Thank you!

Thank you!

You're welcome!

they should but don't, oh well. Thank you though!

Thank you!

that's what they aren't. I thought the same, until I got my Synology and realised I was so, oh, so wrong! hahaha. best bit of tech kit I've ever bought! amazing what you can do with a NAS!

You can use it as a back up but it can do so much more, especially with 10 Gbe.

@@ArtIsRight oh how I wish I could get 10 Gbe!!! but I still need my crappy apple continuty, so just 2.4H GHz wifi connection for me! the minute I switch on any ethernet! it just doesn't work! hahaha

Wow, if you like we can talk about 10 Gbe. It is awesome!

The magic term for a REAL backup is - GENERATIONS. If you don’t create generations, it’s not a backup. It’s merely a copy or clone. If you mess up or delete data on your source, a copy or clone might faithfully copy that error. That’s why you need generations to roll back after an error.

You're welcome!

Great point! So far I have been doing offsite but cloud for longterm the slower one is another way to go.

Wow, thanks

Fully aware but the point here is SHR give future size expansion flexibility.

@@ArtIsRight Simply a reminder. The way it is phrased is misleading (without malice). It lacks clarity. Again, good video!

Thanks!

That is one way to look at SHR2, but know that redundancy is not a proper backup. Something to note, for many of my client I set them up as SHR 2, for me I just use SHR 1, the rate of failure in the past decade since I have been using these are none. Not saying that it can't happen, but across multiple deployments and etc, I have not found any issues. And I also have a video about backing up these as well, it is part of this series, and I highly encourage that you check that one out as well.

@@ArtIsRight Thank you Art. I am going through your NAS videos one-by-one and I did notice the one on backup. Hard drives fail. That is a fact of life when it comes to storage. I have had a few of those myself. I am trying to wrap my head around for instance backing up a 40, 50, 60TB NAS or RAID onto individual smaller 8TB or so drives. I even thought about the idea of using a duplicate NAS or RAID of the same capacity (although expensive) to do a "set it and forget it" back up solution. Still not fool proof but at least it is on "autopilot!" You are the best my friend. Thank you for all your help. I won't bug you until I study your videos and I am able to better articulate my thoughts.

So the 8TB drive back up, that is why I use Carbon Copy Cloner so separate the back up by folders years, etc. You can get bigger back up drives as well. Most of the time, data accumulate over time. If you have lots of data already, another NAS can be a good solution. In that situation, I might consider different drives or drives from different batches in each NAS.

@@ArtIsRight Thank you Art.

👍🏼

You're welcome!

I would not invest in a faster NVMe it does not do much by the way DSM uses these for caching. Also I would check and see if you can use the NVMe slot on the card and internal, I think there might be some limitation where you can use one or the other but not both. I could be wrong but I believe I ran across this information at some point, I can't remember where but if I do I'll share it here. So in all PCI-e Gen 3 will do just fine. Even with 10 GBe, you can't really saturate the bandwidth of the drives and NVMe caches.

You're welcome

For this, yes! In real life it can be a really stressful moment ;) And I have been there with my other Synology, not an experience that I recommend.

If you have a backup routine and only 2 bays, that seems sensible.

SHR2 - 2 redundant drives i.e. 2 drives can fail and the array is safe. SHR 1 - 1 redundant drives i.e. 1 drives can fail and the array is safe. If 2 or more fails, the array is considered to be in crash state. SHR1 + hot spare is 1 redundant drives with parity data on it and 1 hot spare that is just sitting there empty. Personally if you have a 5 bay NAS, I would not consider the SHR1 + hot spare option, it is not a good use of resources. I would rather have a cold spare i.e. 1 identical drive not plugged into the system incase 1 drives fail. Also space considerations on 5 Bays system - assuming all identical drives Space on SHR 1 = 4 bays because 1 is redundant Space on SHR 2 = 3 bays because 2 is redundant Space on SHR 1 + Hot Spare = 3 bays because 1 is redundant with data parity and 1 is just sitting there sinning but not hold any data or being used as part of the array. Hot spare is more of a use case for data centers that needs low downtime, not a good use case for consumers.

