readynas drive failure - replaced and redundant!

[mattkime]

prev thread - http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?1...80,1076506

I decided to turn off energy saver features to prevent drive spin down. the raid continued working at full speed although i turned off my automated backups to prevent unnecessary wear.

yesterday i received a replacement drive. a seagate 1.5TB drive died but i replaced it with a 2TB western digital, at least until the replacement seagate arrives. (its under warranty) plug it in, wait 3-4 hours for the resync to complete and everything is as good as new.

I was considering using an additional drive as an extra parity drive or a hot spare. unfortunately this is not supported by XRAID2. XRAID2 works more like a drobo - automatically making decisions about redundancy and expansion. the readynas does support raid 6 and hot spares but not along side expandable volumes.

i ended up taking another look at the drobo line. the drobo s supports dual parity drives. the readynas solutions go at a bit of a premium but i think its worth it. only the entry level drobo has a clear price / performance advantage although the readynas nv+ is a more robust device at the cost of speed.

in the end, its pretty awesome to be able to survive a drive failure for such a reasonable price.

[DharmaDog]

Agreed.

I'm pretty happy with the LaCie Network Space Max I picked up last week. It's only a 2 drive unit, and the drives are not readily accessible. You have to take the outer skin of the unit off to access the drives (not that hard to do.)

It's my first time using RAID 1. I'm much more used to RAID 5 and 6, and would prefer them but for the added cost of the chassis which support that.

It streams beautifully to my Apple TVs, and the built-in Bit Torrent client is awesome. Haven't gotten around to setting up remote access for it yet. It also supports Time Machine, which I also have not set up yet. I need to rethink my backup strategy and incorporate the NAS, Time Machine and full backups into the plan. I'll probably plug an older USB2 drive into the NAS and backup the mirror to that. But the NAS will also be a Time Machine receptacle. It does have a DLNA server, but I don't have an XBox or PS3 to use it with.

So far I'm loving my first home NAS unit. And the price was right!

[Wailer]

Do either of you know how many watts those actually use?

I try to be frugal with energy. When I get into my 2nd tier of electricity usage (above 800kWH a month I think), my rate jumps for $.125 kWH to $0.165 kWH. Each watt costs me $1.50/year.

Not terribly expensive, but 60-watt server run continuously would cost $90/yr in electricity plus additional cooling.

Right now I use an 8GB flash drive connected to the usb port of my router. It consumes an additional .5W but I can only get about 3 MBps which is a limitation of the USB port. It's great for small files but all my mkv, avi and dvd media is still streamed from my imac to my media player. My imac is usually on anyway and I don't notice any performance issues while it's serving files but an NAS might be nice if I can run it cheaply.

[DharmaDog]

Not sure how much power they use. I thought saw that information somewhere, but I can't find it in the user manual or the product data sheet. But it must consume less than your iMac. So it may save you electricity by allowing you turn off your iMac more frequently.

I'll see if I can put my kill-a-watt on it later and find out.

I recently reduced my home's electricity use by ~10%, and don't want to drive it back up by adding a bunch of thirsty devices.

[Wailer]

I'd appreciate that DharmaDog. Usually the rated amperage is very different than what you see in actual usage.

My imac draws about 45 watts when idle. Not bad but the mini I had drew around 18.

I know it's a PITA to hook up a kill-a-watt to something that is always on because you'll have to shut it down twice. So if you happen to do it, I'll always be interested in the results.

[mattkime]

http://www.readynas.com/?p=711

says that it takes 41-45W spun down (sleeping) and up to 74W of power in usage with data access.

at your electricity costs it would cost me about $60/yr. since its usually spun down.

I don't like the idea of the extra cost either but its cheap if i consider the price of my time and the cost of lost data.

[DharmaDog]

The LaCie Network Space Max 4TB:

On, Idle: ~14 watts
Sustained read/write: ~16 watts

My projected annual electricity cost is between $16-17.

It also has an 'Eco' mode and a deep sleep mode. I did not test these.

[Wailer]

Those are good numbers. Thanks.