Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m assembling a NAS(Network Attached Storage) system. Let’s get started!
These things don’t come cheap. Between the case and four large hard disks, the whole system costs as much as a decent computer. It’s also worth noting that this is the first new system I’ve covered on this blog, aside from Raspberry Pis or similarly powered units.
In a way, it was actually a small blessing that this aspect of the project was delayed. In the time since I started researching NAS and now, Western Digital was found to be selling some of their archive quality drives as SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) instead of PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording). This is bad because shingled drives are designed to overlap their magnetic tracks while writing so only the narrow read head can fit when the deed is done, and I intend to store more than just static data on here.
We bought four of the smallest non-shingled model. At seven Tb a pop, we should be able to dump all our existing data onto these things two or three times over should we see fit, but only after it’s set up, and that’s after reserving a full drive’s worth of data for parity.
Parity is a redundancy technique that provides some room for error. RAID 5 (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) does this by using a bit one one drive and adding all the bits in the same position on each of the other drives and ignoring all carries. It then distributes this parity data across all the drives, so the more drives in the array, the more efficient your data loss protection. If one drive is suddenly zapped out of [electronic] existence, you just need to replace it with another one of equal or greater storage capacity and the array can repair itself from there.
The NAS system we got was made by Synology –just to be clear, this is not a sponsorship, and I have never had a sponsorship– and I had some quality time with my father as we assembled it. Assembly wasn’t toolless, and the case was a little hard to get back on, but the photographic instructions were easy enough to understand, though they could have used to label their screws as being for either HDD or SSD.
Software wise… I’ll be spending another post setting things up, but I did take a self-guided tour of the place already. Synology has their own operating system called DMS (Disk Management System). I saw that and panicked. My shtick has been Linux, and at least trying to do it myself until stop learning and get frustrated. Long story short, I got bored and found myself reading the license agreement. I didn’t understand it all, but I found references to the GNU license in there.
According to one post on Redit I have since lost track of, people should be cautioned against toying around with different operating systems on this NAS solution because there’s a chance it could brick the system; I really don’t want that. Besides, it looks to me like DMS is built on at least the Linux kernel, and if that thread I found was to be trusted, it’s a stripped down version of Debian.
While writing this, I poked around in SSH and confirmed Linux, but determining parent distro is outside my abilities right now. It sure didn’t feel like a normal SSH experience. It dumped me straight into the root directory instead of a home folder –understandably without the disclaimer about free software and no warrenty– and when I got around to sudo whoami, it lectured me about the basics of superuser privileges, mirroring my earlier experiences in the graphical web interface.
From the moment I started installing the DMS operating system, I noticed how they somehow managed to design their user experience in such a way that anyone with basic computer literacy can use it, but they somehow managed to avoid insulting the intelligence of their power users. I didn’t need the utility they had to find the device’s local IP. I don’t need their online services to bypass port forwarding or their pictures and video galleries, but they’re there for people who want them.
My only substantial complaint so far is that the interface looks like it wants to be Windows, but clearly isn’t. The blue color scheme is there, but all the icons are off. I’m also constantly rummaging around through documentation for advanced features I don’t have a reason to know about yet, let alone disregard for the time being. I suppose I was a little miffed about GoldenOakLibrary being one character too long for the length cap at 15, but by removing a couple letters near the end, it’s still readable if you know what you’re looking at.
My big plans for this system at present are to make some sort of division between family photos, computer backups, and general storage. Once that’s done, we can finally start scanning, among other things.
Final Question: What systems have you used that don’t baby down their interfaces with scary warnings to the point of alienating power users who already knew what was going on?