{"id":2466,"date":"2014-10-06T22:48:42","date_gmt":"2014-10-06T13:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2014-10-06\/2466"},"modified":"2014-10-06T22:48:42","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T13:48:42","slug":"populating-the-drive-bays-of-a-synology-nas-unit-lessons-learned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2014-10-06\/2466","title":{"rendered":"Populating The Drive Bays of a Synology NAS Unit: Lessons Learned"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Voigtl\u00e4nder 125mm f\/2.5 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>500 sec, f<\/span>\/2.5, ISO 140 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nAs Peaceful As...<\/span>\n... backup storage that doesn't crash\n
Desktop-Background Versions<\/b>\n1280×<\/span>800<\/a>  ·  1680×<\/span>1050<\/a>  ·  1920×<\/span>1200<\/a>  ·  2560×<\/span>1600<\/a>  ·  2880×<\/span>1800<\/a><\/span>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n

(Recent posts have been filled with fall colors, so for some balance, I'm dipping<\/span> into my cherry-blossom archives)<\/p>\n\n

For the last few years I've had a Synology<\/a> DS1511+ NAS<\/a> unit... an always-on\n“<\/span>network drive”<\/span> that sits in a closet<\/span> at home that I can<\/span> access on my home\nnetwork from all my computers at home. I use it<\/span> for local Time Machine backup,\nas well as a local<\/span> CrashPlan<\/a> repository for various\nbackups. (I also<\/span> use CrashPlan to keep backups offsite.)<\/p>\n\n

The Synology unit has five drive bays, which I initially<\/span> populated with\n3TB Seagate Barracuda drives.<\/p>\n\n

That was a mistake.<\/p>\n\n

Five drives at 3TB each ostensibly adds up to 15TB of storage, but I set<\/span>\nit up in a fail<\/span>-fail-safe RAID<\/a> configuration, meaning\nthat even if two<\/i> drives crash at the same time, the data remains\navailable. That left me with 9TB of usable, relatively safe local storage.<\/p>\n\n

That was a good idea.<\/p>\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Voigtl\u00e4nder 125mm f\/2.5 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>1000 sec, f<\/span>\/2.5, ISO 100 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nToji Temple (\u6771\u5bfa)\nKyoto, Japan\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n

With disk drives, it's never “<\/span>if”<\/span> it will crash, but “<\/span>when”<\/span>. When the\nfirst drive crashed after about a year,<\/span> I yanked<\/span> it out of the drive bay\n(while the Synology DS1511+ was still running... it allows for “<\/span>hot swap”<\/span>)\nand put in a spare<\/span> that I had<\/span> ordered along with the initial five, for just\nsuch an occasion. The Synology<\/span> then used the new drive to rebuild the redundancy\nin the background, and all was well.<\/p>\n\n

The Seagate drive was under warranty, so I packed<\/span> it up and shipped it\noff to a Seagate<\/span> processing facility near Tokyo, at my own expense. It was a<\/span> hassle, but they sent me a new<\/span> (refurbished) drive.<\/p>\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Nikkor 14-24mm f\/2.8 @ 14mm — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>500 sec, f<\/span>\/11, ISO 360 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nRyouanji Temple (\u9f8d\u5b89\u5bfa)\nKyoto, Japan\n
Vertical Desktop-Background Versions<\/b>\n\n\n1050×<\/span>1680<\/a>  ·  1200×<\/span>1920<\/a>  ·  1600×<\/span>2560<\/a><\/small><\/span><\/span>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n

Anyway, to cut to the chase, in the three years since I bought<\/span> those 6 Seagate Barracuda drives, I've had 7\nor 8 of them bad. They get replaced, and the replacement goes bad. The most recent<\/span>, last week, was a\ndrive<\/span> that had been replaced by Seagate just six weeks earlier.<\/p>\n\n

One time, two drives crashed within hours of each other. I was very<\/span> happy I'd opted for the fail-fail-safe\nconfiguration. I replaced<\/span> one of the failed\ndrives right away, but didn't have a second<\/span>\nspare, so I courted<\/span> danger by running in just\nfail-safe mode for a week<\/span> or so until the\nreplacement came.<\/p>\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Voigtl\u00e4nder 125mm f\/2.5 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>500 sec, f<\/span>\/2.5, ISO 100 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nLooking<\/span>\nfor a disk that doesn't crash\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n

I think the problem is that these Seagate drives are “<\/span>Desktop”<\/span> drives, which means they're intended for a PC.<\/span>... perhaps a PC<\/span> that's\nshut down every night? (I rarely<\/span> shut down my computers, FWIW.)<\/p>\n\n

Having gotten so sick of the hassle of sending these back to Seagate, I decided<\/span> to buy some new drives. I went with<\/span> Western Digital “<\/span>Red”<\/span>\n4TB NAS drives.<\/a>. They're specifically built for (or, at least, marketed for)\n use in NAS units, so hopefully I'll have better luck going forward.<\/p>\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Nikkor 50mm f\/1.4 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>100 sec, f<\/span>\/11, ISO 720 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nRocks<\/span>\nas useful as dead disk drives\n
Desktop-Background Versions<\/b>\n1280×<\/span>800<\/a>  ·  1680×<\/span>1050<\/a>  ·  1920×<\/span>1200<\/a>  ·  2560×<\/span>1600<\/a>  ·  2880×<\/span>1800<\/a><\/span>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Recent posts have been filled with fall colors, so for some balance, I'm dipping into my cherry-blossom archives)<\/p>

For the last few years I've had a Synology DS1511+ NAS unit... an always-on \"network drive\" that sits in a closet at home that I can access on my home network from all my computers at home. I use it for local Time Machine backup, as well as a local CrashPlan repository for various backups. (I also use CrashPlan to keep backups offsite.)<\/p>

The Synology unit has five drive bays, which I initially populated with 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives.<\/p>

That was a [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,2,4,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2466"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}