Not NAS

Facing the loss of archived data - the last week's post - I needed a quick decision on the alternative solution. The straightforward way would be to upgrade the old Networked Attached Storage (NAS) server. It clearly has been failing and despite a bunch of bulged capacitors in the power supply unit (PSU), replacing the PSU did not solve the problem. Of four disks one was declared dead almost immediately after start and a second one was being flagged as dead shortly after. I could stuff the old chassis with new disks, but two disks dying at the same time smells like the problem is elsewhere.

On top of that the software on the NAS has been no longer maintained (another civilization disease) and there have been issues using it with newer versions ow Windows (I think it was Windows 10 which officially declared the old SMB protocol fundamentally unsafe).

But another angle of the NAS story is also important. Historically the NAS server was the home multimedia server with stored music and archived videos. We don't use these anymore. It is now all Spotify and YouTube and all sorts of media streaming services. So I asked myself the question if a 24/7 running NAS server was really necessary. Especially as the 1Gbps LAN network I have has the same speed as my fiber Internet connection. And Apple/Google TV boxes are attached to just about every screen or projector at home.

That led me to resort to a non-24/7 storage solution - a simple external (but still redundant) disk station. A quick research narrowed the choices to LaCie (a Seagate brand, following the 2021 acquisition). The difference between LaCie and other options is mostly esthetics (they are pleasantly nicely designed) and support for both USB-C and Thunderbolt. The Thunderbolt option was especially appealing to me for a simple reason: the optical TB cables are slim and can be long (does anyone remember the ugliness of SCSI?).

The model I picked is called LaCie 2BIG Dock and has two 8TB drives, which can be configured in mirrored mode, giving 8TB of RAID-protected storage. The Thunderbolt interface shines, offering on average 300MB/s file copying throughput (clearly limited by the hard drive write speed). It is probably the most economic way of backing up data locally. It does not have the convenience of an always-on NAS server, but the reward is the write speed, at least 3x of what more advanced NAS systems connected over a 1Gbps Ethernet network offer.

The only part f the LaCie drive I don't like is the external power supply brick. But interestingly - as it draws only 30W - the LaCie can be powered by a USB-C cable configured to trigger 12V from a power supply. Standard cables deliver 3A (which works) but to have a bigger safety margin, I'm going to try it with a 5A cable (USB-C cables rated more than 3A must have e-marker chips in them; otherwise the power is limited to 3A only).