Questions about NAS II

[cobito]

Two years ago I opened this thread with doubts about how to set up a NAS. This thread is the second part with new doubts, this time related to expansion (in times of crisis). At the moment it still has 3 4TB WD Red NAS EFAX drives (of the slow ones, although this has not been a problem). In the coming weeks I will install the fourth drive due to lack of space and from that moment on, I will run out of expansion options at a reasonable price. Plan A (exhibited in the first thread) was to replace the 4 drives with 4 more drives with more capacity. That option is not bad from a practical point of view but, unfortunately, the price of hard drives has not changed practically at all in the last two years (at least the ones with single-digit capacities, I don't know about the rest). That means, that doubling the capacity would imply an outlay of 1000€ less what I get for the 4 4TB drives (¿60-70€ per unit?). In total I would spend more than what the complete NAS cost me. So seeing that in a few months, a piece of land, a rifle and a good collection of seeds is going to be the only truly practical thing, I have thought about being more efficient with economic resources. My initial idea is to set up another NAS with 3 6TB drives that would have a cost approximately equal to buying only the 4 8TB drives. The total capacity would be the same with the counterpoint that it would consume double the energy (with what that entails today and I don't know how long it will last). So in the medium term, this idea has a drawback and zero advantages. But this option would give me some time to hold on with the 4TB drives and wait for the drives with more capacity to drop enough, seeing how they are squaring the offer with demand with hammer blows, I believe (without having a clue about macroeconomics) that in the not too distant future (one or two years), they will have a substantially lower price. In essence, I would have more flexibility to be able to expand the NAS. The truth is that buying hard drives at this moment seems to me like throwing money away and the less you spend on this particular piece of hardware, I think the better (that's why I'm looking for a new NAS with smaller drives). But for that I open this consultation:

1. Do you think that from the point of view of scalability and monetary economy, it makes sense to have two (or more) NAS?
2. Should I think about a new box and a controller to continue expanding with 4TB drives in RAID 5? Here I am a bit worried about having only one parity drive for more than 4 or 5 drives, because at these scales, I can no longer have a copy of absolutely everything. In addition, an expansion with a change of drive of this monstrosity would be prohibitive. It doesn't convince me much.
3. Or should I not complicate my life trying to predict the price of things (it seems that I am quite bad at this) and fork out a thousand bucks for the 4x8TB?

Like last time, this is not going to be immediate. This operation would probably be executed between late summer and late year (if civilization still exists, of course). Thanks! PD: To unite the two NAS, I would use something like'mhddfs' to unite both file systems into one.

[Mystique]

@cobito I expanded my NAS with 4 12TB drives a year ago and I would say that for spending €1000, you should look at these

I'll pass this on to you: B07VXKF1L4
I'll leave the rest to your imagination, although I've mentioned before what shucking is

[_Neptunno_]

I don't think the current situation will get any better, quite the opposite (I hope I'm wrong). The problem you might encounter could be a lack of stock, or simply that the prices will skyrocket again and instead of 1,000 you'll end up spending 1,200 or 1,500, who knows. I would say it would be good to be optimistic and that there would be a price drop and in the end they would be 700€... but I just don't dare to think that things will improve much this year or next.
As for having several NAS, I imagine it all depends on each person and it may be viable, but from my experience I'll tell you that the more you simplify things the more time you save from solving problems. Also, I think you should consider making a substantial capacity expansion to avoid having to expand again in a year, although of course there is always the limitation of the budget... there's nothing you can do about that.

Consider the option of @Mystique

Best regards!!

[cobito]

Thanks to both of you for the answers.

@mystique said in Doubts about NAS II:

@cobito I expanded my NAS with 4 disks of 12TB a year ago and I would say that for spending €1000 you look at these

I'll pass this on to you: B07VXKF1L4
I'll leave the rest to your imagination, although I've mentioned before what shucking is

I take note of that option. Do you know how the warranty issue goes in this case or if I do this operation I have to forget about it?

