Stora Disk Upgrade: Success

I mentioned a week ago that I was debating what to do about my slightly too full network storage box, the netgear stora.  Well, I decided to go for the upgrade option rather than to replace the NAS with a new unit of greater capacity.  So, I popped off to my favourite online purveyor of digital wares and acquired 2 x 2TB caviar green western digital drives. I've been a fan of the WD drives now for many years.  I particularly like the way that WD has structured the product line into Green, Blue and Black tiers so its easy to select the right drive for the job; with the black series being persistently close to the top of the performance charts and the green drives being at the bottom end of the price charts.  I went for the low cost, low performance end because the limiting factor on NAS boxes isn't the hard drive, its the network speed, so anything with greater performance is simply a waste of money.




It's worth me just mentioning quickly the Stora's architecture.  It's a 2 hard drive NAS unit that provides digital storage for users on the network.  It can act as a DLNA server allowing music, pictures and videos to be streamed over the network to games consoles and other computers.  It is compatible with Apple products supporting an itunes interface, and provides shared network folders for windows or linux computers to access.  The drives can be logically arranged in one of two formats; either mirrored so that all data is duplicated on both drives offering maximum redundancy or striped so that storage capacity is maximised as the full capacity of both discs is available to the user, but offers no redundancy.  I have mine in the mirrored format.  There are three lights on the front of the unit, the first is a power light, the second for hard drive 1 status and the third for hard drive 2 status; green for good and amber for a problem.

With both drives containing all data it makes the upgrade a lot simpler.  In theory, I don't have to copy all the data to another drive as the Stora is designed to allow a failed disc to be replaced with a new one.  I seriously considered copying all the data to a 2nd location but decided that as both discs in the Stora had an identical copy of my data on them I already had a high degree of redundancy.  If I encountered any problems, I could always put the removed drive back in to recover.

 So, first I powered off the system.  It is designed to allow hot-swapping of drives, but I decided the likelihood of damaging a drive whilst the heads were still spinning was a little too high for my liking.  I removed the first drive, replaced it with the first new 2TB, and turned the unit back on.  As expected, one of the little drive lights was amber indicating a problem with the new disk.  A quick trip into the unit's management web page and it reported the problem that disk 1 was not ready, had detected the new drive and asked what to do.  I told it to include the new drive into the array.  The unit then formatted the new disk and copied all the data from the original disk onto the new disk.  This was a surprisingly quick process and took a little under 2 hours.

 

Once complete, I checked the unit was functioning and then powered it off again.  Removed the last original disk and replaced it with the new 2TB disk and powered the unit on again.  As before, it detected the new disk but needed to know what to do with it.  Another trip to the management web page and I added the new disk to the array and the formatting and data copying commenced again.  2 hours later this process finished.  This was when I realised that although the new drives were working fine and had been recognised by the unit, the partition tables had also been copied allowing only the original 1TB of space to be available.  The only way I was able to make the full 2TB available was to copy all my data to the removed drives by putting them in my desktop computer and to then reformat the entire Stora.  This last step was somewhat annoying, but I now have a 2TB unit with plenty of space on it.  

It is worth mentioning that the Stora is designed to be easy to use, so there are no disk partitioning options at all.  The only option is to have either a mirrored or striped configuration.  All capacity on the drives will be used.  In mirrored mode, the maximum capacity is the size of the smaller drive.  

I've yet to hear whether there is any potential to expand this unit further, but suspect that as the hardware is a few years old now, 2TB is probably the maximum disk size this unit can accommodate.  For me, this is more than enough for the next year or so, and after that I will start looking at systems with space for more than 2 disks.  Currently, QNAP is my favourite, but let's see what comes out in the next year.

Time to Byte

I've been into computers ever since I was a kid, all-in-all that's almost 30 years ago.  Wow, blimey, that's a long time, and all this time I've quietly sat by watching the technological world do its thing.  I've helped the odd friend or family member in need along the way.  Well, quite a lot more than a few, but hey, who's counting.

