We’re finally approaching the end of my “storage nightmare” saga.
I think.
I hope.
To catch everyone up, in spring 2016, I had my main storage raid crash and lost a BUNCH
of data, got a QNAP NAS in for review, moved what I could save to that while I fixed my
computer, and then a SATA port on that NAS died, swapped units and it erased my Raid
Volume, losing a lot more data.
I also started trying to heavily leverage Amazon’s alleged “Unlimited Cloud Storage
Plan” that I had picked up holiday 2015 to try and save my bacon.
Amazon killed their unlimited plan in the US, and I haven’t had the raw disk space
at home to download it, and began to panic earlier this year about what will happen to
THE REST of what little footage archive I have left.
Through the year, I’ve developed a working relationship with Synology.
And my… incredible contact over there has dealt with my panic and stress and worked
to sponsor me with some storage.
First we set up my “Edit Bae” that I made a video on early in the year so I had reliable
working storage to edit from with their Disk Station DS916+.
I’ve been keeping all of my footage on there and editing right off of it.
Now, they’ve sent out the DX513 expansion bay for the DS916+, and we’ve partnered
with WD to utilize their incredibly reliable Red NAS drives for this expansion, and we’re
going to be setting up an even bigger storage array in the near future.
But first, the expansion.
My problem was that I had roughly 40TB of raw data up on Amazon Cloud Drive that I needed
to download as soon as possible.
But I didn’t have 40TB of usable space.
As I worked on my massive 8 plus Terabyte OBS Master Course, my main 12 to 15 terabyte
edit bay quickly filled, leaving me no room to keep trickling Amazon backups down to my
network.
I consulted with Synology and the best course of action to just get the Amazon data downloaded
for me to sort and deal with once I knew it was safe was their DX513 expansion unit.
This is a 5-bay unit that just connects to the main DS916+ NAS via an eSATA connection.
Installation could not have been easier.
Literally just screw in the cable and plug in the power cord.
In the NAS, WD sent over 5 of their 8TB Red drives - a very reliable and respectable drive
among data-hoarders such as myself.
My main desktop storage drive in my workstation rig is actually a 8TB Red, too.
Labeled as “Jean Grey” in Windows - for those of you who comment on my drive names.
These disks are reliable and perform quite well in exactly these scenarios - and you
can virtually always get a great deal on them.
They even have 10TB Reds, too!
I connected the expansion bay, booted everything up, and went to the Storage Manager in the
Disk Station Manager OS.
Here I told it to expand my volume.
I just want all the data in one place, right?
Welll…..
I’m not sure I’d recommend doing that.
Setup time would’ve been a small number of seconds if you make a new volume with the
expansion.
I, however, told it to expand my existing 15TB raid that was already 98% full and it
took an entire week - limiting the NAS’s performance throughout.
I wasn’t exactly prepared for this, but once I realized it was OK to keep using the
NAS during this process, it wasn’t a huge deal.
Things actually sped up significantly once I was able to utilize a couple external drives
to offload about 4TB so it had less data to crawl and more space to move the bits around
on the platters.
Once completed, I now had roughly 49 terabytes of working space, plus some redundancy thanks
to the Synology Hybrid Raid and btrfs.
Perfect.
That’s… really all it took.
This is why I’ve been in love with Synology’s systems so much for the past couple years
now - their DSM operating system works much like a normal desktop OS, and managing file
systems and the like doesn’t get complicated at all - unless you want it to.
Despite being a storage nerd, I get easily overwhelmed by the plethora of tiny details
and inner-workings of the various file systems and raid types.
I understand the basics, but I don’t want to be responsible for making all of the correct
decisions at any given moment.
I want a smart system that lets me choose my needs and handles the rest for me - and
Synology’s network attached storage servers do just that.
Now, as an edit bay, I’ve actually sacrificed a potential performance opportunity by not
utilizing a SSD Cache.
I needed as much raw capacity as possible, so I filled every slot instead of utilizing
that handy feature of Synology’s hardware.
But to be honest - it wouldn’t have made a huge deal for me, anyway.
My high-bitrate DNxHR and ProRes footage is currently fully saturating my gigabit network,
and I only work on projects once - for the most part - and then am done with them, so
only minor graphics assets and music tracks that I use frequently would be served by caching.
In the next phase of my storage build-out, I’m making a similar sacrifice for this
reason.
I’ll be making the push to 10 gigabit networking to eliminate the 1gbps transfer bottleneck,
which I’m unbelievably excited for.
Until then, I’m just grateful to be pulling what data I can from Amazon’s horrendous
service and to at least know my data is safe for now.
The next phase will involve building out enough storage to last a while - so I’m not making
these update videos quite so often.
With my OBS Course project taking up 8 terabytes - clearly bulk storage is a necessity, and
I’m beyond hyped to show you what we’re doing next.
My undying gratitude to Synology and Western Digital for sponsoring this video… series…
my sanity… and making this all happen.
Product links to Synology’s servers will be in the video description, and go pick up
some WD drives for your storage needs.
I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun, and remember -- no data is EVER
safe on Raid0.
And to ALWAYS have backups in multiple places.
Don’t be me.
Don’t do it.
EposVox is a Patreon-supported production.
Our videos would simply not be possible without the support and generosity of our patrons
- whom you can see on-screen now.
If you'd like to join the inner-circle and get early access to videos, among other things,
go to Patreon.com/EposVox to learn more.