Advice for improving home network setup - what to replace or buy?

  • Hello,


    I would be really grateful for some advice on what to do to improve my setup.


    Here is what I currently have:


    NAS

    G1840
    MSI B85M-E45
    12GB RAM (2x4GB and 2x2GB)
    1 x 64GB Crucial M4 SSD - for OMV
    2 x 2TB Samsung F4 Harddrives
    1 x 6TB WD Red Harddrive
    Superflower Golden Green 350w PSU
    Xigmatek Midgard Tower with 1 x 140mm exhaust fan and 1 x 120mm intake fan.


    Desktop PC


    i3-2105
    MSI H61MA-E35
    Antec NSK2480 Case
    2 x 4GB RAM
    60GB Sandisk Ultra SSD (for Linux Mint)
    12GB Samsung SSD (for Windows)
    1 TB Samsung F3 Spinpoint (for general use)
    1TB Samsung F1 Spinpoint (for backup)
    Antect High Current Gamer PSU

    Spare parts

    Antec Earthwatts 380w PSU
    3.5" IDE 500GB HDD
    2.5" SATA 500GB HDD


    Everything is connected via a gigabit switch.


    The NAS runs OMV4 and uses TVHeadend and a Digbit R1 SAT>IP server to make and server recordings to 4 raspberry Pis on the network. Kodi watched statuses are stored on the NAS via MYSQL.


    Now to my problem:


    1. I have virtually no backup provisions in place (very unwise, I know).


    What I currently have is a folder (just shy of 1TB data) on my NAS, that contains all my irreplaceable stuff - photos etc.


    I mirror this folder to the F1 Spinpoint in my desktop by simply adding a copy of a file to both at the same time.


    Everything else on my NAS is not backed up - potentially, lots of recordings and other media to lose.


    2. My NAS is big, slightly noisy and uses up more electricity than I would perhaps like. It is left on 24/7.


    tkaiser has become a bit of hero of mine, on here, as I love his thoughts on using ARM devices that use a fraction of the space and electricity that regular servers do.


    What to do?


    My intial reaction is to build a small, more efficient NAS and then convert the current NAS into a backup server.


    I would buy a new 4TB Hard drive and put this , the 6TB HDD and the SSD into the new system.


    The backup server would then have the following storage for backups:


    2 x 2TB,
    1 x 1 TB
    2 x 500GB


    Which should be enough to backup most of my NAS data.


    My question, therefore, is firstly whether this is a good approach at all and, if so, what replacement NAS hardware should I go for?


    Should I go with an ARM device - something by Odroid or Pine64, for example, or perhaps a mini-itx build with a passive CPU?


    Any advice would be very much appreciated.

  • Should I go with an ARM device

    The problem is that most of them are only good for single disk operation (one of the exceptions is Helios4 or those boards which can be combined with a multiport SATA adapter -- but then you should also look at an HP Microserver since most probably the better and cheaper variant). If I were you I would most probably choose for the productive NAS an ODROID HC2 combined with a 10 TB HDD.


    If you want to allow the drive to sleep when inactive I would choose the cheapest drive with 5 years warranty (most probably Seagate Exos), if the disk should rotate 24/7 I would look at one staying below 3W in idle (most probably a WD RED Pro). For me warranty is more important than anything else (especially no bogus statistics made by Backblaze marketing folks) but others are fine with just 3 years and then it looks like this (still below 3W idle).


    Your current NAS then becomes the backup NAS using all drives as one large pool (mergerfs, btrfs multi disk, whatever), powers on every 24 hours to receive an incremental backup (implementing then VERSIONING -- your current approach is NOT backup!) and then powers off again.

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