I'm currently contemplating purchasing a QNAP TR-004 4 bay DAS device and then filling with 4 16TB (ish) Seagate IronWolf Pro 7200rpm hard drives (which I have the budget for).

This is going to be constantly connected to my studio desktop.

I will be subscribing to Backblaze, who provide free unlimited cloud storage for computer and connected devices (including a DAS) for about $9 per month.

My intent is to set up QNAP and 4 drives in RAID 5, meaning if a drive fails in future, it will be a new 16TB hard drive purchase to pop in and rebuild without losing data.

The aim is to have a single storage location for all data locally that's huge enough to last pretty much forever going forward. I will also, via Backblaze, have the cloud backup version too as an off-site version.

This will mean all of my data will be on one device using up one power socket and one USB connection, a USB connection I can alternate between my desktop and laptop as required.

I do also have internal NVMe (1 x 2TB OS, 1 x 4TB data and 1 x 2TB data) and SSD (2 x 4TB) drives inside my desktop too, where I will place my more daily use content like sample and Kontakt libraries on these internal drives, with the local backups on the DAS.

Anybody using a setup similar to this? Or anyone got observations on this setup?

 

raid calculator

https://raid-calculator.com/default.aspx

you will have 48tb of storage with 1 drive failure recovery option with raid 5

how fast is your internet connection, it might take a while to upload 48tb to your cloud
also I assume they take an initial drive (the raid will be seen as a single drive) image and then
take a differntial backup of files that have changed since backup as this would use less bandwidth, but you need to verify what sort of backup procedure and policy they offer and consider how long it will take to recover the data from the cloud based on your connection speed and the data rate from the cloud provider, that will tell you how many days you will be down when 2 drives in your raid fail.

it would be faster to have 2 raids locally and just swap them out weekly to balance the wear if you're really paranoid about MTBF of your drives. as far as disaster recovery, you can store one raid offsite at a mailboxes r us, or a bank safety deposit box or a friend.

remember once the data goes to the cloud anybody can get to it and anybody can steal it, hack it or destroy it and likely your cloud provider will only renummerate you so many pennies per terrabyte for your loss. read the fine print very closely.

 

I won't have 48TB. I will initially probably have 6-10TB of data and the rest is for future growth for the remainder of my life hopefully (particularly with exponentially increasing Kontakt library sizes!).

As I understand it, the image is only for the OS drive, and the remainder is not image-based, but I will need to double check that!

 

Furbish's law #17, all data will expand exponentially to fill whatever space is avalaible.

This is not supposition, I have boxes of fulll hard drives to prove my research....

 

Yeh, the expansion of data is like the expansion of space - inevitable. I have about 20TB now and aside from the NAS I'm not 100% sure where all those hard drives are at any given moment. damn. DAS would be perfect if you could put all the drives in it, regardless of the size, and have them accessible as one big disk - this actually exists, but then redundancy goes down the drain...

 

I use NAS's I had 3 QNAps and a tera master and just build a xpenology with an old pc I had laying around.
I am not much into the DAS thing since it is very limited for other stuff you have on your network.

QNAPs are good I have one of there QNAP TR-004 external 4 bay hooked up to my NAS for extra storage. It can be used as a DAS or NAS storage.

The only down side it's it's not USB3 it's USB 2.

Drive wise get Seafate Exos they are the fastest now and helium filed.
Also you can not Live expand the array in the DAS what you set it up as it perminate unless you back it up and rebuild it with bigger drives. I prefer NAS over DAS.
Also you can back up your PC with Conezilla as a image to a NAS I think also the DAS.
Although restoring the image from a DAS might be an issue.

 

I was debating the DAS vs NAS thing, but NAS connected drives aren't recognised as valid connected drives for backup by Backblaze, whilst DAS devices are. Therefore, the benefit of the DAS is that it allows for cloud backup for cheap with Backblaze, whereas NAS doesn't seem to

 

Is there something special about Backblaze for backups. I mean windows backup can back up to a NAS device also.
You can also install rsync with is way better for windows and receive to the NAS.

Also they have a NAS version

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/solutions/nas-backup

Now I have been doing IT for over 40 years and I mainly work on Fiber channel SANS. So for me the next bet thing for home use is a NAS.
I can't afford a SAN for my home I wish I could also it's over kill.

So much you can do with it.

To add you can also start out with the Qnap DAS then later if you get a QNap nas you can attache it via the usb port and move your data over to the NAS. Now for me I would rather do it right the first time than do it twice.

 

The main special thing about it is that it is off site, unlimited data, and super cheap (about $9 per month), as well as seemingly reliable with good reviews.

Therefore, the DAS would be on site storage with redundancy built in, whilst Backblaze would be the off-site backup of all of my data.

 

Which of the Seagate Exos drive is best? And how does their naming convention work? I read a few conflicting things, one saying X16, X18, X20 is just a tier version, whilst others saying it refers to the year of release, i.e. 2016, 2018, 2020 etc.

 

Sorry for the late reply I have x16 and x18. Also when in the past I had a drive go bad Seagate was outstanding. This was not the Exos
I paid up from for a return label and they took care of everything else shipping me cross a replacement drive. WD dose not have that service all.

X18 have one lest platter if I can remember correctly also there speed i the best as of now. They also run a little cooler due to the helium in the drives. X20 just came out they are for the 20 TB and up drives from what I understand.

 

Oh got you. Me personally I rather have a NAS as my local / then back up to a cloud.
But like I said before if you decide to go and get a NAS later you can hook the DAS up to a QNap and have integrated management of it and the NAS.

 

the drives in my NAS are mostly recertified ones from https://serverpartdeals.com/ and they've been perfect. it's worth a look as the savings were immense

 

With Backblaze it appears to be $9 per month for unlimited data for direct attached drives, i.e. DAS, but they charge something like $8 per TB for NAS storage. When talking about 6-10TB minimum, which will only ever grow in the future, the price per month then becomes hugely different and more costly for a NAS option.

 

This looks good. Have it as an option, but I'm in UK so shipping from UK is pretty expensive, and not sure where I would lie with any warranty/support?! Anybody based in Europe bought hard drives from the US and got any experiences of shipping or warranty/support type experiences?

The prices, even with shipping, are way cheaper than UK prices for these recertified drives though!

 

I was thinking about recert drives also in the beginning but you only get 1 year warranty.
Are yours still going strong and what raid are you running?

 

I run raid 6 (technically synology's SHR now). The warranty worried me less as for all of the many drives I've had over the years they usually die quickly if they're bad (although mine did all come with 2 year warranty). Mine have all been fine 15 months later (knock on wood). With array sizes what they are these days, personally I'd never go for less than 2 drive redundancy, as the mathematical likelihood of an error during a rebuild in arrays of dozens of TBs is high enough that it risks any rebuild. That said, I did have to rebuild my array probably a dozen times over to convert it and swap in higher capacity drives and there was never an issue. If I was dumping everything to cloud I'd also worry less about errors.

 

yeah, thats JBOD, just a bunch of disks, it was the answer to cheap storage..
what is it cheap,fast,reliable, pick 2???

 

reliable? Not if one disk fails. Yes defiantly fast.

 

Last edited: May 20, 2024