no control over the content of the messages of each contributor. _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com All posts are the result of individual contributors and as such, those individuals are responsible for the content of the post. The list owner has no control over the content of the messages of each contributor.
