NAS Upgrade

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peterbata
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NAS Upgrade

Post by peterbata »

Hello. I am looking to replace our aging TS-269 Pro. Your thoughts / recommendations.

Thank you for your time and assistance.

Peter
It's better to burn out than to fade away.
QNAPDanielFL
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Re: NAS Upgrade

Post by QNAPDanielFL »

If you just want 2 bays, TS-253D is our best 2 bay NAS.
It has a 4 core Celeron CPU and 2 2.5GbE ports.

What are you using the NAS for?
jon96789
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Re: NAS Upgrade

Post by jon96789 »

If possible, buy a 6-bay or larger NAS. The TS-673A look quite promising. It uses a Ryzen V1500B CPU which is about the same as an Intel i3 CPU performance-wise. The CPU should be more than adequate for multimedia streaming, although if you desire on the fly transcoding, you may need an optional nVidia GT1030 GPU to handle the tasks.

The reason I am suggesting a 6-bay NAS is economics. Currently i am using a TS-453 Pro 4-bay NAS. I originally filled it with four 4TB HDD in a RAID-5 configuration which gave me about 10TB storage. RAID-5 uses one drive for data redundancy, so if one drive fails (if two drives fail simultaneously, you are out of luck), you will not lose any data. You just replace the bad drive and the NAS will restore itself. Using a non-RAID array will give you 22TB storage but if one drive fails, you lose all your data. RAID prevents data loss. Also note that a NAS can fail. While this is a rare occurrence, it is not impossible. If the NAS fails, you can also lose all your data. That is why i have two NAS arrays, one is a mirror of the other.

Within a year, i was running out of space and upgraded all the drives to its current 16TB capacity using four 6TB HDD. Two years later, I am facing the same old issue, running out of space. I am looking at buying four 8TB or 10TB drives to increase storage. Buying four large drives gets very expensive. Also, the TS-453 Pro is getting a bit old, so upgrading the NAS has to take some consideration.

Buying a 6-bay or 8-bay NAS expands your options. I can buy three 10TB drives and get 18TB space. If more capacity is needed, all I have to do is add another drive. A 6-bay NAS will give me up to 45TB space using 10TB drives, a lot more than I will need in the forseeable future. Using an 8-bay NAS should be configured in RAID-6, using two drives for data redundancy. That would give me 54TB space using 10TB drives.

Remember, you do not have to fill the array right away. Just buy three of the largest drives you can afford and upgrade from there.

My TS-453 Pro has an Intel J1900 Celeron CPU which is quite ancient. The new AMD CPU is 3X faster. The Celeron has occasionally given me some issues because of its speed. There are times (albeit very rarely) where the NAS stutters when doing mulitple streams or tasks.

Last but not least, make sure you use NAS designed HDDs. Desktop drives have different timing characteristics for error checking and will be prone to giving you drive failure errors even though they may be fine. WD has been using SMR type HDD in their NAS drives, avoid them as they can take a long time to build or rebuild arrays. The drives in order of reliability according to Backblaze, are the UltraStars, WD, Tsoshiba and Seagate. Be aware that Amazon sells only OEM Ultrastars so they are not covered by factory warranties.

Hope this helps...
peterbata
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Re: NAS Upgrade

Post by peterbata »

QNAPDanielFL wrote: Sat Apr 03, 2021 3:26 am If you just want 2 bays, TS-253D is our best 2 bay NAS.
It has a 4 core Celeron CPU and 2 2.5GbE ports.

What are you using the NAS for?
Thank you for your prompt reply. I would have responded sooner had the message notification not gone to my junk mail folder.

We have been using the TS-269 PRO for a number of years but it is really strating to show its age. To say that it is underperforming would be an understatement.

My colleague and I are now working from home and require access to Word, PDF, and Excel documents which exist on the NAS. I should mention that the device is located at a third location which we access via VPN. All told, it appears that we are really not using much of the storage as it stands.

Image
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peterbata
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Re: NAS Upgrade

Post by peterbata »

@jon96789 Thank you so much for chiming in. Please see my response to @QNAPDanielFL

I wish you both a safe and wonderful day!

Peter
It's better to burn out than to fade away.
QNAPDanielFL
Easy as a breeze
Posts: 488
Joined: Fri Mar 31, 2017 7:09 am

Re: NAS Upgrade

Post by QNAPDanielFL »

The TS-x73A series has a great CPU. You may not need that much performance for your use case, but extra CPU power is still nice for what you may try to do in the future. But if you are on a budget, I think the TS-253D is a good option that should be enough performance for what you are trying to do.

Edit: I could add that while I think the TS-253D is a fast enough NAS for your use case, since you access it remotely, I don't know enough about your internet speed to say if your remote access will be as fast as ideal
peterbata
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Re: NAS Upgrade

Post by peterbata »

QNAPDanielFL wrote: Wed Apr 07, 2021 2:45 am The TS-x73A series has a great CPU. You may not need that much performance for your use case, but extra CPU power is still nice for what you may try to do in the future. But if you are on a budget, I think the TS-253D is a good option that should be enough performance for what you are trying to do.

Edit: I could add that while I think the TS-253D is a fast enough NAS for your use case, since you access it remotely, I don't know enough about your internet speed to say if your remote access will be as fast as ideal
RE: Internet speed. 400 mbps d/l - 50 mbps u/l

Thanks again. Much appreciated.
It's better to burn out than to fade away.
peterbata
Starting out
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Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2013 11:31 am

Re: NAS Upgrade

Post by peterbata »

I do one more question if I may. If I do replace our unit with the TS-253D I would like to use SSD drives. Can I simply clone the two existing 1TB SATA drives that are in the TS-269 PRO. Thank you
It's better to burn out than to fade away.
QNAPDanielFL
Easy as a breeze
Posts: 488
Joined: Fri Mar 31, 2017 7:09 am

Re: NAS Upgrade

Post by QNAPDanielFL »

If you are buying new drives for the new unit, I would suggest using HBS3 or file station to back up the folders in one NAS to the other NAS.

If you just wanted to clone the drive, if you have RAID1 in the TS-269 pro, you could pull out one drive and put in an SSD and wait for a RAID rebuild. Then pull out the SSD and put it in the TS-253D and do a system migration. But I think it is better to just backup folders from the 269 to the 253D.
jon96789
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Re: NAS Upgrade

Post by jon96789 »

Man, i am getting tired of NAS drives... I just added a 4TB WD Red Pro drive to my TS-853A NAS to increase capacity and it is now an hour into migration. The NAS reports it will take a whopping 48 hours to migrate. And just now, the drive in bay 2 just died, the NAS reported that drive 2 is unresponsive. I have been using 11 drives in my two NAS (the other is a TS-453 Pro)and so far I have replaced seven drives in the past two years. I tried Toshiba NAS drives and they all died within three months of use.

I just purchased a TS-673A and am wondering if buying five 6TB Red Pros was a good idea. I read that Seagate's Ironwolf drives are worse than the WD Red. I also read that the HGST drives are the most reliable but if you buy them from Amazon, they are all OEM and have no warranty per WD (WD owns HGST).
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