I hear you and can relate. Just make sure to have an external backup set. Simple 8 TB drive Seagate backup plus will do just fine. When they are on sale they are cheap and plenty just have a few. I do redundant back up on the 8 TB drives, so I have 2 of each 8 TB drives mirror each other, this way I have 2 back up, if this makes sense ;)

Yes you would have to use this kzfaq.info/get/bejne/sMWohrijucnKomw.html

Yes

@@ArtIsRight Thanks for the quick reply!

😀

Nope that would be negligence and mal practice on Synology part. It would just say that storage pool is off line.

Done this numerous time no crash and not a common situation. This is also why you should always have a back up set of your data else where before you start. Redundancy is not a backup. WIth adding a drive it should be less of an issue if something happens since the data are on the drives in the setup already.

If an array crash it would detect it and start rebuilding. I don't have a video on that. For a small array like many of these it does not make sense to have a hot spare.

This is a multi step process, add the 2 more drives, provision them into the pool, you can span the pool size once the provision is done. Then from here you can go about it multiple ways, you can re provision the pool as an SHR2 which can be done without breaking the pool. RAID 6 will mean starting from 0. So let say you do SHR 2, then you can just pull both of your smaller drives out, put bigger ones in, provision the pool and then expand the pool. All of this takes time. If you have everything backed up already. It is probably best to start over. Just install all of the 4 larger drives in, provision the pool once, you can choose SHR or SHR 2 that is up to you and copy all of the data over from the back up to the new pool.

@@ArtIsRight Thank you for your answer! But I still can't decide between SHR-2 and Raid 6🤷🏻‍♂️ What would you do in my situation? Many greetings

If you just do storage and work Plex for instance, SHR2 gives you the most flexibility down the road. RAID 6 will lock you in to the storage pool size that you have. If you do virtualization then RAID is better but sans that, I choose SHR any day with BTRFS

If those drives are not part of a volume or storage pool then yes, if they are you will run into an array failure because the drives are in a way assigned to the slot and sequence in the RAID. Hope this helps.

@@ArtIsRight yes. Thank you for confirming.

:D

What type of RAID was it setup as also what drive fails? 1 or both?

I would keep it simple and use SHR, for my own use I set it up as SHR 1 and I do external 8 TB drivers or bigger as backup. For most of my clients, I set them up with SHR 2 in case something happens. I don't usually like the idea of hot spare for home use, for enterprise may be. For home you are adding hours to the drive that is not being used and there are wear and tear on the drive over time. So if I add a drive in, I would incorporate it as part of the SHR, if you are really worry about your data then I would choose SHR 2 and still back up to external disk and even better have those disk off site.

@@ArtIsRight Thank You. I already plan on using an external backup as well as an offsite and/or a Cloud Backup. The real question is SHR1 or SHR2 in a 3 drive config ir should I add in another identical 4th drive and go with SHR-2. What that make the configuration more complicated in anyway? I have 3 Brand New WD Gold 14TB Drives. Just trying to determine how best to setup the server. I am converting from a Windows Essentials 2016 / WHS 2016 Server.

So if you only have 3 drives I might not allow you to do SHR 2, I think that you will need at least 4 for this setup. To which if you are going for 4 drives then just go with SHR 2 this way you can be sure the data is safe

@@ArtIsRight You are correct. I need at least 4 drives for SHR-2. Does SHR-2 create any additional complexity over SHR-1?

Not any more, it is Synology Proprietary system but its has works really well for me in the past 7 years using Synology so I go with it for the ease of expansion. And you are not really running virtual machine or Hyper Visor so you are ok.

I would choose the Plus models, faster processors and more capability, better over head room. I also would go with the 6 than the 4 bays.