I'm an engineer, and in true engineering style I believe that things shouldn't just 'be' instead they should 'be useful'.  As such, I love the usefulness of computers, the systems that are used to connect them together, the plethora of protocols that can be used and services that can be run. 

Never before has the internet been such a wondrous place, so many devices, so much software, so much potential and enthusiasm to use it, and now it needs a hand in the right direction.  Does that sound a bit stuck up?  Well, yes, you are right, it does, most people know more than enough about computers and the internet to get by.  The problem as I see it is that there is a lot of good common sense out there, but not that much good practice.  Everyone knows it, but everyone forgets from time to time to apply those techniques that keep them, their families and their computers safe.

With all this wonderfulness comes the bad side, having every computer able to talk to every other computer brings with it problems.  People who want to steal, people who want to destroy, people who want to deface.  I don't like those people and want to help others to avoid them. 

So I decided it was time, and I was ready, to publish my own internet security website.  A place where I could have a free no-nonsense guide for fellow webscape dwellers to learn.  You may have noticed that this isn't my website.  When I started to sketch out what the site would look like I came up with this:

That took me about 20 minutes to do, is by no means complete and the first 10 of those minutes were spent finding a mind mapping tool I liked.  That short exercise made me realise that I have a lot of content to produce before I can even contemplate getting a site up and running.   So here was the inspiration for Dave Bytes, a place where I can start to blog about internet and computer security whilst slowly building the website in the background.

To Stora or not to Stora

About a year ago, I bought a Netgear Stora, and it has been one of the best purchases I have made.  For the uninitiated it looks like this:

Not much to look at is it?  Well, its what's on the inside that counts.  This little beauty connects to my home network and gives me 1TB of network storage.  That's a good start, but what's really cool about it is that I can access it from anywhere in the world, it acts as an itunes server, it lets me stream movies, audio and pictures to other devices in my home, like my PS3.  Oh, and if the hard drive fails, there is a spare one in there with everything backed up to it.  So, I like it, and so what, well, did I mention, it was pretty cheap too.  If you bought one today the chassis would cost about £70 and disks are £40 each.

Anyway, that's enough of the preamble, the problem I have is that it is now full.  Yup, you heard right, in the space of 12 months I've stuffed the little thing full of movies, tv series, music, and pictures (including a few too many uncompressed SLR piccies too from various holidays).  So what to do?  Well, I could delete some stuff, I could archive it off the network onto other computers or external hard drives, or I could even delete some of the lesser used content.  I believe that a well organised network is going to be more sustainable and reliable than a disorganised one and so to fragment my data doesn't sound like a great idea.  Its time to get more storage and more storage on the network.  Hmmm, this sounds like it might cost.

As a true engineer, its time to list my options:

• Upgrade existing disks (put larger ones in)
• Pro's - Cheap ~£60 per 2TB drive
• Cons - Compatibility risk, not straight forward data migration
• Buy new NAS unit
• Pros - Easy data migration, loads to choose from, expandable
• Cons - More expensive, starting at £280 for a chassis then £60 per disk
• Do nothing
• Pros - cheap, low labour cost
• Cons - still have nowhere to store data, unit becomes full, unreliable

There are some really nice new units out at the moment, my personal favourite is the QNAP:

Its not as cheap as the Stora, £280 for the box and £60 per drive.  It holds up to 4 drives, so that comes in at £520 for what is close to 6TB of storage.  In my experience, I have been doubling the volume of data every year, so this should give me about 2.5 years worth of use.  Here is where the problem lies.  Technology moves on at a startling rate, by the time I fill this up it will be obsolete, spare drives will no longer be available and it will have cost £200/yr.  As I can get another year's worth of use out of the Stora for £120 quid, I think I'll go for the upgrade option, slightly more fiddly but in a years time NAS' will be more prevalent in the home user market and hopefully they will be cheaper.  Shame really, I was looking forward to getting a new toy ;)