Is the Grass Greener on the other Side? 3-Months Later

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
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The short answer is “no”.

I have spent a few months now living with just my QNAP.

I have not sold my three EX2 Ultras nor my three My Book Duos, my WD My Book Pro and my two 8TB single drive My Clouds. I’ve, however, acquired two more 4TB Passport for use as my Backup for my QNAP. I like the idea of having portable backups rather than using My Book Duos. I bought cases for the two 4TB Passports to throw into my desk drawer.

My QNAP is still stuck with mismatched drives; 2x10TB and 2x8TB drives. Luckily my buying OCD did not kick in even though the drives are mismatched in size as I am dead-locked with spending another thousand versus having balanced size drives.

However I have been constantly contemplating in ripping out my 2x8TB from my My Clouds to reclaim my 2x10TB drives for use in one of my EX2 but this is also deadlocked with my procrastination in having to rip out the 8TB from my My Clouds, rebuilding my Raid 6 (takes two weeks), and perhaps rebuild my My Clouds with 3TB drives. Also within this list of things to do is testing whether a single bay My Cloud might work with a 10TB drive, if anyone knows that it can, let me know and I’ll shorten my procrastination time.

The problems of the QNAP on waking up is about the same or perhaps worst than the My Cloud and EX2. The QNAP wakes up at least twice in the night at 2:00AM and 3:00AM doing cron work; eg. reclaiming deleted space from thin volumes.

During the day, it wakes up as frequently as it needs to annoy me. Whenever I start to think, hey it is nice and quiet, the QNAP whines up like a turbine engine, each whine is the individual hard drives turning on and the whole QNAP unit starts to gurgle like water going down a drain.

However, thankfully, it is not as annoying as the My Clouds which clicks and the EX2 which ticks like a clock, the QNAP gurgles at a deeper resonance that only marginally irritates me.

There is no doubt that the QNAP is the Mercedes Benz of the NAS world but the problem is at the end of the day, it is just another storage device no matter the fact that I’m using Raid 6 meaning that two hard drives can fail, if I simply drop the QNAP from the top of my shelf to the bottom shelf, it will still fail completely as though I have a single copy of my data.

Thus the caveat of all NAS is that you must have a backup. So I’m back to having a main copy of my data and one backup; except I’m out of pocket by a few thousand and no happier.

In fact I have exacerbated my original problem of having manually backup from one drive to another, to having to fit my backup on two passport drives and in the event that my QNAP fails, it takes about two weeks to rebuild a Raid 6 drive. In comparison, my backup 8TB My Cloud can immediately be used as the primary My Cloud and to create a new 8TB My Cloud, it takes 4 days for the file copy.

So there you have it. Unlike the other users who have gone to Synology or other NAS devices, and although QNAP is a fantastic blocky media center type device (10 years ago) at the moment I’m of the mindset of just saying “meh” to being on the other side.

If a 10TB drive works on the My Cloud gen 2 bay, let me know and I’ll spend the time building two and switching back to the My Cloud in a heartbeat.

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I still think a lot of these issues with automated multi-device fault tolerant backups could be accomplished on the stock MyCloud units easily enough with just another small host pulling some strings.

I recently purchased one of those silly little zsun card readers, for instance. After ditching the horror-show it was running by default for a nice openwrt install, it is basically a very tiny dongle sized linux host with a wifi connection. Assuming you have the MyCloud attached to a wireless AC enabled gigbit router, one could just plug the little zsun into the back of either the router, or the MyCloud, and it could do all the automated thingywhoozits you want, and it would not take up much space at all. I could easily configure it to do the remote rsync transfers between redundant hosts, and email or text me (SMS over internet relay) if it fails.

I am quite happy with my new EX2-Ultra I got from that closeout ebay sale. (thanks again for the heads up on that btw) The old mycloud gen 2 is being used for various fun network attached device experiments, and I am pleased. (The latest silly experiment was loading a vnc server so that I could run qemu, and run a retro netware installation in a VM on it-- just to see if I could. Hilariously enough, I could. Fun little things like that.)

Any NAS on the market is going to have the same basic bottlenecks in terms of how fast you can push and pull data in or out of it. (gigabit interface is only so fast. SMB is only so efficient. Etc.) Some might offer more fancy features like bonded ethernet, but that is quickly outside the consumer market. Being a satisfied prosumer means realizing what you are buying and why.

The MyCloud is a little annoying in some of the things it does (or tries to do), but for the most part it is a very solid offering in the consumer space, and does what it needs to do fairly reliably.

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Totally!! after all the My Clouds are just mini PC’s.

good job…

you are quite welcome on the heads up.

Well the thing is in today’s world we really don’t need most of the NAS functions that use to be the cat’s meow like VM, bittorrent, raid and so on. Some might want it and some might need it like running a web server, but for myself, I don’t have a need for it as I use a remote Mac Mini to do all my server type work including bit torrenting.

The QNAP is really just old school and like you say the speed limit is your gigabit network or even Wifi AC of which my iPhone/ipad/Apple TV is using, therefore there is no need to use Raid 10 or Raid 0, Even raid 6 is an overkill since I am wasting half of my storage on mirroring.

The bottom line is that I really don’t need a Mercedes QNAP and I really miss my old Miata My Cloud. The problem is though, I ran out of space on my 8TB My Cloud and it really isn’t that I need more room as I could easily delete a lot of unused files but I’m a packrat of miscellaneous data.

If I had a 10TB My Cloud… that would probably solve my problem of space.

The only problem today is that the My Cloud Personal has been discontinued which leads me back to probably staying with the QNAP for the next 4 years whether I like it or not.