OT: Replacing Venerable NAS

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I have an original-label Infrant (now NetGear) ReadyNAS storage appliance that’s been running for 8+ years. Except for replacing its power supply, it has not skipped a beat in all this time.

I use it primarily as a backup device (via NFS) for a couple of Linux machines, (via SMB) for a couple of Windows PC’s, and (via ftp) for web sites at my hosting provider.

SMART+ reporting shows ~75K hours operation, with zero sectors reallocated, on each of the four disks.

I’m thinking I should be looking for a replacement, even with all this good info/luck.

Would like to hear recommendations here. Besides the ReadyNAS, I have worked with a Thecus NAS (don’t recall model). What are the features I
should look at?

Thanks.

24 thoughts on - OT: Replacing Venerable NAS

  • Tim Evans wrote:

    What size storage are you looking at, and what’s your budget? Are we talking a 4TB drive, or 33TB, or…?

    mark

  • Sorry, should’ve mentioned this is for home/home office. The ReadyNAS is a four-bay unit, with 500GB disks. Will want a four-bay, probably with
    1- or 2-TB disks.

  • I just bought a QNAP TS-251 a couple of months ago to replace my old Intel SS4000E fileserver that started looking like it was thinking about dying after a dozen years in service.

    So far I’m pretty happy with this QNAP, though I did have to spend a while in the setup screen turning off a bunch of stuff that I don’t need, want, or care about. In particular, it was creating a ton of .@_thumb files every night. Since I use it exclusively for file backups, I don’t want any of the “multimedia” stuff that it can do, but now that I’ve got all of that turned off, it’s a slick little fileserver.

    The one that I got is only two bays but they sell bigger ones if you want it. I just got the two bay model with two 1tb hard drives in it.

  • Tim Evans wrote:
    Recommendation #1: get a multi-bay drive, and buy your own drives – it’ll be cheaper. That being said, we really like our WD Red 4TB drives. They run about $160 each. The Red *are* for NAS, SAN, etc.

    mark

  • We’re using Synology boxes with good results so far.

    They’re built on Linux with SSH access and good support for things like rsync.

    They have options to backup to remote servers including Amazon too.

  • For those who don’t know why you’d pay $1000 for a diskless 4-bay NAS box when there are $300-500 boxes that are superficially similar from QNAP, Synology, and others:

    – ZFS. Modern cheap NAS boxes have gained some ZFS-like features (online expansion and such) but they’re still not ZFS.

    – FreeNAS. Many low-end NASes use proprietary or rebadged ODM management software that barely scrapes by in terms of features and support, whereas FreeNAS has a long-standing open source developer community behind it.

    – Much bigger CPU than is typical for the low-end NAS boxes. Many low-end NAS boxes have gigabit Ethernet ports, but if you don’t put enough CPU grunt behind that port, you can’t fill it. As a rule, you need at least 1 GHz of CPU to fill a gigabit pipe.

    – Much more RAM than in low-end NAS boxes. Partly this is because ZFS (the storage subsystem for FreeNAS) is a RAM-hungry pig, but the benefit you get from that is that more of your data is in RAM, so even if your spindles aren’t fast enough to fill the gigabit pipe, data from cache can fill it.

    – L2ARC and ZIL upgrade options, which are intermediary caches between RAM and disk. Again, this helps you to keep that gigabit pipe full.

    – They’re serious server-grade machines, not borderline flimsy boxes competing largely on price. Built in and supported from Silicon Valley, not China. :)

    – iXsystems sponsors FreeNAS and FreeBSD (via PC-BSD) developers. Does your alternative choice of NAS provider sponsor open source developers?

    – Those latter two points mean you can actually call them and get someone on the phone who knows what they’re talking about. The last time my Lacie NAS choked, I had to just nuke it and re-mirror all the data.

    I don’t have a FreeNAS mini, and I have never used one. But, I’ve been lusting after them for some time now. Next time one of my NASes dies, one of these is going to be high on the list of choices for replacement.

  • Once upon a time, Warren Young said:

    iXsystems sells rebadged SuperMicro stuff, nothing special (not made in Silicon Valley).

