At the moment running 2.5" 500GB drive for OS Windows Server 2012 R2 + 3x old( circa 2003 so not very efficient) 250GB 3.5" drives in RAID 0 for testing purposes and power consumption is 47-48W at idle, 60W when running speedtest for disks using CrystalDiskMark and max I have seen when CPU is 100% load was 99W. More modern HDD's should be more efficient so I am hoping to see under 50W power consumption with 4x2TB drives.

The way I calculated 1W of power consumption equals to £0.768 per year running 24/7 with economy 7 tariff so going from 300W to 50W over 3 years is £576 saving for me and will pay for CPU upgrade to Xeon E3-1265L and RAM to 8GB with spare left.

Throw away any sub 500 Gb discs and replace with mirrored pair of SSD.

Very low power. Very quick access... Spinning spindles is getting to be a waste of money now unless they are multi TB.

Which model do you have and what did it cost you?

I do not remember exact models I had but first I had D-Link 2 bay NAS( about £50) which did about 30MB/s transfer speeds with2x2TB in RAID0, I felt this was not enough so went for Netgear 4 bay(over £100) which only did 20MB/s so I scrapped that (well sold on E-bay to honest) that and went for Dell server.

250GB drives are just for testing functionality before I take 2TB discs out of Dell server as the Dell is fully functioning for now while I test HP and make configueration decissions for it. I do Have SSD's in desktop and every laptop ranging from 100GB 1.8 drive to 500GB 2.5" but don't see it as necessary for server

I swapped the SSD out of my desktop - keep meaning to install the server OS on the old one and stick it in there. Main benefit is it's silent and doesn't need to spool up. The supplied HDD with the HP servers is a noisy little bugger!

I ran mine off a USB stick for a year with no issues, but got nervous about the amount of read/writes to it and took it out...

I'm sober now and it still confuses me all the technical stuff you guys are talking about.

I currently have a 8tb qnap 412 naz setup in raid 5 because when I read the setup prompts that seemed like the best compromise.

It gets used for time machine backups for MacBook Pro with 1tb drive and iMac also with 1tb

There is also all my photos backup on it and copy of entire music collection to serve sonos

What do you guys think would be best for the above, I would like some other means of storing photos and important documents but don't really fancy paying for it to be stored in the cloud, have a huge trust issue with the amount of data we freely give to others these days.

There's one other thing that bothers me, just recently one of the drives has reported minor errors but is still working, I dud some reading and it says not to change a drive that hasn't failed on a raid 5 setup because it may not rebuild because the disk was still in use, is that true?

That's quite an impressive setup!

Just quads though? Aren't you over-provisioning the available cores somewhat with 75 VMs? ... or does that include redundant VMs?

And wouldn't it be better to use Fibre Channel to the SAN to reduce the amount of network cables needed?

That's a hell of a lot of storage too! What sort of application is this lot running? And out of interest, do you virtualise your DCs or are they physical?

If the drives are of the same age/make/model and one of them is beginning to show signs of failing, if it were me, I'd consider replacing all 4 and switching to RAID10. You'll need 4 x 4TB in RAID 10 to get 8TB of storage.

Bloody Heck, you guys are up and about rather early for a Sunday :tuttut:
There was me thinking with two early door airport runs I was the only bloke up :D
And you are all talking really involved technical, thank heaven I have retired from all that malarkie :ROFL:
I'm just running a two bay Zyxel NAS with 2 x 2TB drives and hanging on the back a 4TB USB drive for backup.
This simple setup supports all the home machines, roughly

• on gigabyte ethernet:- one desktop, one printer, 2 x Sky boxes, 3 x Box Ones and one 55 inch TV (the house is fully wired)
• on wireless:- 3 x laptops, 2 x X Box 360s, 4 x i pads and 8 x phones (ooops, forgot the colour printer)

But then I started my home network before wireless was available.
My problem is the cost of coal to keep the fires burning for the steam generation.

So how would I go about doing that? Is there a way to clone the entire naz so it's a painless process.