(Part 2) Top products from r/qnap

Ok, I really like the advice of /u/zottelbeyer

, but I will try to give my own. Just remember: There is never enough storage space.

My current setup: TS-673 with 2x512GB M.2 SSD RAID 1 as system volume + 4x10TB HDD RAID 6 ad storage volume, with intention of expanding up to 6x10TB as I need more space. Synology DS218J with 1x10TB+1x3TB HDD JBOD used as backup unit.

First: I personally don't think I'd use RAID 10 when I can use RAID 6. RAID 6 offer better drive protection than RAID 10, so yes, I'd also switch to RAID 6.

Second: Backup in the same machine is not considered backup. There are tons of things that can destroy all drives in a case at same time. For example:

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/dc8hda/nearly_lost_all_my_data/

So, The fact that you are backuping your main RAID 10 data into a different 8TB drive inside the same NAS means that you are in fact not performing any backup at all. One ransomware infection will destroy the totality of your data.

Ok, now, let's dive in.

Currently, the sweet spot of cost/storage are located in 8TB drives, but slowly switching to 10TB. Personally, I'd go with 10 or 12 TB drives. You can get 10TB WD red drives for 189€ (WD element drives shucked). With 5x10TB drives in RAID 6 you get 30TB (27.3 TB of usable space). If you use RAID 5 (more about that later), you can bump up to 40TB (36.4 TB of usable space). That is 5 times what you currently have, and without need to buy a new enclosure. That is leaving your 6th bay as offsite for the other user.

Right now, IMHO there is no reason to stick with lots and lots of low storage drive. Get fewer with higher capacity. Prices have dropped enough.

You have also to take into account that bay space is also an important issue. That makes in the end bigger drives more valuable that small drives.

You can start increasing your drive count slowly, and adding more drives as your space needs increase.

About backups: I really encourage you to move your backup outside your TVS-673. If you go the bigger drive route you will have 4TB drives spare (your current RAID array) that you can use to perform backup. I used this:

https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Docking-Station-Support/dp/B0099TX7O4/

or a cheaper version:

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-SATA-USB-Cable-USB3S2SAT3CB/dp/B00HJZJI84/

Connect your drive, then you can create a backup job to store your important files on it, and then disconnect it and store it away. Repeat with each drive you want. Perform a new backup once a week. In case of NAS destroy, you have full backup available.

I personally prefer to use another cheap NAS to automatically perform backups, but that means spending some more money. About RAID 0 backups, it's not ideal, but it is doable. RAID is not backup, is intended to reduce downtime. Strictly speaking, you don't need RAID if you are willing to assume downtime while you restore from your backups. So, RAID 0 (or JBOD) is acceptable as backup plan. Yes, if one drive of your backup fails, you lose everything, but it is a backup. All you have to do is switch the failing drive and recreate the backup from scratch. Pretty straight forward and it doesn't risk your data. Since your main data is a RAID array, in case of failure of your backup RAID 0, you still have tolerance for at least another drive failure (RAID 5) or even two (RAID 6) in your main array.

• Main RAID 1, 5 or 6 + Backup RAID 0 or JBOD: Ok
  
• Main RAID 0, JBOD or non array + Backup RAID 1, 5 or 6: OK
  
• Main RAID 0, JBOD or non array + Backup RAID 0 or JBOD: NOPE
  
  Finally, if you decide to go "full datahoard mode" (rack server, +10 bays, ZFS or BTRFS , etc) then by all means, go to /r/DataHoarder and /r/homelab. Tons of useful advice there.
  
  In case you go this route, then yes, get a nice rack, set ZFS, and use your TVS-673 as an expensive backup NAS to keep your data safe. I personally use borg backup, but ZFS has a nice snapshot backup utility with incremental copy.
  
  Sorry for the wall of text. I think I addressed most of your concerns, right?

This should probably get the job done to your satisfaction.

Not sure if it matters on UPS devices, but black friday is just around the corner so it might be worth it to wait a couple of days.

It is on https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00T7BYV6W/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 for around £72 which seems like a reasonable offer.

Best of luck!


​

The linked site is about 10% more expensive than Amazon UK for the same thing. Also that table of QNAP Nas's leaves out a lot of models and is totally user unfriendly since the tables don't list the models, don't buy from them, if you are smart and like the best deal here's what you should really do instead. TS-251 - £187.64 + Kingston 8gb installable RAM (that you install yourself, it's easy) - £26.30 + QNAP RM-IR002 - £8.99 (optional) is best in my opinion, £222.93 for a TS-251 with 8gb ram vs. £255.60 TS-251+ with 2gb ram

Some cameras (like the Foscam FI8910W) can upload to FTP on motion alert. You can enable FTP on the qnap and setup an account. I've done it.

I'm pretty confident that none of the off-the-shelf doorbells allow for it. There's no incentive. Monthly service charges are too lucrative.

I bought the 2GB unit, and it came shipped with 2x1 (It only has 2 slots). I -thought- I had to buy the 8GB version for some reason, but my purchase history says other-wise.

For HDDs I am using [these beauts] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M1BUBSO/) To be fair, I ahve fairly sensitive hearing, and my wife and guests don't notice 'em much. But right now I am listening to music, and I can CLEARLY tell someone is streaming something because I hear those HDDs a-churning. I am probably ~4 feet away from it currently in my office, though.