    We bought an iXsystems TrueNAS (commercial version of FreeNAS +
    “supported” hardware) system at $DAYJOB about 2 years ago, with the dual-node “HA” setup, and it was not a pleasant experience. Over the first 6 months or so, our longest functioning uptime was about 10 days. NFS would run and then just stop serving (no errors or anything). Eventually, iX found and fixed a FreeBSD kernel NFS bug, but it was a painful experience.

    Then, early this year, we had a node fail, and it took them almost a month to get us a replacement.

    Their idea of HA is to monitor the ethernet links, not the services;
    even though we have multiple links in a LAG, if one drops, the node fails over (and now we’re having trouble with CentOS 7 NFS clients when the TrueNAS has a failover). When we had NFS problems, we had to monitor that externally and manually trigger a failover. Failover consists of “reboot the active node”; there’s no graceful cluster tool
    (such as Pacemaker on Linux).

    And today, when trying to open a ticket, their website is broken because one of their DNS servers is returning 10.0.0.240 for part of their website (where the CSS is served).

    —
    Chris Adams

  • I’ve heard good things about Synology.

    My home NAS going on 3 years now is a HP Microserver running FreeNAS, with 4 x 3TB SATA drives.

  • They aren’t fabbed there, but the assembly is done in the USA.

    We used the mini extensively in my previous position, managing IT for a few dozen small businesses. As backup systems go, it was very reliable. We didn’t use them as servers, though.

  • Good to know, though I must say, the SuperMicro stuff I’ve used is a cut above typical desktop PC or commodity grade hardware. Not on par with super high end stuff, but well above average.

    I see that story in the exact opposite way: iXsystems found and fixed the problem, expending heroic levels of effort to do so.

    By contrast, I’ve had several $300-500 NASes become unmountable for one reason or another, and the vendor was no use *at all* in getting it remounted. I had to rebuild the NAS from backups each time.

    It’s rather annoying to buy a NAS, then later realize you need to buy *another* NAS as a mirror in case the first one roaches itself. Isn’t that what redundant storage is supposed to avoid?

    Meanwhile, I’ve never had a ZFS pool become unmountable, even when the disk enclosure hardware was failing underneath it.

    That’s not good.

    But have you gotten better turn time from the $300-500 NAS providers for the same service?

    Did you opt for advance replacement, and if not, why not?

    Do the $300-500 NAS boxes even try to do HA failover?

    I’ve also had trouble with FreeBSD’s lagg feature. Fortunately, my use case allowed me to switch to a round-robin DNS based load balancing scheme instead. I don’t think you can do that with NFS, by its nature.

    Yes, I noticed their site was running awfully slowly. Embarrassing, but I don’t see what it has to do with the quality of their FreeNAS boxes.

  • no, RAID is purely availability when faced with single or double drive failure, nothing else. classic raid is most certainly NOT about data integrity, as the raid stripes aren’t checksummed, they assume hardware data integrity.

    —
    john r pierce, recycling bits in santa cruz

  • Once upon a time, Warren Young said:

    So, I was offering my opinion (backed by some personal anecdotes) of iXsystems. The system we had with all this trouble was much more than
    $300 (more like $30,000); IMHO it isn’t “heroic levels of effort” to do something they told us it could do before we wrote the check.

    Yes, we had purchased a support contract that included advance replacement. They had no replacement part and took several weeks to find one.

    Yes, NFS talks to a single IP at a time. My problem isn’t with FreeBSD, it with the TrueNAS software; it considers any configured network link dropping as a reason to fail over (even if the link is in a LAG). That is not configurable behavior.

    Mainly just more anecdotal evidence about the company and their general reliability.

    I know there are fans of iXsystems and FreeNAS; I am not one of them
    (nor is anyone in my office). We also sold a TrueNAS system to a customer, they had trouble (different problems from us), and we just about lost the customer.

    —
    Chris Adams

  • I knew I’d get some kind of lecture like that.

    Look, I know RAID/ZFS is not a backup. My point is simply that if you need to keep a mirror of your file server just in case it roaches itself, what you have there is dual redundancy, not a backup. You need an offline backup *on top* of that, for the same reason that all hot mirrors are not backups.

    My point is that unreliable NAS/RAID systems *require* this dual redundancy, whereas a reliable system only needs normal backups, that being the sort where you rarely go back and pull more than a few files at a time.

