The NAS is dead, long live the NAS!

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sstillwell

New Member
Feb 21, 2018
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Well, I had one too many failures on a Netgear ReadyNAS Pro (4 x 8TB WD RED, 2 x 500GB Samsung 850 PRO SSD). btrfs filesystem is pretty much completely hosed somehow...nothing that I've tried so far (sticking to read-only recovery methods, haven't decided if I'll send it in for (expensive) recovery). The ReadyNAS has been powered down and removed and put in storage. I'll start pricing recovery options because there are some files on there that I'd REALLY like to get back. (I do a lot of audio recording and there are years of archived projects that I'll never have to work on again, but I also can't go back and re-create them even if I wanted to...)

I had offsite backups for everything that was TRULY business-critical, but the previous time it had failed I did manage to get it to mount, copied everything off, rebuilt the array, did a full scrub and an extended disk test...it all checked out fine. Then it cr*pped out again. I'm gonna have to blame this failure squarely on the unit itself and its software.

Well, there's an excuse to buy more gear...so I bought a Synology DS1819+ and loaded it with 6 x 10TB Seagate IronWolf drives and 2 x 960GB Seagate IronWolf 110 SSD for read/write cache, and upgraded the RAM to 32 GB. Hopefully this will be a buy once, cry once decision. It's certainly quieter and cooler than its predecessor.

I'm now in the middle of moving all of my VMs from NFS storage to a VMFS6 datastore on a 10TB thick-provisioned file LUN that I carved out of the available ~42TB storage. It's hard to judge performance of iSCSI when the NFS store is on the same spindles, but one thing that is obvious is that latency is FAR lower in iSCSI - around 450 MICROseconds instead of the 45 MILLIseconds that the NFS is running.

Currently using the first two NICs of the Synology bonded in adaptive-SLB (why not LACP? because reasons...). When I get a chance to move things around on the switches I'll consider setting up multiple separate NICs and use iSCSI MPIO, but performance is pretty acceptable right now with just a single pipe. I'm pretty much hitting bandwidth limits on the pipe and the disks aren't even breathing hard (which is to be expected).
 

BoredSysadmin

Not affiliated with Maxell
Mar 2, 2019
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Meh, For me Netgear and Synology are the exactly of the same breed. You've upgraded to much more efficient and recent hardware. Congrats. If data is indeed mission critical, consider Qnap for your next upgrade or even FreeNAS Mini.
 

sstillwell

New Member
Feb 21, 2018
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Meh, For me Netgear and Synology are the exactly of the same breed. You've upgraded to much more efficient and recent hardware. Congrats. If data is indeed mission critical, consider Qnap for your next upgrade or even FreeNAS Mini.
I'm curious why you'd lump Netgear and Synology together, yet keep QNAP as a breed apart. I'd consider it to be in the same class of device as the other two. Primary reason for choosing Synology in my case is DSM - it's a lot more pleasant to use and feature-rich than a lot of other options.

Of course I could have built out a dedicated storage box from the ground up...but I truly did not want to. I spend enough time jacking around with this stuff as it is...I'm getting to the point where I'm a lot more of a fan of plug-and-play than I used to be.