Earlier this summer, I bought myself a new NAS. I’d lost faith in my old Netgear ReadyNAS devices a while ago, after a failure took out both halves of a RAID 1 mirror and I lost all the data on one of them. That actually taught me two important lessons:

1. Data doesn’t exist unless it’s backed up in at least two places.
2. RAID 1 is not suitable for fault-tolerant backups.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, my new model is to get all of the data into one place, then sync/archive as appropriate to the cloud. Anything on any other PCs, external disks, etc. should be considered transient.

For the device itself, it seems that there are only really two vendors to consider – QNAP or Synology (maybe a Drobo). I chose Synology – and elected to go with a 4-bay model, picking up a Synology Diskstation DS916+ (8GB) and kitting it out with 4 Hitachi (HGST) Deskstar NAS drives.

Look what arrived yesterday (instead of next Monday) :-) @spandotcom under-promised and over-delivered. Thanks guys! pic.twitter.com/ovkaX3SIQd

— Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) July 14, 2016

Unfortunately, I had a little hiccup in that I’d ordered the device pre-configured. The weight of the disks was clearly too much for the plastic drive carriers to cope with but, once again, span.com sorted things out for me and I soon had a replacement in my possession.

Up and running now with replacement NAS – guess shipping a unit with drives pre-installed was too much to handle https://t.co/bLPoPIj28E

— Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) July 17, 2016

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been building up what I’m doing with the Diskstation: providing home drives for the family; syncing all of my cloud storage; acting as a VPN endpoint; providing DHCP and DNS services; running anti-virus checks; and backing up key files to Microsoft Azure.

This last workload is worthy of discussion, as it took me a couple of weeks to push my data to the cloud. Setup was fairly straightforward, following Paris Polyzos (@ppolyzos)’s advice to backup Synology NAS data in Microsoft Azure Cool Storage but the volume of data and the network it had to traverse was more problematic.

Initially I had issues with timeouts due to a TP-Link HomeplugAV (powerline Ethernet) device between the ISP router and the DNS server that kept failing. I worked around that by moving DNS onto the NAS, and physically locating the NAS next to the router (bypassing the problematic section of network). Then it was just a case of waiting for my abysmal home Internet connection to cope with multi-GB upstream transfers…

#Azure backup 2% complete after 4.5 hours… matches my calculations but so much for FTTC being fast! #UKBroadband pic.twitter.com/T9Zy2Cm5hO

— Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) August 14, 2016

I have no doubts that this NAS, albeit over-specified for a family (because I wanted an Intel-based model), is a great device but I did need to work around some issues with vibration noise. It’s also slightly frustrating that there is no integration between the DHCP and DNS services (I’ve been spoiled working with Windows Server…), the Security Advisor reports are a bit dramatic, and some of the Linux commands are missing – but I really haven’t found anything yet that’s a show-stopper.

Now I need to get back to consolidating data onto the device, and moving more of it into the cloud…