Better to max out available drive slots or add drives over time

[landseer_sg]

Hi, I am planning for the TS1277 and wondering if I should start with 8 hdd now or to start smaller and add more hdd over time.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Sam

[Toxic17]

Hi and Welcome to the forums

Though this is usually a personal choice, I guess it is better to add over time so that Hard disks are not from the same batch and have the same warranty date. if a disc failed, you might have multiple failures at once which could destroy an array. this is of course very rare, but worth taking note of.

[landseer_sg]

Thanks Simon. Much appreciated.

Sam

[QNAPDanielFL]

I don't see many downsides to buying over time. I would rather buy over time because the price of drives over time will likely decrease. If you wait to buy until you need the space you should get a better price.

[landseer_sg]

Sound advice. Thanks Daniel.

Sam

[Trexx]

The only * I would add to the comments above are related to using the 2.5" drives slots for SSD's.

Currently if you want to leverage QNAP's QTier functionality, you have to set it up at the time of Storage Pool creation. So if you were going to use say the 4xSSD + 8xHDD in a QTier config, you would probably want to get the 4xSSD right away (especially if you were thinking RAID-10 for them).

I don't believe you would need to have all 8xHDD's in place at that time though so you could expand those down the road.

[landseer_sg]

@Trexx, actually I'm thinking of setting up 8x3.5inch in Raid 10 for movies, and 4x2.5inch for music, also Raid 10. I think I might use the M.2 for the tiering, if that is a possible configuration.

I currently have a Dlink DNS 343 for music and 2x Netgear Readynas Business Pro, one for movies and the other a backup - DNS in Raid 5, Readynas in Raid 6.

Once the TS 1277 is acquired, I plan to use the Readynas as backups. The DNS I shall retire - its too slow.

[Don]

I would use one RAID 6 for all storage instead of RAID 10.

[jds580s]

The only argument I can think of for doing all 8x HDD drives at once would be speed. If you are planning to purchase a 10GbE card you will be better able to saturate it's available bandwidth with a larger numbers of drives.

Aside from that, I agree that ramping up is typically better. Get the fewest number and largest capacity drives that meet your storage/redundancy/budget requirements today, and then add more as your storage needs increase - with the added benefit that the drive costs will likely come down and your manufacture/warranty dates will be scattered.

[Trexx]

@Trexx, actually I'm thinking of setting up 8x3.5inch in Raid 10 for movies, and 4x2.5inch for music, also Raid 10. I think I might use the M.2 for the tiering, if that is a possible configuration.

I currently have a Dlink DNS 343 for music and 2x Netgear Readynas Business Pro, one for movies and the other a backup - DNS in Raid 5, Readynas in Raid 6.

Once the TS 1277 is acquired, I plan to use the Readynas as backups. The DNS I shall retire - its too slow.

For the 4x2.5" I would do Raid-5. You won't need RAID-6 for that small of a raid group, and you won't gain any significant performance (especially in the Ryzen series) from Raid-10 vs. Raid-5.

You can use the m.2 for tiering, straight storage (storage pool) or caching which could come in handy if you will have 10GbE NW. Mainly helps with random i/o usage, not so much for sequential usage.

[landseer_sg]

Think I'll just do that. Thanks Paul.

[P3R]

@Trexx, actually I'm thinking of setting up 8x3.5inch in Raid 10 for movies...

RAID 6 would be faster, more reliable and give you more available storage than RAID 10.

...4x2.5inch for music, also Raid 10.

Wow! SSDs for a very low bandwidth sequential application like music streaming my be considered a slight overkill hardware configuration.

Why not have the music in a shared folder called Music and the movies in a shared folder called Movies on the mechanical disks instead? That could save you much money with absolutely no difference in performance. Already the change from RAID 10 to RAID 6 I suggested above would probably give you plenty of room for the music as well unless your music collection approaches the size of Spotify or Tidal.

I think I might use the M.2 for the tiering, if that is a possible configuration.

Why do you think you need tiering? The data you've mentioned so far suggests the usage for this NAS is media streaming that 8 mechanical disks should do just fine without any SSD support at all.

If the streaming involves live transcoding you may have use for the CPU but disks unlikely will be a bottleneck unless we're talking of many concurrent streams. Do you intend to use much live transcoding?

Is media streaming the only use for this NAS? How many concurrent streams of movies and music respectively?

What does the networking look like? 1, 10 or 40 GbE?

[Don]

I agree with P3R. SSD and tiering is overkill to play music and movies. Will provide no benefit. Neither will RAID 10.

[landseer_sg]

Hi, just got to see the latest advice. Thanks a lot. I think based on the comments for my intended use, the TS1277 could be way overkill. I have also considered the TVS873. But I am smitten by the Ryzen CPU and would like to future-proof for up to 7 years. My Netgear Readynas had served me well and still going strong but for 1080p transcoding, which they cannot cope with, nor run Plex.

Based on my intended use and future-proofing, would the capabilities of the Ryzen significantly warrant its selection over the TVS873's CPU? The TS1277 will hopefully be out soon and I have to make a decision to buy that or the TVS873.

Thanks again in advance for your comments and advice. Its been very helpful and enlightening.

[landseer_sg]

BTW, my current network is 1Gbe based (Asus RTAC88U) but will be upgrading to cat7 10Gbe with Qnap QSW-1208-8c once its available. Media streaming is the main use, up to 3 streams to 2 TVs and 1x ipad (via cloud). If possible, gaming with GPU pass through, but not critical.