Which NAS do list members prefer?

[zdjh22]

Well, my drobo just shit itself. Its own diagnostics say that it has no drives installed. Of course, there is zero support for it, since the company went defunct a couple of years ago.

I’ll see if there’s maybe a power supply issue with it, but rhis is gount to be a real PITA.

Ouch. So many of us over the years have been there, just not necessarily with a Drobo unit. A huge PITA for sure.

Do let us know about your progress and success or failures.

 

[SeeMoreDigital]

Well, my drobo just shit itself. Its own diagnostics say that it has no drives installed. Of course, there is zero support for it, since the company went defunct a couple of years ago.

If you haven't done so already, I highly recommend you remove the HDD's from the NAS now!

 

[LuvMyQuad]

My Qnap NAS failed about a year ago. The last log entry said the fan had failed and it shut down due to over temp. I tracked down a new replacement fan and swapped it out, but still no joy. It was still unresponsive.

That is when i learned you just cant take the drives out of one NAS and put them in another NAS. The formatted drives would be compatable that way if i moved them to a small selection of other Qnap models, but thats it. I ended up buying a new Synology NAS. i had to reformat all the drives and restore all the files from a backup. Thank goodness for the backup.

 

[SeeMoreDigital]

That is when i learned you just cant take the drives out of one NAS and put them in another NAS.

Indeed you can't...

But you can put the drives in a caddie and gain access the the media files via a USB connection to your new NAS (or Linux computer). Which is what I had to do many years ago before I bought my current Synology DS212+ NAS.

 

[barfle]

If you haven't done so already, I highly recommend you remove the HDD's from the NAS now!

It's off.

 

[barfle]

Ouch. So many of us over the years have been there, just not necessarily with a Drobo unit. A huge PITA for sure.

Do let us know about your progress and success or failures.

Did a bunch of research on-line, and read that the power supply (which is a desk wart style) can cause that. There's enough power left to run the chassis, but not the drives. I was able to update the firmware even with it in generally useless mode, and I ordered a new power supply. It's supposed to be in sometime on Monday.

Fingers crossed.

But the drobo will be replaced. Not sure which Synology I'll be getting, but this is my second drobo failure, without a hard-drive failure.

 

[zdjh22]

Did a bunch of research on-line, and read that the power supply (which is a desk wart style) can cause that. There's enough power left to run the chassis, but not the drives. I was able to update the firmware even with it in generally useless mode, and I ordered a new power supply. It's supposed to be in sometime on Monday.

Fingers crossed.

But the drobo will be replaced. Not sure which Synology I'll be getting, but this is my second drobo failure, without a hard-drive failure.

My fingers are crossed for you as well.

I have an old 4-bay Synology NAS that’s worked reliably for me for almost 10 years, with just two disk replacements (3 TB) over that time. I don’t really trust it anymore for critical data, or at least data that isn’t backed up elsewhere. It’s handy still because I run my local NTP time server there (for my telescopes to use) as well as for some background frame grabs and posts from my weather cams.

I know new Synology firmware allows you to use btrfs to add extra data integrity, which is very useful, but I’m baffled by their choice to still use LVM and MDRAID underneath it, rather than letting btrfs do the RAID work. I’ve seen too many folks have really difficult times recovering when their LVM setups had issues (RedHat used to default to LVM for Linux installs, so lots of folks at my former place of employment had Linux laptops and desktops with LVM, which, frankly, makes no sense for single drive systems).

I’m still a ZFS guy, although btrfs would be a fine substitute. Last week I got around to doing my periodic backups of my various ZFS filesystems to my two big ZFS boxes, and was reminded how powerful serialization (send/receive, available for both ZFS and btrfs) is. So easy to do incremental backups. I’ve had the experience of a failed system when all I had to do was move the ZFS hard drives to the new system and do a “zfs import” to fully recover the filesystems.

I finally pulled the trigger today on an LTO6 tape drive purchase, which will be used as an additional backup for those serialized ZFS filesystems. I’ll finally have a true 321 backup strategy (3 copies, on 2 distinct media, with one copy in a different physical location).

 

[SeeMoreDigital]

But the drobo will be replaced. Not sure which Synology I'll be getting, but this is my second drobo failure, without a hard-drive failure.

The main thing I like about my Synology DS212+ is that it offers three USB ports, an eSATA port and an SD card slot. I prefer placing my media files on NTFS formatted portable USB drives.

Sadly though, the SD card slot stopped working a few days ago. Fortunately the data on the 128GB SD card was fine so I was able to transfer it onto a 320GB SSD which I placed within an old eSATA caddie I had lying around. Thankfully it works well.

The next thing I want to try connecting to my Synology NAS is a powered 4-port USB hub as I want to know if the Synology is able to detect/read multiple storage devices using different file formats (such as exFAT and ext3/4, HFS+, etc).

It's a while since I looked at the feature sets of newer Synology NAS's but I doubt they offer so much external connectivity...

 

[mandrix]

I have a friend with three QNAP NAS boxes. One kept indicating it was overheating. He bought new fans....no fix. I believe he finally was able to rig a fan to blow on the heatpipe and fixed...for now.

For myself I guess I'm going to stick with my current strategy. I'm running an old Adaptec ASR 71605-16i SAS/SATA card & the MaxView storage manager....pretty much like the LSI utility.
I have 3 drive pairs in RAID 1 for my more important "stuff", and have the same data on another pc.
All drives on my main rig are in cages/rack that were made for my Case Labs Merlin SM8 case, in the top "pedestal", 15 drives total at this point. Using those old Corsair SSD's for scratch drives..still working after all these years.
On the back side there is a 120mm fan for each drive cage on the main mount that spans the length of the pedestal. Drive power wiring and sleeving by me.
I also fabbed the aluminum drive cage on the left, you can see it's a little out of kilter compared to the other two....but I have no sheet metal brake.

 

[barfle]

My Qnap NAS failed about a year ago. The last log entry said the fan had failed and it shut down due to over temp. I tracked down a new replacement fan and swapped it out, but still no joy. It was still unresponsive.

That is when i learned you just cant take the drives out of one NAS and put them in another NAS. The formatted drives would be compatable that way if i moved them to a small selection of other Qnap models, but thats it. I ended up buying a new Synology NAS. i had to reformat all the drives and restore all the files from a backup. Thank goodness for the backup.

When I replaced my first drobo 5N, I tried simply moving the old drives into the new chassis, and everything formatted immediately. That wasn’t an issue and I was told to expect it.

I have a handful of older drives that are just sitting in a pile that I’ll probably populate whatever Synology unit I buy, Nothing wrong with the drives but capacity - I’m in the process of populating the drobo with 12TB drives, just because I can - and see if I can copy all my drobo data (assuming it works with the new power supply) over to it. I expect that to be a lengthy process.

 

[DuncanS]

I have a couple of Star Tech HDD duplicators which I've used to copy HDD to SSD for PCs (via USB) and copy NAS HDDs (standalone duplicator - very quick!)
They're not that expensive.
https://www.startech.com/en-gb/hdd/duplicators
I have older versions of
https://www.startech.com/en-gb/hdd/satdock2reu3
https://www.startech.com/en-gb/hdd/sdock2u313r