Good Backup NAS

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Synology and QNAP are widely considered the leaders in the NAS market. Their devices have marginally better hardware than the competition's, but their software is much, much better. So the question really is, are you (or your IT staff) good enough at tinkering with software that you can kludge and coddle another brand into doing what you want? Or are you willing to pay a little more for the initial purchase to get something you can easily set up and forget about for the years you'll be using it?

If the DS712/713 series is too rich for your tastes, you can drop down to a lower tier model (e.g. DS212). Lower cost but lower performance. SmallNetBuilder has a fairly comprehensive set of NAS benchmarks so you can judge how much you're giving up. At the extreme you can build your own NAS using an old computer (I usually recommend against this though because the extra power consumed by an old computer left on 24/7 for a few years usually exceeds the cost of a NAS).
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas

You say this is only for backup? In that case is there any reason you can't just hook up an external 4TB HDD to one of the computers and share it over the network for backups? The usual reason companies go with a 2-disk or 4-disk NAS is for redundancy (RAID-1 or RAID-5/6/10). One of the drives in the NAS can fail and all their data will still be available. The drive failure doesn't bring the company to a grinding halt. If all you're doing is backups, you don't really need the redundancy of RAID-1/5/6/10, and you don't need RAID-0 since you can assign the backups of different computers to different external drives.
 
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I personally use a QNAP 8 bay and it's been really good. Synology would have been my other choice of brand during my time of research.

But the important features I was looking for was easy RAID re-build and the most important reason - the ability to expand the RAID by installing larger disks. I can't remember if that was the reason I chose QNAP.

The only thing I can suggest is that in a business environment with 30+ users, you do want to get decent disks - I would suggest at least 10K SAS drives. You don't want to get slow disks with your users constantly complaining about how slow it is. You'd definitely want to have Gbps NICs on the server. But i'm not sure I understand correctly - if this is for backup, shouldn't there be no users rather than 30 users?

If it's backup, then you don't really need the fast disks. Assuming you are using some variant of rysnc backup - there hopefully shouldn't be that much delta data to backup.

With QNAP, you the SMB models with Atom CPUs, more RAM, dual NICs would be the choice. The cheapest I can find the QNAP 269 is from Scan Computers for £322 (http://www.scan.co.uk/products/qnap-ts-269l-2-bay-sata-atom-186ghz-dual-core-1gb-ram-2gbit-lan-2xusb30-3xusb20-1xesata) and that's without drives so it all comes down to your budget.

But I would agree with Solandri. If it is just a 2 - 4TB, wouldn't it be more cost effective to just find an existing server to stick the drives in?

But if you want to find out more about QNAP, here is where I started: http://www.qnap.com/en/index.php?lang=en&sn=822&c=351&sc=513
 
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The one I selected was based upon performance, reliability and ease of use. You can spend thousands, and in my opinion not get a better solution. There are cheaper models out there, and realistically like the others mentioned, the "cheapest" way to achieve your goal is to add an external USB hard drive like this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822205189

Depending upon your backup strategy, will dictate what hardware/software to use. If you are backing up a server's shares (share drive for users), the external drive may be a solution. If you are backing up individual PC's, you either want to build a PC for this purpose, or use a NAS like the one suggested - many different solutions based on bandwidth required, total volume space, etc...
 
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I think I know what I want, I will go for a bit more expensive but not too much. I am setting up a raid 5 NAS (4 bay unit, 3 drives) but I need one that supports Sata 6bg/s

I was looking at the Synology DS412+ but after all it turns out that it is the old sata 300 ?
 
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Unless you have 30 users logged in and using the drives at virtually the same time, it shouldn't make a huge difference. If large databases or other large files were being used by multiple users at the same time, it would be different as well, but I believe you were wanting a simple backup solution, with in theory is 1 computer/server connecting and transferring data at a time (maybe 2-3?).

SATA II WD Red Drives should give you enough transfer speeds and read/write to get the job done.

NAS devices are not recommended as a replacement for a file server...but do well for small office shared drives and/or backup devices.
 
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No HDD can fully utilize SATA-3 (6 Gbps) or SATA-2 (3 Gbps). The fastest HDDs peak at about 150 MB/s read/write, well short of the 300 MB/s of SATA-2 and nowhere near the 600 MB/s of SATA-3.

The only reason to go with SATA-3 ports in these devices is if you plan to put SSDs in them. Or (obscurely) for slightly better chipset support since most SATA-3 implementations are Intel while most SATA-2 implementations are Marvell, and there have been more problems with Marvell SATA ports.