@@ArtIsRight sure thing. It was hard to pick one from many. I was thinking to 1621+ or 920+

I would go with the 1621+ More drives

I hear ya, if you are talking about the year 2015 models, anything with 15 as the last 2 digits lots of issues. But that was technically a Intel bug and not their fault. Side note but not that this matters now, you should be able to take the array out and plug it into a different unit and recover the array. That and as I always say, these are not the be all end all, any one should always back up these data to another medium / device. I think of these as a mini computer with a large data array and whatever raid you use you should still have a back up. Speaking of which I should do that now. Cheers

When file access occur it would use the NAS resources and the work station, it is only file sharing so only very little resource and over head is used on both. You can access the file directly from NAS for the most part stand alone, non database file works well, these are images and assets that you would use in Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, or even images and video. What does not work on NAS is database and catalog such as Lightroom Catalog. But other file such as Final Project can be setup to work on NAS. What I would recommend that you do is consider getting 10 Gbe ethernet for your NAS and each of your work station can be at 1 Gbe ethernet or you can upgrade them to 10 Gbe, but unless you are pull large files on the WS all the time it is not really necessary, it is better to equip the NAS with more bandwidth so that there's no bottle neck when the work station request the files.

@@ArtIsRight Thanks Art . But with access I actually meant working on the files. Say for an instance , I am working on a photoshop file that's about 5GB in size and requires real heavy editing. The file is stored on NAS, I open the file from my workstation (not copying in my workstation but directly from NAS) and start working on the editing. Which systems resources (like the CPU or GPU) would I get to use - the NAS or the workstation or the combination of both and if combination which influences the most. If it is going to use the resources of NAS or atleast the most of it and less of the workstation, it could be a problem as the high end config of workstation would be un or underutilised and NAS which is usually low on configuration would really get heavy. This could hence result in everything getting slow. Sorry but it's just that an confused on what solution would work for me. I am trying to find a better solution for our office, We are really struggling with the speed and don't want this to go on even after the new purchases are made.

Most of the resources in your situation would be on the work station and not on the Nas. The Nas just serve the file. You also want to make sure that no 2 people are editing the same file at the same time. In this setup, I would configure a high end work station with lots of power and for the NAS, no processing is done there. So what you need is a powerful high end work station. Like I said before there are 2 ways to go about this. 1. Is to configure all of the computer sin your office with 10 Gbe, this way you avoid any slow down reading and writing file. And put a dual 10 Gbe PCIE card on the NAS, set up link aggregation in the Nas and 10 Gbe switch so that these 2 - 10 Gbe port can be pooled together. What you will need here is a 10 Gbe Switch depending on how many work station you have and you will need a 10 Gbe NIC (Network Interface Card) in each of your work station. You can use fiber or if the work station and switch are relatively close to each other you can just use a CAT 6 or CAT 7 cable with some length limitation. 2. Do as I suggested in the other replied comment, 10 Gbe on the Nas and the computer just use 1 Gbe and that should work ok as well. Keep in mind that with 10 Gbe NIC a computer hooked up to a NAS can write at over 500 MB/s and read at over 800 MB/s which if you use a 1 Gbe a computer hooked up to the NAS can read and write at about 80 - 100 MB/s, it will take longer to open and save files but it still works. How many work station do you have? Also if you are working with these large file, setting up a server as you originally intended to pool the data and use the server processing power is not the best approach.

@@ArtIsRight Thanks Art. I think Scenario 1 should work well for me. I assume, once the file is opened on the workstation, the entire computing load of editing is taken care of by the workstations power even if the file is actually located on the NAS itself. Am I right ?

