So the last discussion did not, in fact, dissuade me from spending metric craptons of money on hard drives and LAN products. Exactly the opposite, in fact.
Based on the discussion here I started wandering afield. I had initially figured RAID5 was a good way to go and a 5-bay Synology made sense, but then I started looking into RAID failure rates and no matter how you figure it, RAID6 gives you about three orders of magnitude more fault tolerance than RAID5. So 5 bays suddenly wasn't enough.
(...$$$$$$igh...)
I then realized that if we're going to six drives, it starts to be economical to go to more drives. Synology has an 8-drive box that will talk to up to two 5-bay expanders... at current technology, that gets me up to about nine and a half gajillion terabites before I outgrow it.
So on Saturday I ordered $2300 worth of hard drives and shit. It showed up Monday.
- 3 4TB WD Reds from Amazon
- 3 4TB WD Reds from Newegg (so that I've got at least two batch numbers in there)
- Synology 1813+ Diskstation
- Netgear FS108 unmanaged switch out front (more on that in a bit)
- Netgear GS108Tv2 managed switch here where shit's intense (more on that, too)
- The Nausicaa boxed set because after this much thinking, I deserved a break
Anyway. BEHOLD:
BEHOLD:
(Synology counts "bytes" differently than OS X, by rather a lot - OS X sees it as a 16TB array, Synology as 14.42 TB).
Anyway. SHR2 is basically RAID6 with a little added Droboism; add a drive bigger than 4TB and it'll break the drives up into logical chunks and RAID that so that you can mix 5TB drives with 4TB drives (but not 3 or 2 or 1 since I started with 4TB).
Sucker is trunked four ways because I had the ports. Gonna VPN between the NAS and the big computer (3.5TB of that 3.6TB worth of Time Machine), which may get hairy; I've got two LAN ports on the tower but one of them is talking to EuCon which is notoriously flaky. Not sure I want to deal with that yet.
But that raises a new question:
Now what?
...See, I've got the mother of all Time Machines here and it's working fine. It's backing up 4 computers at 100-125MB/S. But that's all it's doing. And my friend Synology will do everything. DLNA server. Glacier. Crashplan. Photo sharing. PHPBB. Sky's the limit.
So what else should I throw on this thing?
I have a few added questions that I'd love the braintrust to address:
1) How the hell do I configure NTP on a GS108? This is the worst software in the world, by the way - in order to make it work I had to A) whip out the nettop because it's Win only B) Install Adobe AiR because it's not actually Win only, it's Flash that will only run on Win C) plug in an external monitor because the "scan" button is at the bottom of a 800 pixel high window that can't be resized D) put it on 192.168.100 instead of 192.168.1 because what the fuck are they thinking E) Download Java F) only talk to it in Exploder, Safari or Firefox because Chrome makes 64-bit Java cry . And even now, it thinks it's 1970. Bitch.
2) Anybody have any experience with Crashplan or Glacier or anything else? I recognize I have redundancy here instead of "backup" despite the fact that the whole server is a backup. Nonetheless, I've got enough hinky shit that having stuff on something in addition to Time Machine would be handy. Especially if
3) I feel like putting iTunes, the movies and the photos on it, as it'll serve 'em no problem. Right now I've got a Mac Mini, a Roku, a Wii and a PS3 all talking to an internet (and AirPlay) enabled 7.1 receiver in the living room; the Mini is older than hen's teeth (2007) and a little crunchy with its GMA950 chipset. The PS3, on the other hand, works a treat.
So, Hubski. Pretend you've got 16TB of storage, of which 12 is spoken for for time machine and the like. You've got 4-5 macs talking to it regularly. You've got gigE to the living room where there are 4 HDMI sources that will happily stream your media. And you've got 15MB down, 1MB up for redundancy.
What's your move?
I am at a complete loss as to what one do for fun and profit with that much storage after backups/work and audio media is accounted for. But here is this: http://atp.fm/episodes/22-full-brichter It's a podcast (called Accidental Tech Podcast) from some well known Apple devs (creator of Instapaper, back-end for Tumblr, and some other stuff) and writers. Topics vary, but in this one they basically geek out and do some lengthy coffee-talk about NAS options. If memory serves, this was also the first episode after Synology heard them geeking a bit on NAS a couple episodes before, and shipped at least one of them a unit to have out of the blue. They used it and ended up giving their first impressions on this podcast. Anyway, it sounds like this episode they are speaking from a similar place you're in now regarding your Synology gear, unless you've used their stuff for a while.