@_neptunno_ said in Doubts about NAS II:

I don't think the current situation will get better, rather the opposite (I hope I'm wrong). The problem you might encounter is a lack of stock, or simply that prices will skyrocket again and instead of €1,000 you end up spending €1,200 or €1,500, who knows. I would say it would be good to be optimistic and that there would be a price drop and in the end they would be €700… but I just don't dare to think that this year or the next things will improve much.
The thing about having several NAS, I imagine it all depends on each person and it may be viable, but from my experience I'll tell you that the more you simplify things the more time you save solving problems. In addition, I think you should consider making a substantial capacity expansion to avoid having to expand again in a year, although of course there is always the limitation of the budget… there's nothing you can do about that.

Consider the option of @Mystique

Best regards!!

In reality it's very difficult to predict the price. For example, at a time of galloping inflation like the current one, the price of graphics cards is falling (due to financial factors that they are).

I take into account two things: a drop in demand is being forced through monetary policy and (leaving aside transport), I'm not aware that the price of raw materials and energy substantially influences the manufacturing price of hard drives, or in other words: the costs of raw materials, energy and transport of hard drives represent a small percentage of the final selling price (if someone corrects me if I'm wrong). In addition, it seems that the price of maritime transport is easing and the supply shortage of integrated circuits is being mitigated despite the fact that there is a disruption in the supply chain of certain industrial electronic components (as far as I know, it shouldn't excessively affect consumer electronics).

Precisely because things don't look good for this year or the next, I wouldn't expect a price increase or maintenance of prices for products that are not heavily dependent on the price of raw materials and energy. That adds to the fact that the prices of hard drives have varied little or nothing in the last year and a half or two years, which leads me to think that a substantial price drop per tera is coming.

But these are just speculations and (as you mention) everything could be the opposite.

What I looked at when buying the NAS and I look at now to choose capacity (in addition to my needs) is the price per TB. To this day (just like two years ago), the lowest price per TB is that of 4TB disks, although there is a notable drop in 12TB disks (comparing disks of the same brand and model). Choosing more than enough capacity is the best option from a practical point of view. For me that would be buying 4 disks of 16TB. But that option, as you've rightly said, has a price that is too high at the moment.

[Mystique]

@cobito in principle, if you clean it well and put it back in its plastic box the warranty should cover you... as long as it's not noticeable what you've done

I haven't needed it so far, but I keep the boxes and cables of the 7 disks on which I've done it

[_Neptunno_]

@cobito maybe I'm wrong but we did a calculation a few months ago at work to order external drives of various sizes for some projects. It's amazing how many drives I see going through my office and work jajaja. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you is that the 6TB ones were the ones with the best capacity and size ratio.

Lately I have a couple of coworkers from work who are going crazy trying to manage the more than 150TB of information from a digitization project (we'll see another one that will be even bigger) that we are doing, because on top of that you have to manage the BCK that although it has it mounted in Raid 5 you can't afford to lose information. To make matters worse, you have to work hard on that storage because there's no other option. The problem with this project is that from the beginning the amount of space it would occupy wasn't well defined, issues with bck, workflow, etc...and you can't imagine the amount of work it took to "fix" the solution.

I'm just telling you this so that you can be encouraged to refine the final idea well, because later you end up spending more money in the long run with expansions and on top of that you spend days until you see the volume of information replicated, etc. If you have to spend a little more don't hesitate, you'll save time and health!

Regards!!

[cobito]

I have made a table with the WD Red NAS Plus (3 years warranty)

Capacity [TB]	Price [€]	Price/TB [€/TB]
1	78,99	78,99
2	90,99	45,495
3	117,99	39,33
4	120,99	30,2475
6	187,99	31,3316667
8	259,99	32,49875
10	321,99	32,199
12	347,99	28,9991667
14	480,99	34,3564286

It seems that there have been more changes than I initially thought. The 12TB drive has dethroned the 4TB one. In any case, the capacities from 4 to 12TB have a similar price per TB, so, if choosing this model (I would still have to evaluate the proposal from Mystique, which is even more tempting), the best option would be the 12TB. Here the limiting factor is already the budget. As I said above, all of this is for a few months from now.

