After I finished recovering my data from my 2-year-long storage nightmare at the end of
2017 with amazing help from Synology - it was time to establish a more permanent infrastructure
solution that met my needs.
We’ve made some huge upgrades on my home network in speed, functionality, and storage
capacity, and I’ve been stoked to share them with you.
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I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun, and I have officially moved my primary
networking over to 10 gigabit!
Affordably, too!.
Last year, Synology and WD sponsored some storage upgrades for me to set up a kickass
DS916+ rig for my to get all of my work-related video storage in one place.
This has been a HUGE part in my business stability in recent months.
A bottleneck I kept running into, however, was gigabit file transfers to the NAS.
With some of the high bitrate and DNx footage I capture, it could take an hour to transfer
a small amount of usable footage to the NAS.
So when we planned for a long-term solution, I wanted to make the jump to 10 gigabit networking.
I experimented with it back in 2015 when I made a video showing how you can set up point-to-point
10gigabit between two PCs, so I already had some SFP+ network cards and cables.
The focus of my upgrade was Synology’s newer DS1817+ - an 8-bay NAS that can expand up
to 18 total drives via two DX517 expansion units.
For now we just went with one expansion unit.
You can get these NAS boxes in either 2GB or 8GB memory configurations, and can expand
it up to 16GB - though I haven’t seen a use for that on my end.
A quad-core Intel Atom C2438 powers the rig which also features 4 gigabit LAN ports onboard,
as well as 4 USB 3.0 ports for expansion.
The really clutch feature, however, is the x8 PCIe expansion slot - allowing for either
a dual M.2 SSD adapter for SSD caching or a network card - such as this dual SFP+ 10
gigabit card installed in mine.
Installing an expansion card is simple.
Unscrew the 6 screws in the back that secure the outer shroud.
Slide off the cover and flip around to the side.
Here, a plastic mechanism holds the PCIe card in place.
Lift up on the plastic lever, install your expansion card, and slide the mechanism back
down to secure your card.
Reinstall the outer shroud and you’re done!
The DS1817+ also features a kensington lock and two eSATA ports for the expansion bays
mentioned before.
I chose the 10gigabit NIC, as I needed faster transfer speeds between the NAS and my PC
during editing and when ingesting footage.
I’d love a NAS like this where I could utilize both 10gbe networking and M.2 SSD caching
- but this is fine for now.
For storage capacity - you could totally max this out with SSDs and fully saturate that
10 gigabit line, but capacity is far more important to me right now.
Western Digital was amazing enough to send out thirteen of their 6TB WD Red drives.
I have used many different drives in my time, and WD Reds are always my preferred NAS drives
- and I even use one regularly in my main rig for bulk storage, too!
They run cool and quiet, and provide a great balance between performance and long-term
reliability in situations exactly like this.
They have served me very well over the years and I’m super grateful to have such an array
of them set up for my primary work storage now.
Installing the drives in the DS1817+ was super simple and toolless.
Simply remove the side securing pieces from the drive bays, install your drive - being
careful not to remove the rubber spacers when you do - and align and replace the side pieces.
You can screw the drives in, if desired, but I generally have not seen the need.
The NAS also comes with keys to lock the drives in place, if needed.
For networking, I was in a tough spot.
All of my servers and networking are kept and managed in my living room-turned office
in my apartment.
So enterprise switches are out of the question - they’re just far too loud to ever be a
usable solution.
Thankfully Wendell from Level1Techs was able to refer me to a single switch that met my
needs - the TP-Link JetStream T1700G-28TQ - I’ll just call it Jet.
Jet features 24 gigabit ports, 4 SFP+ 10-gigabit ports, smart, unmanaged, automatic routing
and so on, is rack-mountable and…..
Is fanless!
100% silent, affordable, and features enough SFP+ ports for me to convert all necessary
rigs to 10 gigabit.
To this day I’ve yet to find another switch that checks all these boxes.
Unfortunately the price is quite volatile for it.
I wound up paying $334 for it, but at the time of writing it is back down to $297.
Oh well.
I got the switch mounted in my audio rack on my new office shelving unit, ran SFP+ cables
to my rig and the DS1817+ over in my server rack - with planned runs to a streaming PC
and my fiancee’s rig soon - and we’re off to the races.
So why am I going through all this?
Why am I not just utilizing one of the plethora of cloud storage services available?
To start, I’d point you to my previous videos on NASes and my experiences w/ Amazon Cloud
Drive - tl;dr NAS storage requires a high upfront cost for mass data like I use, but
quickly comes out to be way more affordable than any cloud storage option for such file
sizes.
After Amazon got rid of their unlimited storage option, 2 months of storing only part of my
video archive with them would cost more than this whole setup.
Pretty crazy.
Plus, with a Synology NAS, you get to make your own private “cloud” and keep things
safe and secure from unwelcomed eyes, while still having control of sharing it to the
world.
Synology’s DiskStation Manager is what really seals the deal for this kind of setup for
me.
While I’m obviously a techie and someone who likes to get into the nuts and bolts of
things - my file storage for my business is one thing I want to make sure is as stable
and safe as possible.
Synology DSM takes car of all that.
Setup is always easy to follow step-by-step and they make it super easy to build a storage
volume.
You can choose between a few different RAID modes for how you stripe your data - adjusting
for how much redundancy you want versus raw capacity, speed, etc.
I usually go with Synology Hybrid Raid and btrfs.
Synology also has a sweet “RAID Calculator” that lets you choose your NAS and expansions,
drive capacities, and then see how much data is allocated to which use right there before
you decide.
Really neat.
For my NAS, I wound up going with Synology Hybrid Raid and btrfs with 2-disk fault protection
leaving me with a little over 57 total TB of capacity left, plenty of transfer speed,
but the security of knowing I won’t lose my data if something goes wrong.
Then you can enable NFS and set up shared folder permissions and shared folders, then
mount them in Windows as a network drive or network location.
Since I sometimes share projects across machines, I usually use the actual network location
instead of mapping to a drive letter.
Synology’s software also let you set up your own cloud Drive - like a certain box
of drops - where any changes made to the files in the Drive are synced to other PCs, other
NAS units, or mobile devices - with version tracking and recovery, too.
You can also share links to specific files or folders to other people - whether they
use Synology DSM or not.
It’s really cool.
Setup guides for everything mentioned here will be linked in the video description if
you want more info.
Those of you who have followed me for a while will have noticed that I complain substantially
less about my overall storage infrastructure and back-end issues these days.
I’ve been running this new setup for a few months now and it has been smooth sailing.
Editing and rendering is faster - no longer bottlenecked by gigabit speeds.
File transfers are quicker, meaning I can organize and start editing quicker.
And I have enough capacity, thanks to the incredible people over at WD, to keep me going
for quite some time.
I’ll have some follow-up videos showing how I’m condensing some of my long-term
archives, as well as some additional uses and guides for Synology NASes coming in the
future.
For now, go check out Synology’s product lineup and pick you up some WD Red drives
via the link in the video description.
Hit the like button if you enjoyed, subscribe for more awesome tech content, and I’ll
see you next time.
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