Network and Storage Upgrades

Holly and I have been married since August 2014. But we have not yet had a chance to set up a central storage location. We finally did so! Or as Holly has been putting it: "We're finally married!"

We were long not happy with Comcast as our internet service provider (ISP) and Starry was soon going to become an available ISP for our apartment. We decided that we would do some network upgrades and make ourselves not dependent on the router and access point (usually an all-in-one router / access point / modem from the ISP). I had done some research and elected to build out on devices that would be completely agnostic of our ISP.

As is normal for me, I did a lot of research. I decided to go with components that provide a nice ecosystem for adding future complexity and something not quite consumer nor enterprise but something at a nice "prosumer" level.

The primary components I decided on were: 1) Ubiquiti Networks ER-X EdgeRouter X; 2) Ubiquiti Networks US-8-60W UniFi 8-Port Gigabit PoE Compliant Managed Switch; and 3) Ubiquiti Networks UAP-AC-LR-US 802.11ac Long Range Access Point.

My research was only so good though. Turns out that Starry as a ISP does not play nice with you using your own device as a DNS so the Ubiquiti Networks ER-X EdgeRouter X wound up being something we do not use.

The access point is nice in that it is a power over Ethernet (PoE) device and can be future upgraded, swapped out, for another access point that is WiFi6 compliant in the future. And the switch has been great, though, we may be getting nearly saturated on ports at this point and may expand in the not to distant future.

We also measured our cable runs, got a bit of extra, and used a combination of Kramer CAT6a HDBaseT Cables and a C2G 3' Cat6A Snagless Shielded (STP) Network Patch Cable (Blue). We chose these because they are well shielded and should provide headroom to future increases in our network switch and device speeds up to 10 Gbps.

The network upgrades were circa April 2020.

In January 2021 we finally took steps to have a shared storage solution. Again, a lot of research. We looked at building our own solution as well as multiple manufacturer built solutions from Synology, QNAP, and TrueNAS.

Our main criteria were:

1. Needed to act as central storage.
2. Needed to host a virtual machine that either of us could access and would connect with out Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 (older version, not the newer one).
3. Needed to play nice in backing up to a local NAS.
4. Needed to be able to backup to a cloud backup.
5. Power draw of the unit and expected thermal output. 

 We were also very much looking to implement a 3-2-1 backup strategy which is typically stated as: 3 copies of data on at least 2 types of media with at least 1 copy being remote. (We do not strictly follow this in the 2 types of media where one is tape sense of the strategy.)

An additional consideration is eventually we plan to set up a bit of a home lab for various projects and testing and if it was robust enough for this, great.

We wound up choosing the QNAP TS-h886 as our device. For such a mission critical purpose we decided not build our own as we did not want the hassle and headache of building and maintaining it. We also did a lot of research regarding being able to backup to our old Seagate 2-Bay NAS (no longer available) and we found that QNAP provided reasonable documentation and supportive user reviews.

The TrueNAS solution was likely going to need significant tinkering. And everything we could find on Synology indicated that it is super user friendly if trying to push to another Synology device but no good indication showing support of pushing to devices by other manufacturers, at least not easily.

Also, for the price point of the primary device QNAP offered the better processor, RAM, and future upgrade and expansion slots. Currently it has 16 GB of ECC UDIMM RAM.

For our implementation we bought 4x Seagate IronWolf 6TB 5400RPM SATA III 6Gb/s 3.5" Internal NAS Hard Drives. We ran a complete scan on each. Currently we are using 3x of these in a RAID 5 configuration and have the 4th as a cold storage spare in case one of the drives fails.

We also picked up a single Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD 3-bit MLC V-NAND SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5" Internal Solid State Drive as our VM host drive to run our Windows 10 VM on. Maybe in the future we will mirror this.

In terms of future expand-ability of the QNAP device we have two unused NVMe SSD slots. We may at some point use one or both of these for write caching to increase read and write speeds. There are also two available PCIe slots for future add-on cards. We have one spare 2.5" SSD bay and three spare 3.25" HDD / SSD bays. Lastly it can support up to 128 GB of RAM. So we have a lot of overhead available to us.

For our current configuration we have the following:

• Shared network storage is hosted on the QNAP and Holly and I each map to it.
• The QNAP twice daily performs a one way sync of changed files to the Seagate 2-Bay NAS.
• The Seagate 2-Bay NAS uses 2x 4 TB Seagate NAS HDDs configured in RAID 1.
• The QNAP twice daily performs a one way sync of changed files to a cloud backup on Backblaze.
  

 So far we are really happy with this setup. And we are only starting to explore its capabilities.

 Feel free and comment if you have any questions.