Qnap 653B setup ideas

[etotore]

Bought 653b 8gb. Maybe add more ref. other posts.
I do like the HDMI out port. Will check out USB 5.1 sound card.
Low power consumption, Ruined a bit by IronWolf drives. 4pcs
3 in raid 5 and one standalone. Use mirroring of important folders.
In progress of setting up, buying the last parts.
Planning to run Plex. (almost no transcoding)
Torrent downloads,
Small vpn tunnel solution.
Backup of a few computers regularly.
And lastly Roon, know the cpu is a bit in the smallest size, hope I can make it work okay.
So should I buy SSD, one drive for applications? ROON and so on.
Or can I buy a M. 2 adapter and mount ssd on that for the application use? So I can expand with more drives later.
No real information on possibilities except for Qnap marketing ideas,, or maybe use is so limited.

[QNAPDanielFL]

What is the reason you are considering SSDs/M.2? You will be limited by the speed of a 1GbE connection. Maybe I don't understand ROON very well but I wonder if you will see enough performance increase with an SSD to make it worth putting it in.

[etotore]

Not really, you have the pcie adapter. So it's probably the fastest interface on the box.

[QNAPDanielFL]

I mean to ask if you will be able to get data to and from the NAS much faster because of the SSD. I know M.2 can connect to the NAS through PCIe. But will it let you stream music or video any faster? I think any streaming would have to go through ethernet or WiFi and I wonder how much SSD caching will affect your performance in a practical way.

[Don]

No need for SSD for streaming. Put all four drives in raid 5. No need to have separate drive.

[etotore]

Planning to run, try to run.
Roon, CPU is a bit smaller than needed.
Hopefully with faster SSD and more memory I can get acceptable speed on the internal Database. So is more internal database handling capability I'm looking for. Else the NAS has 3x8T drives in Raid 5, one drive separately with 8T, all ironwolf drives. I can buy a SSD drive or the seperate pcie adapter and SSD NVMe SSD drives with faster speed. (But they have no use if I can't install application on them). And I save a hard drive slot for later usage.

There the documentation from qnap is not very clear.

[P3R]

3 in raid 5 and one standalone. Use mirroring of important folders.

I fail to see how that could be mirroring.

I can guess that you intend to use some kind of sync software or scheduled replication from the RAID 5 to single disk volume and intend that to be some kind of backup?

If so, that would be a system internal backup, which is unfortunately always a very bad idea.

[etotore]

In a way I understand, your reasoning, P3R and I agree too.

With ransomware attacks that is getting more frequent.
I was thinking this setup makes sense on home front.. You are right, my planned script would use a checksum, test on some files that will not be changed. If those files are passing the test (my guess is then they have not been encrypted, is already the backup for the windows computers we are talking about.), all folders would be synced, with a different USER/Password. Is not a replacement for backup I know, but it increase the frequency, and the layers of protection. It do not protect against fire/lightning, power-surge or theft.
I do have a powered down NAS that will be used in between for offline backups. But it's not done as often as I should, but I'm away from home for longer times in a row. And a few external drives in the safe. So it mirrors Backups of user folders, and restore images of computers, the rest is handled by more my less frequent backup of most of the NAS to another NAS. Little bit to the cloud too, but my net is soo slow.

[Trexx]

In a way I understand, your reasoning, P3R and I agree too.

With ransomware attacks that is getting more frequent.
I was thinking this setup makes sense on home front.. You are right, my planned script would use a checksum, test on some files that will not be changed. If those files are passing the test (my guess is then they have not been encrypted, is already the backup for the windows computers we are talking about.), all folders would be synced, with a different USER/Password. Is not a replacement for backup I know, but it increase the frequency, and the layers of protection. It do not protect against fire/lightning, power-surge or theft.
I do have a powered down NAS that will be used in between for offline backups. But it's not done as often as I should, but I'm away from home for longer times in a row. And a few external drives in the safe. So it mirrors Backups of user folders, and restore images of computers, the rest is handled by more my less frequent backup of most of the NAS to another NAS. Little bit to the cloud too, but my net is soo slow.

Easier way to do it. Use Raid-5 for all 4 drives. Enable Snapshots (I use 7 day rotation on mine) which will let you revert back to pre ransomware drive/file versions if needed. You can also do Shared Folder Level snapshot if you house all your critical data in one place for faster restores.

Use external backups as well as surge protection to help keep system safe. Install QNAP Antivirus (although PC scanning is better) and Malware apps. Limit external connectivity and have good firewall/logging enabled.

For more information, look at the recent QNAP webinar posted here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWuTjkohCWM&t=35s

Slides here:
https://www.slideshare.net/QNAP_Inc/pro ... ansomeware

[etotore]

The, main reason for the split into two segments is I Will try to use the one drive for 24/7 operations while the Raid is in sleep mode. when not in use. To save power. So the synchronization is just a small extra idea. Very expensive power in my country.

[Don]

Won't work. All drives spin or no drives spin. Individual drives will not spin down.

[peter247]

my setup is 4 x 8 tb wd red drives in raid 5 thin , and the system drive ( where all apps are ) on 2 * 1 tb ssd drive , the idea was that the hard drive would spin down and the ssd drive could be used for 24 hour access like BT , but you will find it doesn`t work that way because my system has been told to spin down after 5 mins , but all drives spin back up every hour , so I guess it`s a 50 / 50 which will kill my drives spinning up every hour or running 24 hours a day.

if you only have 1 ssd , the system will place the swap file on raid 5 hard drives , you need 2 ssd drives in raid to make it use the ssd for a swap file / partition .

[P3R]

my setup is 4 x 8 tb wd red drives in raid 5 thin , and the system drive ( where all apps are ) on 2 * 1 tb ssd drive , the idea was that the hard drive would spin down and the ssd drive could be used for 24 hour access like BT , but you will find it doesn`t work that way...

Yes asked and answered many times in the forum; all disks spin up on any disk access.

...my system has been told to spin down after 5 mins , but all drives spin back up every hour , so I guess it`s a 50 / 50 which will kill my drives spinning up every hour or running 24 hours a day.

Frequent spin-ups and downs (as every hour or even worse) I would consider far more harmfull for disks. Disks are designed to spin, they don't die from doing that.

When you read the forum regularly you'll notice that the experienced administrators keep their disks spinning all the time but many newcomers enable spin down and have much concerns and problems with that.

if you only have 1 ssd , the system will place the swap file on raid 5 hard drives , you need 2 ssd drives in raid to make it use the ssd for a swap file / partition .

No. You can have the system on a single disk volume as well. It isn't reliable, convenient or recommended but it works.

[peter247]

No. You can have the system on a single disk volume as well. It isn't reliable, convenient or recommended but it works.

Yes , I had the system on a single ssd disk at first, but it placed the swap file / partition on the hard drives and ignored the ssd which should be better for a swap partition , plus thought that was the reason why my hard drives wasn`t spinning down, now I know better , hopping that your qnap nas hard-drives spin down after long periods of inactivate is just a pipe dream.

[P3R]

...hopping that your qnap nas hard-drives spin down after long periods of inactivate is just a pipe dream.

Disks will spin down as configured but the following things will make them spin up again:

1. Your configuration. If it spins up every hour you most likely have services and applications enabled that access disks with that frequency.
2. NAS internal activities. The NAS by default does several important housekeeping avtivities. 3 a.m. in the morning for example.
3. A QTS bug. Bugs that prevent spin down have been introduced from time to time.