Synology NAS questions.

ItHurtsWhenIP

Hi folks - I'm new here, so please be gentle.

I'm fairly knowledgeable on most server and networking topics when it comes to business needs, but not so much on home/entertainment needs.

I'm about to set up a small business at home and need a reasonable amount of storage to hold a number of different VMs, which would be stored on a NAS, but executed on a workstation laptop. I'll have a Gigabit network switch, with Cat6 cabling for laptop and NAS.

So I was thinking that the Synology 415+ would be pretty good for this requirement.

As this set-up is going to be in my home, I was thinking that the NAS could also host my video/audio library. This is currently stored on a 1TB external disk connected to a WD Live Media Player. I have a 1 year old Smart TV, so I was thinking this could directly access the media on the NAS and not needing the WD box. Would I be correct to think that the Synology 415Play would be more suited to this than the 415+?

If the answer to this is yes, would the 415Play suit my business requirement?

Any thoughts please?

ED E

Rule 1. Budget for an offsite backup.


415+ is a lot more powerful than the play at a glance (2.4 Quad vs 1.6 Dual) so if you need transcoding matters.

If you want to transcode, review Plex, and you need power. If its pure storage then you don't need power.

Additionally you should note that RAID5 is a bad idea, so the real options are RAID6 or RAID10 if you care about data. In a 4 bay that means put in 16TB get 8TB usable.

rolion

@ ED E
What's wrong with "RAID5 bad idea "please !?
Tks

SmithySeller

Nothing. RAID 5 is a very good choice in a 4 bay NAS from a data protection perspective.

The DS-415+ is also a good choice ahead of the Play. RAM can also be added, plenty more, if you go the out of warranty route also!

ED E

Its perfect, until you have to do a recovery, then it shíts the bed.

What's the problem? The problem is that RAID 5 only protects against a single disk failure. But SATA drives are spec'd at one Unrecoverable Read Error (URE) every ~12.5 TB.

Let's do the math.

In a small 4 drive array using 2 TB disks, if you lose a disk you have 6 TB - 3 drives - of remaining capacity. That includes the parity data used to reconstruct the data lost on the failed drive.

Reading through that 6 TB you have a better than 40% chance of encountering an URE - and at that point the disk rebuild will stop since the RAID controller doesn't have the information it needs to reconstruct your data.

RAID 5 was a great idea with 250GB drives, as URE rates were very low, but with huge data density drives we have today (they're still 3.5", similar platter counts but 16x capacity) the likelyhood of hitting a URE during recovery is too great.

Thats why I'd suggest RAID6, but with 4 disks thats the same as RAID10, where as with 8 disks its 6 usable 2 parity.

ZFS/BTRFS/Storage spaces, maybe flexraid make more sense for small pools.

SmithySeller

Well there is truth in that there is no denying it. In practice I have yet to see it as bad, and that's with a lot of experience. What IS for certain is that RAID6/10 does provide more redundancy.

If it were me I'd still choose RAID5 for those NAS by Synology, but only you 'the OP' can weigh up the data backup/recovery V price V storage V performance. I don't know what drives you want to get. With regard to performance Synology use to and probably still do their benchmarking using RAID5.

AFAIK only the 'Play' editions have the HDMI port for connecting direct to TV's etc. RAID5 and URE is discussed lots on the Synology forums BTW!

opus

Used to work in support for one of the well known storage companies, RAID 5 with big SATA drives was a very bad idea I found (or rather customers discovered!). Always recommended RAID 6 to customers for that config, RAID 5 was fine with the FC drives as much more reliable.