Old/New Hardware

Video and photos take up a crazy amount of space, especially when filming at high resolutions and taking photos in RAW sometimes with a DSLR. Add the pictures that never get used, edited originals, resized images, and all of the other supporting files, presentations, ect. On top of all of that I have to have redundancy, it really adds up quickly. Years ago when building our first networked storage drive I never thought I would ever be able to fill it up. After a little time and an upgraded camera that quickly led to adding another NAS and then later a server packed full of storage as well. In the end I had a Seagate NAS with 4 2tb drives, a QNAP NAS with two 3tb drives, and a small server with two 2tb drives and two 1tb drives. That’s 20 terabytes (10 after RAID) of storage spread out over multiple devices being used for PC backups, webserver backups, all file storage for the network (photos, videos, install files for test benches, steam backsup, ect). Although capacity was an issue, when looking at upgrading being able to condense our server closet down and save on electricity was paramount.

I started by revaluating everything running on the server and moving over what I still needed onto the LAN server that hosts Teamspeak on the LAN. Once the server was only doing file sharing duty I had to look into the idea NAS for our situation. Considering how well the Thecus N5550 has performed for my wife and I for personal use a Thecus NAS was only logical. I decided to go with the Thecus N7510 an Atom powered NAS like the N5550 but with a total of 7 drive bays.

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To fill NAS I stuck with Seagate drives. I used them in all of my other NAS with only one failure during a storm. In the past I used server grade drives in our first NAS but with the server and NAS I went with cheaper consumer grade drives. Even though this didn’t end up biting me in the end, I wanted to make sure to stick with something that would perform best in a NAS environment. Because of that I went with Seagate’s new at the time, NAS hard drives, specifically the 4TB drives (Model number ST4000VN000).

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At 4TB each this would give me the capacity needed to combine all three devices into the N7510 while still bumping me up from 20TB to 28TB to leave room for expansion an on the fly hot swap drive, but I will get into that more later. Being designed for NAS use, the drives are made to run 24x7. Seagate’s NASWorks also helps the drives handle all of the vibrations that 7 drives in a tight space can generate as well as ensures the drives comply with NAS system requirements. To keep vibration down Seagate dual-plane balance where a consumer drive is single pane, this is especially important when you combine so many drives together.

Now that we have covered what I was using previously and why I went with the products that I went with. Let’s dig in and see what the N7510 is all about and later find out how it has performed in the time that I have been using it.

 

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #35144 08 Jul 2014 00:39
I forgot to post this earlier today, but I replaced the LanOC NAS months ago and finally wrote about the experience. Enjoy

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