Also, being that this is a NAS, your main speed constraint will be the Gigabit network, which will top out at about 125 MB/s (and most devices can't even reach that in real-world use). If you get a higher-end unit with two Gigabit port, 250 GB/s is theoretically possible. But even that is shy of what SATA-2 can deliver.
 
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Yeah I think as far as I remember NEC was the only one who came up also with USB 3.0 at proper speeds and I think Sata3 was either Intel or asMedia. The Nas will be my backup option, not to be for everyday use, but understanding backups take some time I want the best option for the budget I got. If anyone can find these WD RED sata 2 just let me know as it doesn't look good providing a hard drive that it will work at limited speeds, I guess it would still be faster than sata2, but price wise it's not worth it, unless like you're saying, an SSD (which I don't want)

Regarding the Gigabit port, yes, that is exactly what I thought, but if you are going to the extreme then you would get a bottleneck because hdds are slower than your Eth Gb port, but well..I try to get the most of it by setting up the raid 5, hopefully this is a good plan
 
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The 2TB WD Red Drives: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236343

Even though they are SATA III, they are backward compatible with SATA II (limited to 3GB/s) and will work fine.

As for the RAID, if this is only backing up data, I have often used RAID 0 for a backup system, as the chances for failure in both the primary and backup unit at the same time are low. If you want more redundancy, RAID 10 would give you striping and mirroring (2X the drives), and in RAID 10, if a drive fails, you pull that drive out, replace it with the same capacity/speed drive, and rebuild the array (it should be automatic), and you are back up and running in no time.
 
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So does raid5, it only uses 3 drives.

My question now is, if I purchase one of this with no hard drives installed then will I have to install an operating system on it? I mean this

http://www.ebuyer.com/387318-synology-ds412-4-bay-nas-enclosure-ds412-

comes with no hard drives as it says 'enclosure'

 
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No operating system install - just install the drives, configure the RAID, and assign volumes to the array.

RAID 5 is the less expensive way to go as compared to RAID 10 - the difference is the blocks are distributed among the available drives in RAID 5, and in RAID 10, you have full striping/mirroring. RAID 5 is less expensive, as you don't need actual mirror drives, recovery time is higher to rebuild the array in case of failure. RAID 10 rebuilds in about half the time.
 
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RAID is not a backup. The problem with using redundant RAID as a backup is if you accidentally delete or overwrite a file, all copies get deleted or overwritten from the RAID array simultaneously. So it's not that much better than backing up to a single disk. If you want the safety of redundant backups, you are best off making separate backups to two different disks.


The Synologies will allocate a small partition on the first drive to install its OS (it runs Linux internally). The device's firmware does this automatically when you first power it up with disks installed, so you don't have to do anything. The only thing you have to worry about is that you'll lose a small amount of space to this OS partition. I think it was about 100 MB. If you're running RAID 1 or RAID 5 on disks of the same size, this lost space will occur on all the disks.

Depending on the firmware version, you may want to upgrade to a newer version of the Synology OS. Their website has instructions for downloading and upgrading.
 
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Cool mate that is great.

the only reason i wanted a raid on the backup is because backups take time.so wanted to make it quicker and redundant.

but as im running short of budget i think i will cancel my raid plans..probably run raid on the server only and get a cheaper backup.

thank you all for the help
 
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I have several "backup devices" on m y LAN - all are configured with RAID 0 (the drives they are backing up are RAID 10). I use the WD RED drives, and over the last 4 years - 0 failures. I did lose 2 WD Black drives in my RAID 10 clusters (2 different servers), which were pulled out and rebuild quickly. I haven't had to use a backup yet....knock on wood....but it is nice knowing that it is there.

The RAID 10 clusters are stable and performs well, theoretically, I will never need the backup. Reality - one day I will....

On true mission critical applications - tape backup is still my primary option - but they are very expensive. This is more due to legal requirements to have this data "accessible" for up to 10 years.
 
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That sounds cool. I had a black series now for about 3 years, a 640gb one, 0 failures. I guess you were unlucky or probably your seller needs to watch what they are selling. The only concern I have regarding black series is the noise, not a lot but when your AV runs you do hear it, but compared to the performance it gives you then it is all right.
My second drive is also a WD caviar but it is a 250gb, had it for 7 years, no complains:)
Also I had a Seagate Barracuda for about 10 years, still rocks, no failures.
 
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The WD Black Drives were in a high-speed database production environment. Disk I/O is the primary bottleneck of all processing, and running processes against billions of records 24/7 puts a huge strain on any drive. Considering that there are 16 drives in each of my database servers, losing 2 drives since 2006 isn't bad...

This year, the drives will be replaced one by one (every other day), until every drive is replaced in both systems...I will re-use the drives for backup purposes in the office - even after 8 years of heavy-duty work.
 
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