  • well, at the sub $1000 price point of the typical SOHO NAS box, you’re not going to find high ‘reliable’ systems, with redundant power supplies, dual storage controllers, and everything else that goes along with ‘high availability’. even my fairly well built $7000-ish 2U
    servers in my development lab, if the motherboard or a CPU chip fails?
    they are offline until repaired, if they were mission critical, I’d need pairs of everything.. if a network switch fails? yeah, I didn’t implement fully redundant multipath networking either.

    the /really/ hard one when rolling your own highly redundant systems with high data integrity needed for things like transactional database servers, is implementing redundant storage controllers with shared writeback cache… you pretty much have to get into EMC class hardware for this level of reliability with data integrity and performance. and thats /really/ expensive stuff.

  • Warren Young wrote:

    Which is why, for home, I went to MicroCenter and bought, for about $30
    USD, a hot swap drive bay that fits in my mid-sized tower, and a 2TB
    drive. Doesn’t even need a sled….

    mark

  • That’s great if your volume fits onto a single hard disk. I use 4-5 bay NASes because I have more than 8 TiB under management, and want volume level redundancy on top of that. That means 4+ 4 TiB disks, at minimum, which means I need another like-kind NAS to backstop the first.

  • –For reasons that others have already touched on, I like FreeNAS, as long as you’re using the base system. I have one that is running jails so that I can run some custom software on the same box, and I think when possible I’d prefer to keep such software off on another machine.
    (In this case though, it’s a situation of keeping the program as close as possible to the data to minimize network traffic.)

    I have one FreeNAS running on an HP Microserver Gen 8 (four bays, RAID-Z2 double redundancy, which means two disks worth of usable space). The OS is on an internal memory stick, the spinning drives are all data drives. It’s a nice solid piece of hardware and suitable for home & small office.

    I also have FreeNAS running in a larger system which is based on an Intel DBS1200V3RPS motherboard, a Xeon processor, lots of ECC memory, and 36TB of disk. (6 SATA connectors on board, and 6TB drives were the largest available at the time; it will get expanded soon via an add-on RAID card running in JBOD mode.) It’s a solid system.

    FreeNAS will do almost anything you’d expect of a storage device. I’d suggest downloading it and trying it on a spare piece of (64bit)
    hardware, but unless it’s using ECC memory don’t trust your production data with it. I’ve exercised the disk replacement process once and it went flawlessly. (‘Twas far too early, but it was probably a manufacturing flaw given the early failure.)

    If you’re planning on doing data encryption or data duplication, make sure you read into specific hardware requirements for that before you go and buy stuff.

    And given which mailing list we’re on, I’ll add in that CentOS 5, 6, and 7 NFS clients talk to it just fine. (And OS-X clients as well, with both NFS and AFP. I don’t have windows clients, but they shouldn’t be an issue.)

    Devin

  • Yes it is, because it really is that hard to do shared writeback cache.
    EMC, Nimble, NetApp, and the like cost what they do because of those HA
    features. EMC storage processors have specialized shared backplanes and replicated write caches just in case an SP goes down while the data to be written is in cache and has yet to be committed (so that the trespassing SP can write the correct data to disk). They also have dedicated battery backup units and the whole concept of the ‘vault’
    drives to specifically save the write cache in a powerfail emergency.

    But I would love to see something in the free software space that did that kind of thing, with appropriate hardware.

  • Not sure if this will help, but our company is building out an open source NAS. We are still not completely done, but we are nearly done. If you would like to experiment , do let us know.

    Here is the docs link :
    https://fractalram.gitbooks.io/integralstor-unicell-v1-0-user-manual/content/

    We should have the iso built out in another week.

    If this interests, and would love to experiment, do reply back as a PM, and I would direct you to the relative sources.

  • Just closing the loop here. Thanks for all the replies and recommendations. As usual, discussion went far and away beyond what I
    needed for my decision–but I was interested to read all the messages.

    For my home/home office solution, I’ve decided to stay with the ReadyNAS
    line (the Model 204, 4-slots, for $370, with four WD Red 2TB disks). Was tempted by the Thecus similar model N4800ECO ($100 more). The even-more-expensive QNAP TS453 Pro model seemed more than I needed, as did the Synology DS415+–and I was put off by a rather negative review of Synology service).