NAS questions

I need a new NAS. ATM the QNAP TS-231P can be had for ~$160CAD. Any good?

Currently I'm running a WDmycloud 2TB and it's full. I use it exclusively for bulk storage of my music, to be accessed from my Win 10 and DAPhile (gentoo, I believe) laptops. I have no use for print servers, torrents, etc.

Another question I have is how exactly does JBOD work? More specifically, if I buy just 1 4TB drive right now, when it's full, would I be able to just plugin another drive and have immediate access to the extra space or would the NAS need to be re-initialized and I'll have to restore all my files from backup.

Speaking of backup, since this should be done anyways, is there even a point in having a 2 bay NAS? The redundancy of raid is nice and would make recovering from a failure much faster, but would it maybe be smarter to just buy a single bay NAS & use a bigger (6TB) drive.

OOps, I forgot, WD or Seagate… which sucks less?

 

How important is your music collection? If it went up in smoke would you even blink twice?

If it is important:

The TS-231P will suffice for your needs. Set it up in RAID1 with the biggest WD HDD's you can afford today (I recommend the 10TB NAS models). Do this times two if you don't want to be without your music (ever). Just in case the M/B or PSU blows up on the first TS-231P and takes out both drives with it...

In addition to the 2x recommended setup above, I would have at least one other USB backup of the same files that are updated on a weekly/monthly basis (as needed). If you can keep one or more of the above setups offsite, that would be golden.

Again: how important is having 100% uptime worth it to you? How important is the data itself too?

 

Just want to add: with anything you want to depend on, you want to add a quality UPS that not only help with surges and blackouts but also with brownouts too with a pure (or at least a quality) sinewave output.

This is not just for your NAS. This is also for networking equipment (router, switches, etc.), DT workstations that you value/depend on and even your primary/only mobile platform too would benefit from being plugged into one. Fewer glitches, less downtime, and more productivity.

 

I have had my library go up in smoke once (user error - surprisingly, the mycloud has been rock solid hardware wise). It p---ed me off for a day, then I got over it and went to rebuilding it.
I'm pretty apathetic about using RAID. If I am backing up regularly to an external drive, it really doesn't seem worth the extra money of another drive. That's why I was also wondering if a single bay + giant external backup drive wouldn't be a better option - roughly the same price as going for a 2 bay RAID setup (I'll need a bigger backup drive anyways). 10TB is probably out of my price range ATM, I think 6TB should last me a few years based on my past consumption.
The big reason I can think for having a dual bay is just future proofing. Once the first drive is full, then I can just plug in another(?) without needing more hardware again.

 

Another question…
What's the best way to set up the NAS to work best with both Windows and Linux?

The Mycloud I currently use is set up as CIFS/SMB. Works well under Windows, but transfer rate to my DAPhile machine (I keep large DSD files on its own HD) is pretty slow. Mycloud doesn't support NFS so I have no idea how it works under Windows, but is fairly easy to set up in DAPhile, and from what I understand works much better for Linux based systems. I also have the option to use FTP and SSHFS in DAPhile, but I'm clueless on how to set that up or if it's worth considering

 

@Token CDN I'd only use SMB3, or at least SMB2. CIFS transmits passwords in plain text, it is insecure by design.

 

Isn't smb and cifs one and the same?

So far I have the QNAP all set up. I have my shared folder set to use SMB for my Win. laptop and NFS for DAPhile - although that can be easily switched to SMB if need be.
It took a whole lot of screwing around getting it setup. Nothing in the quick start mentioned the fact that the firmware update portion of the setup will continuely fail until you manually update the firmware.

The problem I'm running into now however is slow transfers. The NAS is configured to use min. SMB2, max. SMB3. I've confirmed that the network connection is 1GBe, but my speeds never top 30MB/s - by contrast, transfering to my old Mycloud, I can easily get 60-70MB over ethernet. Going to the QNAP my ethernet speeds are almost exactly the same as wifi. So far it's taken me ~16hrs to transfer the 2TB from my old NAS to the new one (and there's still a couple hours to go)
As an experiment, I copied a music folder of around 150GB from my WD to a external portable drive connected to my laptop. I was averageing around 65MB/s transfer. Then I connected the portable drive directly to the QNAP and copied the file that way at ~70MB. I think that pretty much rules out a hardware issue with the QNAP.

I'm thinking there has to be something in the network config that is causing the bottleneck, but I'm not nearly smart enough to brain this out on my own.
Can anybody offer up some tips on where to start?

 

@Token CDN as far as I read, CIFS is a subset of SMB1. I have no experience with QNAP and other prebuilt NAS, only with DIY ones - thus sadly cannot help you pinpoint the problem in its configuration. Good luck, hopefully someone familiar with QTS will chime in.

Try enabling Jumbo Frames if they are disabled, maybe? This guide shows how.

 

I have a few questions here.
Where is the NAS located in a cool or hot environment. Facing Sun or not? What is it attached to? Too many unknown here. How stable is the fixture it sits on or mounted to? Dusty or Clean environment?

 

The NAS sits in my living room, literally right next to my router. Temps: average, No: direct sun. The router and NAS are both sitting on an end table, and I'd like to think my house is just as clean as anybody else's.

I think I've pretty much gotten it running the best it'll get.
I have everything set to CIFS, SMB2 or higher. I was going to use NFS for my DAPhile (linux) server but the fact that NFS on the QNAP doesn't require a password or anything kind of squashed that idea. Speaking of squash: what do the squash/nosquash/etc options for NFS mean? I Googled it, but it still made no sense to me.
I traced to biggest slow down in my transfer rate to using smb encryption. Using it drops my transfer speeds by at least half. I was expecting a slowdown - QNAP even mentions it - but not quite that much.
Now my write speeds average high 30 - low 40MBps on wifi.

re Jumbo Frames: The QNAP defaults to 1500. I tried changing it to 9000 and it noticeably slowed things down. I don't know why it slowed down, but I'm happy with the default setting.