Recommend me a NAS/Backup Server setup

I have the one-bay variant. It works fine, but I'm hardly a professional sys-admin. I've got machines running backups to it and it running a backup to a big drive on one of the machines. No complaints. The interface is good and once I got an external IP set up, I use it as a personal cloud. Only real complaint is that the android app for streaming music doesn't use https. IOS apps do and the android file app does.

Everyone at work swears by synology. I've never seen such unanimous agreement on any product before.

I'm kicking ideas around in my head about my storage for sometime in the future™ and I'm thinking about power consumption. Would it be feasible to have a share split onto different drives by directory (perhaps shared as one sum total of the drives), yet the drives hosting each section only spin up when their content is accessed.

I've been looking at FreeNAS and they seem directed towards RAID arrays which would involve all the drives acting as one. The FreeNAS documentation is a bit sparse, so for all I know this might be a solved problem.

I bit the bullet and ordered the Synology 411J. I was really debating whether to get the 2 bay or 4 bay... until I learned that you can do multiple raid 1 arrays in the 4 bay, so I picked up 2-2TB drives for the first array and then I'll add a second Raid-1 array later.

Just for future reference for those who come across this thread, the 411J installed easily. I installed the media server and itunes server apps from their package utility and DLNA works great to xbox, my panasonic viera, etc. I really like the management interface. Highly recommended.

Good to hear. I've not had a synology in years (stuck with promise at work) so I think I'm going to pick up a ds411 to play with.

Scratched wrote:

I'm kicking ideas around in my head about my storage for sometime in the future™ and I'm thinking about power consumption. Would it be feasible to have a share split onto different drives by directory (perhaps shared as one sum total of the drives), yet the drives hosting each section only spin up when their content is accessed.

I've been looking at FreeNAS and they seem directed towards RAID arrays which would involve all the drives acting as one. The FreeNAS documentation is a bit sparse, so for all I know this might be a solved problem.

I don't know anything about freenas and have never cared about power consumption but if you use jlinks in windows or linux then you can have all your data appear to be on one drive but divided out by directories. With the right power settings, you should be able to have the drives spin up and down only when data on them is accessed. I may not be reading what your asking right though. Are you wanting a drive pool? Honestly, unless you're talking about hundreds of drives, the power consumption isn't that much.

ibdoomed wrote:

I don't know anything about freenas and have never cared about power consumption but if you use jlinks in windows or linux then you can have all your data appear to be on one drive but divided out by directories. With the right power settings, you should be able to have the drives spin up and down only when data on them is accessed. I may not be reading what your asking right though. Are you wanting a drive pool? Honestly, unless you're talking about hundreds of drives, the power consumption isn't that much.

I actually had a power monitor on my computer recently. Running just the motherboard+CPU+RAM it was around 70W, and adding 2 hard drives added around another 10W (IIRC), and with everything plugged in it's around 100W plus/minus a bit. If I was making a low power NAS I think I'd be looking at other things such as a more suited mobo/CPU than recycling a normal one. FreeNAS/NAS4free does support power saving mods, but there's also other options such as wake-on-lan. Really, as a longer-term thing I'm just trying to educate myself on what's possible, and more importantly how I would use it and fit it in with that usage.

Drives don't take up much power, I wouldn't sweat it. The WHS I have with 8 drives draws 357W with integrated video and no optical drive according to the Newegg power supply calculator.