Our home network has had a workhorse (over 1,300 days continuous uptime and counting) Thecus N2100 YES Box 2-bay NAS running since 2006. Problem is, it's running two 320GB drives using RAID 1 - so total usable capacity is only 320GB (you lose one drive to RAID mirroring). That was fine in 2006 when it stored our iTunes library and various other miscellaneous files, but today with audio AND video streaming content and an ever growing digital picture library, it simply ran out of capacity. With the latest (beta) firmware - several years old now - I could have upgraded it to 2TB with two new drives, but in the end it's still 9 years old.
Another issue is that ever since OS X Mountain Lion, transfer speeds to my various Macs have been terrible. Even with an all GigE path it would only write files at around 3 to 4 MB/s. Windows PCs had a higher write speed, but not much better. Transferring large video rips or Operating System .iso images took forever.
Last week Newegg had a great "flash" deal on the Seagate STCU100 4-bay NAS. I bought that with four 4TB Seagate NAS HDDs (ST4000VN000). One of the main reasons I bought this NAS (beside the price) was that it has two GigE ports that can be aggregated for load balancing (assuming the switch ports you connect them to can also be trunked) - more on that later.
Below are my setup process notes:
- Since I bought the NAS "diskless", the manual says to connect the LAN port(s) - I connected both to a Netgear GS724T switch) - then boot it with no drives installed. After fully booted add drives (with power on), one by one from left to right. No issues there - Drive and Power LEDs acted as they should.
- First used my Mac Mini (OS X 10.10.4). Tried "discover.seagate.com" to find NAS - no go. Installed Seagate Network Assistant - also didn't find the NAS on the network. Tried a Windows VM (using Parallels) and it found the NAS (what?!?). So I used an old Windows 7 Desktop machine to do initial setup. Note: after a restart of the Mac Mini, it too was able to access the NAS.
- Specific initial/final config items (IPs, MAC addresses, etc) are kept in a OneNote Notebook. Don't need to clutter this post with it.
- Default setup when drives were added (no other intervention on my part) was a four disk SimplyRAID volume. After more than a day of building that volume, I changed it to a straight RAID 5 volume since it yields the same storage capacity as SimplyRAID (12TB), but is supposed to allow faster transfer speeds. Note: it took over 24 hours to rebuild the RAID volume.
- Upon first powerup the NAS updated its firmware to V4.0.15.0 (2015-04-13)
- I gave the administrator account a username and password, set the correct timezone and workgroup name.
- Disabled DHCP for the LAN ports and manually gave them IPs.
- Used Link Aggregation to bond the network ports together. See the Seagate online manual for how to do this. The bonded link uses the IP of the LAN1 port and the Network Status (from the web mgmt. tool) shows a green light and new speed as 2Gb/s.
Now, onto the Netgear GS724T managed switch...
Since I received the switch as a gift a few years back, I'd been using it as simply a dumb switch, never tried to log into it to do anything. Most I'd done with it was swapped out the rattling fan for a quieter one and reset the unit to factory defaults.
Could not see the switch at first on the network using my Mac (probably my mistake - I needed to use a network tool to find out what DHCP address it was assigned) so I used the old Windows 7 PC again and loaded the Netgear "Smartwizard Discovery" tool. Using that tool I was able to find the switch and reconfigure its IP to a static address on my network.
From there it was pretty simple to log into the web interface, went to the trunking menu and checked the boxes for the two ports the NAS is plugged into. You need to make sure the two ports are in the same VLAN group to be able to trunk them.
Exited out of the web interface and everything seems to be working fine.
My only regret is that I didn't do any read/write speed benchmarks on the NAS "before and after" port trunking to see if/how much of a difference it made.
I can tell you that I can write large files to the NAS from my Mac at around 40MB/s - a 10x improvement over the old Thecus NAS!
Before I totally decommission the old Thecus I'm awaiting arrival of a 6TB USB 3.0 external drive to be able to do scheduled backups of the NAS - remember - RAID IS NOT A BACKUP SOLUTION. Yes - the 6TB external drive won't be enough to back up a full 12TB NAS, but I think it's going to take a while to get the NAS more than half full! If there are any issues of note when setting up the backup hardware/software, I'll edit this post.
