Comments | andrewducker: I love smart technology

andrewducker

I love smart technology

Sep 10, 2013 07:40

My network hard drive box had two 2TB hard drives in it, acting as mirrors of each other, but was down to 60GB free, and unless I wanted to start deleting data I needed to expand it ( Read more... )

Comments 15

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andrewducker September 10 2013, 08:03:11 UTC

See the "explanation" link in the footnotes :->

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andrewducker September 10 2013, 08:07:20 UTC

I don't actually know what it's doing under the hood - I assume that it was running RAID0 and switched to something like RAID 5 automatically - it took about 36 hours to run the conversion job, so it must have been doing _something_ impressive.

Handily, it was still readable during that time - we were happily streaming video off of it without a hitch. That was pretty impressive too.

Thread 11

bracknellexile September 10 2013, 08:53:42 UTC

I do love Synology's Hybrid Raid. I'll be adding disks to my 2x2TB mirror shortly too and trusting it goes as smoothly.

andrewducker September 10 2013, 08:58:36 UTC

When it restarts with the new drive(s) in give it ten minutes to come back up - I got a bit worried, but it was fine once it had time to analyse itself.

You then go to the Storage Manager, select the storage pool you want to add the disk to, select the disks, and hit "Ok".

All services will stop for a few minutes while it sets things up - and then it will whir away for about 36 hours until it gets it all converted (you can see the progress in the Storage Manager screen).

Oh, and make sure you're running the latest version of DSM before you start.

bracknellexile September 10 2013, 09:17:01 UTC

Cheers for the heads-up.

f4f3 September 10 2013, 15:29:45 UTC

I seem to remember storage costs of about £27k per TB when I got into this game. And the idea of using RAID for a home storage solution would have seemed ludicrous way back when.

andrewducker September 10 2013, 15:41:03 UTC

Yeah - the fact that it's now £500/TB for a _solid state_ hard drive, and only £30/TB for a spinning one is damned impressive.

Now, if they could just get the prices for SSDs down by an order of magnitude...

daveon September 10 2013, 15:52:21 UTC

Which one are you using? My box died last year and I need to replace it.

andrewducker September 10 2013, 16:00:01 UTC

I have a Synology ds411j - the most recent version of which is glowingly reviewed here:
http://www.vortez.net/articles_pages/synology_ds413j_review,1.html

The only drawback to mine is that it's not beefy enough to run a Plex server on - but if you just want it for video storage/streaming then it does so fantastically well.