For memory I bought these beasts as they were basically the only confirmed ones to work.

Just to give you a heads up that you can get a card with just 2 m.2 ports and no 10gb ethernet. They are about half price or more then the one with 10gb.

SATA M.2- https://www.amazon.co.uk/QNAP-Dual-SATA-Erweiterung-PCIe/dp/B07CT8WHJL/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=QM2-2S-220A&qid=1554135131&s=gateway&sr=8-1

NVME M.2- https://www.amazon.co.uk/QNAP-Dual-PCIe-expansion-card/dp/B07CTD5ML5/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=QNAP+QM2-2P-244A&qid=1554135071&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull


I would suggest to save some money though and get the sata card. Drives are cheaper and the pci-e bus on the nas is only x2 so you wont get anything above 800MBps.
But yeah it would be nice to see if anything would work that isn't on the official compatibility list.

Edit: Changed the links to UK since op is obviously from their.

I've been using these things, and they seem to work pretty good. so far

https://www.amazon.com/5-Colors-SISUN-Anti-Static-Protector-protective/dp/B01M1B3XG8/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1521779318&sr=8-10&keywords=hdd+case+3.5

Pretty sure its max 8GB, i ordered mine when i bought the NAS

Corsair 8gb 2x4gb

EDIT: Mine is not a "+", so not sure of the difference between TS-451 and TS-451+

> Kingston HyperX Dimms

Did you use the 2133 MHz or 2400 MHz? Is ECC memory supported?

For example, which do you recommend?

• Crucial 2133 CL15 $164.00 * 2 = $328
  
• Corsair 2400 CL16 $438.99
  
• Ballistix Sport 2400 CL16 $189.99 * 2 = $379.98
  
• Kingston HyperX 2133 CL14 $494.11
  
• Kingston HyperX 2133 CL13 $215.99 * 2 = $431.98
  
• Kingston HyperX 2400 CL15 $493.24
  
• Kingston HyperX 2400 CL14 $233.99 * 2 = $467.98
  

I just got this for my TS-451 and works great:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C53B2FW/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Understand about the "home lab" usage scenario.

m.2 SATA ssd vs. 2.5" sata SSD will give same performance. Big advantage of m.2 is not wasting drive slots. From what I have been reading though, I would look at adding some heatsinks to the m.2 as they can get hot, which then triggers thermal throttle reducing performance.

I have been looking at something like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P6Z2BQU

Right now for the performance/expansion/etc. it is a tough model to beat in the segment it targets.

FYI I have a TVS-1282T3 with 2 TX-800Ps daisy-chained, with an Apple Thunderbolt adapter and 2 Apple Thunderbolt 2 cables.

It works perfectly, except the Thunderbolt 2 ports on the TX-800Ps seem shallower than they should be so the plug ends up loose. As a consequence, the slightest touch to the plug will make the unit go offline and then reinitialize. I've found this cable is much less stiff than the Apple one, but the plug's still loose.

I wish QNAP made a T3 expansion chassis.

First off, you linked to a switch and not a hub. There is a difference. Second, the only way you will see increased bandwidth due to connection aggregation is if you use LACP (802.3ad, or Dynamic Link Aggregation), which requires a managed switch to set up the port bundle on the other side so both sides can negotiate a LACP bond. The Netgear switch ain't it, you're after something like this. All other modes of port-trunking on the QNAP are meant for fault tolerance or load balancing, they will not aggregate bandwidth.

Understand, however, that port-trunking (QNAP's description for network aggregation) tends to break some other things like Linux Station. Plus, if all you're concerned about is increased throughput to your laptop, unless you're doing the same thing on your laptop all that extra bandwidth is going to be wasted anyway. There's something to be said if multiple devices are hitting it at once, but your description didn't specify that.

A few things come to mind, but I am no "pro".

How large is the swap file/drive for your photo editing program? You may want to make this really large so only saved projects reach back out to the network to make changes.

Why do you have wireless read/write speeds on your qnap? Plug both Ethernet cables into the router and then bind the services.

Router only supports 300mb/sec? I assume that is your ISP's down? This is likely your bottle neck, lots of ISP modem/router/wireless hot spots are cheap and have poor internal network routing. I would suggest an upgrade. Make the modem/router only a modem and if you want to go cheap, get something like an edge router lite.

I am running a TS-653a, 3x ports binded on the back and unfi networking hardware. Over a wired connection I often pull 100+mb/sec down

You could also use an ethernet-wifi bridge device like the Netgear EX3700, a travel router, or a regular old router in client mode (if it has that feature, or if alternate firmware enabling it is available).

These...

Zero issues.

sorry about the long delay in response time,
2x10gbE i mean like network teaming or bonding whichever phrase is correct, on a side note im either going to get (https://www.amazon.com/XG-U2008-Unmanaged-2-Port-8-Port-Gigabit/dp/B01LZMM7ZO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484810642&sr=8-1&keywords=ASUS+XGU2008) or im just gonna use a cross-over cable, as 10gbe has a real world speed of 1.25GB/s which is way more then the nas can r/w until i get the dual NVMe drives in there

Woah I'm running exactly the same ram also working non-stop with no problems, Here's an Amazon link where I got mine from: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JCRZ6XS/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apap_hQm4DfHcUvJil