[_Neptunno_]

I'm not sure about the prices of all the disks you mention, but I think the ones we bought of 4TB and 6TB are a bit lower than the prices you mention, so it's possible that in that specific case, the 6TB ones end up being more profitable per TB.
But anyway, my opinion is more in a work environment, so it's more cost-effective to set up 6TB disks than 4TB because it's quite a lot of capacity you gain disk by disk and the investment is more justified.
Then another thing that happens, according to what I was told in the support department of the servers they assemble, is that the 6Tb pools that are created take quite a while to set up and when there is any discrepancy, it takes a long time to rebuild, so with more capacity, that time is multiplied and it's a problem.

These are things you probably know, but that we often don't realize until we're in the middle of it and see that taking 1 or 2 days to get the raid functional again is terrible.

Of course, I'm talking about the systems we handle and my personal experience with my home server... a SAI is the best because an electrical outage will at least cause your NAS to take a few hours to rebuild.

Regards!!

[cobito]

@_neptunno_ Surely. I'm just looking at the WD website as a reference for comparison. You can get them cheaper on other sites. It's likely that your colleagues have reached 6TB by looking at regular stores, which is more reliable for the final purchase. In any case, in the 4-12TB range of Red NAS Plus, the differences seem to be more or less small.

Just to complete the data and have a reference for later (or if someone wants to buy now), I leave here another couple of tables.

WD Red NAS Pro (5 years warranty)

Capacity [TB]	Price [€]	Price/TB [€/TB]
2	109,99	54,995
4	156,99	39,2475
6	249,99	41,665
8	287,99	35,99875
10	368,99	36,899
12	433,99	36,1658333
14	476,99	34,0707143
16	334,99	20,936875
18	609,99	33,8883333
20	667,99	33,3995

The 16TB drive is on sale and for being a Pro, it has a very interesting price, although it still doesn't beat the 12TB WD Elements at 18€/TB.

Seagate IronWolf (3 years warranty)

Capacity [TB]	Price [€]	Price/TB [€/TB]
1	60,39	60,39
2	80,45	40,225
3	105,94	35,3133333
4	109,99	27,4975
6	189,27	31,545
8	239	29,875
10	333,95	33,395
12	362,53	30,2108333
14	480,09	34,2921429

[Mystique]

@cobito said in Dudas sobre NAS II:

The 16TB drive is on sale and for being a Pro, it has a very interesting price, although it still does not beat the 18€/TB of the 12TB WD Elements.

The 16 for that price... you already hurry
Because I don't have where to plug them now, but if I needed them for that price I wouldn't think twice

[cobito]

@mystique What can I say, it's very tempting. I've been thinking about it for a few days but I didn't plan to spend 1000 euros now (I would need 3 disks) and the thing is that I don't need the space now either.

I think it's this "cheap" because the waiting time is 2-3 weeks (which, with things the way they are, I wouldn't trust much). I suppose the offer will last until they restock.

I'll keep thinking about it.

[JuezDred]

Hello, call me crazy, but I don't trust WD at all. and I'm building a NAS from a Xeon 1220V2 4gb ddr3, an ssd for the OS and two seagate barracuda disks of 2tb each. I still don't know what operating system to put in it, or if I should add another disk to make some interesting raid or put it as raid 1 only. any advice? it will mainly be for storing movies, work, invoices and being able to access from different devices in the house. even maybe from outside of it to store photos and other things.

[cobito]

@juezdred I think RAID 5 is quite balanced for having 3 or 4 disks. It depends a lot on your storage needs and data security. In the end, the RAID level depends a lot on what you want. If with 2TB you think you will have enough, RAID 1 can serve you. If you want the possibility to expand and maintain some redundancy, RAID 5 is a good option.

I've been using a home NAS for a couple of years that runs on OpenMediaVault and it works perfectly. I have a RAID 5 set up. A few months ago, a hard drive failed and I was able to rebuild the volume without any problems. And recently I expanded it (from 3 to 4 disks) and it was quite simple. In essence, I have experienced all the more or less delicate operations without any surprises.

Then you have FreeNAS (which seems to now be called TrueNAS) which, due to its use of ZFS, has some pretty interesting features like compression and deduplication. Depending on the type of data you are going to put in, you can save a lot of space, but it has some drawbacks like it being more difficult to expand.

In my case, what I wanted was simplicity, reliability, stability and ease of expansion, OMV was what I was looking for.