That is correct

ok

I think that to some 10 GBe is a question of will and time ;) for me I want super fast transfer 600+ MB/s on average, and I could get up to 1GB/s but that is rare and depend largely on the files type that I am transferring. For Photo you can get away with just the 1 GBe, it will transfer at about 80-100 MB/s. Which means if you are working with a 100 GB folder of RAW files, to backup said folder it would take 14-18 min to transfer over 1 GBe and no more than 3-4 min on the 10 GBe. I happened to work on lots of video files as well and having the faster transfer speed is usefully for backup and network video file use. Even-though most linear editing program does not use that much bandwidth for 4K video play back on the timeline, it helps to have it. This said I would go with the DS1621+ more expandability should you need it down the road and you can add a 10 GB card and SSD caching as well.

@@ArtIsRight Thank you so much for replying on a Friday and yes that is all logical thank you for sharing the numbers it definitely helps. I agree the DS1621 it’s definitely a good option for my use case with Room to grow. Have a lovely weekend and thank you again for your advice. David

Anytime!

@@ArtIsRight Thank you, it’s very much appreciated. Just wondering what hard drives would you recommend? It seems to be a bit of a minefield. Also is it okay to use the synology RAID SHR or is it Besty to go with RAID five for better performance? No rush have a lovely weekend. David

I use SHR and really like it, When I set it up for my clients, who are less tech savvy I usually set them up with SHR 2 so up to 2 drives can fail before they have to hit the panic button with my name on it. As far as drive I have been deploying Seagate Exos drive, they are enterprise drive with greater durability and longer MTBF time and they are usually priced below the IronWolf or IronWolf Pro. Other contender would be WD RED Pro, but those are pricy. Before there was HGST which were really good but now that is part of WD RED Pro line. WD brought HGST. Another brand to consider would be Toshiba. I used many of their individual drives and for the most part they do well. But your best bet is Exos drive. There are many version X14, X16 etc, I can't remember exactly but I think this refers to the number of read heads. More head also means slightly faster read / write speed. This also means slightly, higher temp, noise, which are really not that loud.

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/sMWohrijucnKomw.html

There are a few things to consider. It is important and not at the same time. Let me explain. For the primary unit, you probably won't run into that many issues. For expansion unit, firmware is paramount because if it not compatible or is a version that is known to cause issues, it will cause the drive to get kicked out of the array and there goes the spiral of trying to trouble shoot. For internal primary unit, you can run mixed firmware and it is ok. But ideally if the drives are all from the same manufacture, model and size they should run all the same firmware for synchronicity. Now do you need to go in and update the firmware on the drives, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. All many of the drive manufacture do not like to release the firmware to consumer as well, so that is another issue. For me trying to get the firmware update from HGST now western digital is a pain to say the least.

I hear you. SHR 2 will be good.

I use both, for my ancillary NAS I use SHR, for my primary 12 bay RAID archive I use SHR 2. And I still back up everything both on and off site.

Yes and no. It is always a good idea to get the drives from the same batch because generally, we can make the assumption that they would have the same firmware. And the drive firmware has a lot to do with the overall performance of a RAID system. And even though, drive firmware can be upgraded, they are not easy to do and most of the time require proprietary software from the drive manufacturer which are only distributed on a case by case bases through tech support; i.e. a pain, I've been through this. And with this said there are some distinction, if you are configuring these drives in a primary unit i.e. DS920+/1520+ with mixed firmware, it is not ideal but it would be ok. If you are however, configuring an expansion DX unit then firmware miss match can cause more of an issue. Not that you need to know all of this but for what you want to do, you'll be ok mix and matching the firmware. For instance, I use SHR 1 for my setup and throughout the years I have been upgrading drive capacity, obviously those are different firmware and they do just fine. Also the vanilla RAID with 2 drive redundancy that you are referring to is RAID 6 and to set that up you are going to need at least 4 drivers. RAID 1 is just standard drive mirroring 1:1. And reading further into your comment if you are going to setup the drives as SHR 2, then you are good, SHR is synology proprietary RAID, and you can expand that later on by adding more drive or just swiping to bigger drive. One more thing to note is that to setup SHR 2 which is a proprietary variation of RAID 6, you will need at least 4 drives as well.