Pawn to c3? Damn, I've been doing fine with 2TB for two years now. But I'd digitize everything I own and connect it to my TV. And maybe create a filesystem to ease your workflow. One disk for raw footage, one for [insert usage here]. Or maybe download Wikipedia, or Project Guthenberg. Make a backup of hubski. I can't say anything about Glacier or the fancy jargon used. I do hope you'll enjoy your purchase though. At least you'll be good for the next decade or so.What's your move?
You crazy, kb. But I like the lights on the monolith. I'm seeing complaints about Glacier file operations from Synology generating large bills: http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=228&t=74866&sid=05254630f318b4b44a75d3681491ba49 Seems like two issues: 1) the Synology software generates many more put requests than other software and 2) people are backing up many smaller files rather than fewer larger ones or archives of smaller files pre-packaged before upload. So unless you want to get back into the world of fiddling and write scripts for the Synology box to tar your many small files before upload, or restrict the box to sending only your huge media files to Glacier, it might be better to avoid it. Some of the folks in those threads suggests Crashplan is the way to go.
Glacier looks expensive. http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-calculator/ Crashplan doesn't let you back up NAS devices... Hmm...
Here's what I get natively: Here's how to set up CrashPlan. So it can be done. It'll just be a pain in the ass. Like the goddamn timeserver on the router that doesn't believe in ntp.org. Bitch.
Set up a Bittorrent Sync server for friends & family. It's like your own personal, secure Dropbox. Write or download a search engine and let it munch away at the intertubes. Download a large query from a DNA dataset and write or find a program to do something interesting with it.What's your move?
The first I can do built-in. It's got cloud sync natively. The next I could do if I were a hacker. If I were, I'd probably use one of the spare laptops I have sitting around. The final I'd want some real power, not a spare NAS designed to throw files around. Good thoughts, though.
It occurred to me after writing that you might have meant media apps, to complement your streaming setup. I actually have a semi–media related project I'd like to do at some point. ☑ realize that tardigrades are awesome. ☐ acquire a tardigrade in a petri dish. ☐ put it under a USB microscope connected to a server, streaming the live video feed to a monitor. Voilà. Instant macroscopic pet tardigrade. From that point, you can: ☐ stream it over the internet, for anyone to watch your pet tardigrade it all its glory. ☐ save the video to a hard drive. ☐ run the video thru image recognition software and write some code to do behavioral analysis—eating, sleeping habits, etc. So far I've only gotten to step 1. Maybe once I get out of grad school and have some of this mythical "spare time" I keep hearing about.
You inspired me to spend a lunch break collecting specimens, though it got me caught in a sudden spring rainstorm. I gathered a wad of moss from a stone wall, some other greenish stuff that might be moss from some stones on the ground, and some more green organic matter on a tree, all three samples taken near a river. I realized that it has been a long time since high school biology and I am pretty ignorant in the realms of moss, lichen, algae, mold, and fungus. Metro card for scale. As the rain and wind picked up, I struggled to record an eVox for cW documenting the adventure. Back at the office, I cut the bottoms off some spring water bottles I had bought for the purpose, and left my tardigrade-rich organic matter soaking over the weekend. A few days passed, and I tried in vain to spot the waterbears frolicking in my fake petri dishes. It didn't help that my microscope was one half of a pair of binoculars held backwards. b_b, this is your line of work, can you recommend a strategy for acquiring a decent binocular dissecting microscope on the cheap? There are some on eBay in the $100 range, but they are new and I suspect that I might get better value buying used, if I can find something with undamaged optics. Ruler showing millimeter marks for scale. I neglected to remove the samples, continuing to add water as necessary, and after two or three weeks I had some growth, but I think it is time to liberate my samples before they start to stink. I like the idea of having a living thing in my otherwise sterile cubicle, a form of emotional sustenance. But maybe for now I should stick to something simpler.realize that tardigrades are awesome.
I have also completed only Step 1.
So THIS is a tardigrade! It seemed in your e-Vox that you were crediting me with telling you about them, which I was fairly certain was not the case, but didn't want to rule out hypnogogic wiki trawls/random sharing. They are indeed badass. Marketing them as stuffed animals will be challenging, given their eyelessness. Their size suggests cuteness, but this may actually be my favorite conception: Don't they look like they're covered in canvas? Such as those ghastly bodysuits actors occasionally don? Also, they evoke for me the Caterpillar of Alice in Wonderland, suggesting that perhaps Alice, on her "magic potion" trip, got a lot smaller than we had previously realized.
For reference, I'm 90% certain that OSX calculates kilobytes while Synology calculates kibibytes - it's a 16,000,000,000,000 byte array. Base 1000 (kilo), it's a clean 16 - but it's more accurate to calculate it with base 2^10 since it's data storage - and so, it means that Synology divides every 1024 - which means that (aside from the little tidbits set aside for low-level stuff) it should be a 14.9Tebibyte (I think) array. The more you know!