It is sort of a good deal, but the cardreader is slow. You can get the same GB/$ with the 512GB (if you get a "650GB", i.e., 605GiB). The 150GB are also reasonably priced since they are actually 150GiB, rather than 140GiB. The 325GB version is actually 302GiB as expected. I have 1937GB of the Delkin Blacks now including the 325 and just have to stop buying. I prefer the 325 and 256 as a practical size in the R5 and Z9.
I know little to nothing about a NAS, but I have too many external drives, (at least 12) so I'm going to order one of these.
Looking at this item on B&H, is there anything else that I will need to set this up with my Mac Studio?
davev wrote:
I know little to nothing about a NAS, but I have too many external drives, (at least 12) so I'm going to order one of these.
Looking at this item on B&H, is there anything else that I will need to set this up with my Mac Studio?
I recommend the an internal m.2 drive for cache to increase read speed, and a 10gb network card. Makes it much faster.
I have this exact drive and size and use it for video and photo. It can get a bit loud compared to regular external drives so keep that in mind, thankfully because you can run it through your network you can move it away from your desktop without issue.
Geoff CB wrote:
I recommend the an internal m.2 drive for cache to increase read speed, and a 10gb network card. Makes it much faster.
I have this exact drive and size and use it for video and photo. It can get a bit loud compared to regular external drives so keep that in mind, thankfully because you can run it through your network you can move it away from your desktop without issue.
My plan is to use this in a raid for storage, probably raid 5 and just save a copy of the files on the 12 external drives.
I think that should give me triple redundancy, if I'm thinking right, and then the NAS, for the most part, will only be running
when I'm copying files to it, and occasionally when I'm looking though my older photos.
Definitely get m.2 cache drive. Go raid 6 you want spares, raid 5 rebuild almost guaranteed to fail on large drive capacities. Depending on how much storage you need I’d recommend either a second nas somewhere else or cloud storage.
You can get 10 tb for 49.95/month from google drive and most nas have a drive auto sync feature.
Thanks for the advice guys.
I can see this isn't going to be a plug and play type of thing.
I'll have to try to learn what I'm doing, before I actually do anything.
Raid 6 would still give me 64tb of storage, that should be enough for years to come, so I'll study up on that more.
As for the cashe, I don't see how that is going to help much, this will be for mass storage, not everyday access.
Maybe I'm wrong ... more studying.
Anyway, thanks for the info and direction of things to look into.
davev wrote:
Thanks for the advice guys.
I can see this isn't going to be a plug and play type of thing.
I'll have to try to learn what I'm doing, before I actually do anything.
Raid 6 would still give me 64tb of storage, that should be enough for years to come, so I'll study up on that more.
As for the cashe, I don't see how that is going to help much, this will be for mass storage, not everyday access.
Maybe I'm wrong ... more studying.
Anyway, thanks for the info and direction of things to look into.
I have many NAS (QNAP and Synology) including four that have 10Gb ports (typically SPF+, but 10GbE would be correct for the MACs). The closest one I have to the DS1621+ is an 8-bay QNAP with the same CPU and 18TB drives. I tend to prefer RAID-Z2 (RAID 6) for 8 bays and RAID-Z1 (RAID 5) for 5 and fewer. On principle I prefer ZFS (QNAP) to Btrfs (Synology), though both are COW and better for data integrity than EXT4, which is the default and certainly fine for many users. The ZFS and Btrfs do exact a performance penalty.
You probably won't see a lot of benefit in SSD caching for large (photo and video) files and small numbers of concurrent users. In some cases the SSD will be bypassed for large files, but check the documentation. That bargain Synology deal has only 4GB of RAM, which impacts performance and in some cases limits volume sizes and other functionality. One of the benefits of the embedded Ryzen CPUs is that they support ECC RAM. I suggest 16GB or the max of 32GB.
davev wrote:
Thanks for the advice guys.
I can see this isn't going to be a plug and play type of thing.
I'll have to try to learn what I'm doing, before I actually do anything.
Raid 6 would still give me 64tb of storage, that should be enough for years to come, so I'll study up on that more.
As for the cashe, I don't see how that is going to help much, this will be for mass storage, not everyday access.
Maybe I'm wrong ... more studying.
Anyway, thanks for the info and direction of things to look into.
If you're not planning to edit off of it, you can probably get away without the cache.
anguyenre wrote:
As someone who joined the hobby post-Black Friday... Are there any big sales that come within the first half of the year?
Sony recently introduced the a7Rv, so the prior two versions are available new or used for a song. The Riii is excellent. Personally, I think the Riv was a step sideways and not up. More pixels but worse diffraction performance. Sony rather regularly has $100-200 off various lenses.
In my opinion, the Black Friday offerings were not all that different from what you can get now or previously.
Remember, acquiring camera gear should be a marathon and not a sprint. The Buy & Sell forum here is also a great place to get good used gear.
anguyenre wrote:
As someone who joined the hobby post-Black Friday... Are there any big sales that come within the first half of the year?
Depending on the manufacturer there are often similar discounts other times during the year, Nikon, for instance, usually has spring discounts that are similar to their fall discounts and then another round in summer. You can use a price tracker like camelcamelcamel to view the price history of a particular manufacturer to get an idea of the typical schedule for their sales.
anguyenre wrote:
As someone who joined the hobby post-Black Friday... Are there any big sales that come within the first half of the year?
If applicable, for the system(s) that you use, at least some of the Camera Quest dot com promotional pricing, that was active during the Black Friday time frame, is still in effect. I did not see a way to link to only the promotional pricing, so, check each system’s pricing.
