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?