@@ArtIsRight Thanks! Ok then, as it is fine for the main unit, I suppose I should just get 4 8TB drives and not worry about irregularities in firmware. This is for personal use and I’m not a video/photo editor or media hoarder, 16TB will outlast my confidence in the drives. I may get a DS1520+ just in case that presumption proves to be false and I want another 8TB. I’ll start with SHR-2 from the get-go and buy external 16TB drives for backup.

👍🏼

@@ArtIsRight By the way, what problems could I face if they’re on different firmwares? Thanks

@@ArtIsRight You mentioned degraded performance. Is it drastic? Would I notice? Or like you said, it’s mainly on the extension units that it’s an issue?

That is strange, what NAS brand do you own?

@@ArtIsRight Model DS416Play CPU Celeron N3060

I would submit a support note to Synology. That is not supposed to happen, nor have I seen that happen.

That is why you use SHR 2 or RAID that have double failure redundancy. And if you are that lucky you should go buy a lottery ticket. Not saying that does not happen but extremely rare. Also this is what if you look at the video in the series there's another one that talks about a robust backup solution as well both on and offsite.

I am aware of that fact but thanks for reiterating!

@@ArtIsRight No complaint or trolling intended, it's just that I got caught out on that one when I got some new drives to upgrade my Synology! Live and learn! would love to pick your brains about monitor colour calibration for offset printing sometime, if you happen to have any interest about that! great vids btw 🖖

Hi Polar Red, it is hard to gauge intent on a text comment, but it is not being taken as a complain or trolling at all :) And yes please reach out to me with questions about the color calibration!

Hi Polar Red, Thanks for your comment, it's very useful for me, of course, people say they are aware of it but not me as a person who just watch this video. "can" and "have to" is very big different meaning, they should be trained to use the word properly so that the information gets delivered clearly not mislead.

Really nice Video, KZfaq did something good, with the recommendations 👍🏻

Thank you!

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hpanrbGV2q2xeaM.html

Yes and no, you can get a basic mikrotik for a little over $100, QNAP capable one for about $300-$500 which is about in range with most commercial switch, so it all depends.

This is one part of the video, if you watch the other I have a back up solution, I build system and architect storage network, rest assured I am accurately aware of what I am doing. I am also aware that this is about redundancy and not back, I suffer no delusion between the two.

Oh and no repeating, thank you very much ;)

Good question, I don't know and I probably will not test this because there's cumulative consequences to the drives. This may be related to the function of the OS as well. My system I have a UPS link up to it with USB so it will shutdown when the UPS is low.

@@ArtIsRight ok thx. Then I have to test this. But in theory there is a risk to lost all data not only the one you wrote. And this is what a hate on raid. It is not realy secure. Ofc usv super. But for me it should be not realy usefully, if they would did raid correct.

You can test and let me know. I would test for both Mac and PC to see variations.

@@ArtIsRight hi I tested. Two hdds sha 1. First: just off (from energy) only a hint not correctly shut down. Second: during upload off. Again hint and second one that the data have to cleared up. Process 2 minutes. I have just 10 GB on this hdds. Test passed. Third copy Operation on the hdds. See second. With synology thought now I m New in dsm. The Tour startet. But data again safe after cleaning up. Ofc the data from upload and from copy is gone. Thus is normal. Maybe the hdds not went in parking Position. But if you not Touch the synology, it should be no Problem. So I dont want give 100% garantee But an uvs should be not nessacery if you dont take care of the cleaning data time, where you cant use the Server.

Thanks for the test. UPS choice is something that I leave up to the users. They have to make their own decisions based on facts and risks factors. :)

SHR combines all available drive space of various capacity, so it is not necessary smallest n-1 and having a first big drive may show additional storage. All of this depends on storage ratio between drives. I would SHR calculator on Synology Site for this.