NAS on the Way

I've been running a Zyxel NSA320, a two-bay NAS, for about a year now. I've been going slowly into the world of NAS, partly because I wasn't sure how it would fit into my workflow. I chose the Zyxel based on cost. At first I installed a single 500GB drive I had laying around. Once that filled up, I moved to a 3TB WD Red drive. After a while I was noticing I was keeping somewhat important stuff on the NAS, so I decided to add a second 3TB drive and migrate to a RAID 1. All of the migration was seamless. I've been running that RAID 1 setup for about six months now.

Now I'm taking the next step and replacing this NAS with a more capable device. This step is meant to replace a handful of DAS devices, so I'm going to put virtually all of my important info on the NAS, including photos, videos, and personal documents. To that end, I decided on a 4-bay NAS, thinking that RAID 5 would give me the best balance of capacity, performance, and redundancy. I'm going to reuse the 3TB drives I have.

Here are the factors that went into deciding on a solution.

Expandability

One of the advantages of NAS is the way it abstracts the notion of drives from storage. In the long term, I want to be able to expand my volume size. In the short term, I need to be able to go from a single disk, to a two disk mirror, to a three disk RAID 5. This is necessary to migrate my data from a two-drive mirror to a three drive RAID 5 by adding only one drive total, and directly transferring from one device to another (i.e., not backing everything up to a third device and using that to transfer). Most NASes do this with aplomb; it's really their bread-and-butter. A few lackluster consumer models fail in this regard, which is a deal-killer.

Performance

I'm giving up on my DAS drives, partly because of clutter: more Firewire, USB, and power cables than I want to deal with. I don't want this to feel like a big step down in performance. I need Lightroom, iTunes, Photos, etc., to access data on the NAS without feeling slow.

Backup

I'm a big believer of off-site backup. For homes and home offices, that means some cloud service. I need a way to backup the data on the NAS to the cloud. And I don't mean a half-measure like mount the NAS on a Mac and run Arq. I love Arq, but the NAS should have an integrated solution.

Spouse Friendly

The easier it is for my non-technical family members to use, the better. Not specific bullet points on this score.

Other lesser important factors:

• Media streaming. A bonus. I'm intrigued by the Synology play series. But not a deciding factor.
• HDMI. It's going under my desk, not in my TV cabinet. Not needed.
• Pretty much any feature not related to serving files. No, I will not be running a blog, a wiki, or a forum on my NAS.
• Time Machine. We're a Mac house, so I wish I could count on this. This is the one thing the Zyxel flat-out failed at. After several weeks the backup was inexplicably corrupt. Hopefully a quality NAS will be more reliable, but I'm not counting on it. It's really Apple’s issue. Nothing outside a Time Capsule or OS X Server is supported, and I'm not going either those routes.

So what did I choose? For that, dear reader, you'll have to come back next time. I'll reveal my choice and the rationale. The good news is that there are lots of good choices. The bad news is there isn't one obvious choice, or a singe standout vendor to make the decision easier.

Bell Labs Innovation

From Trust Me I'm a Scientist. The article is about audio sampling rates, but this passage stood out.

The mid-20th century was a heady time at Bell Laboratories. Just before its closing, it employed upward of 25,000 people, dedicated entirely to research and development.

Their innovations were enormous ones, and they lie at the root of the very device you are reading this on: The transistor, the laser, semi-conduction, the solar cell, television, C++ programming, the fax machine, and by the 1960s, the goddamn video phone.

For the sake of contrast, Google, one of our greatest innovators of today, employs roughly 50,000 people across all of its departments, and it’s greatest offerings have been, well… a slightly improved version of the fax machine and the videophone.

This passage is perhaps too dismissive of Google, but it is amazing how one of the technological powerhouses of our era pales in the face of Bell Labs.

Math & Code in Blogger

I use Blogger because of its simplicity and general lack of features. I’ve installed WordPress, and for me it’s a quagmire of tinkering and playing with plugins and themes, all in avoidance of writing. Blogger’s lack of features is itself a feature in the same way that full-screen text editors are a feature: it blocks out lots of potential time wasters.

Having said that, there are a few features I miss on Blogger, namely syntax highlighting and math formatting. Luckily there are a couple of easy javascript libraries that can do the job.

Syntax Highlighting with Google Code Prettify

Google has a javascript library for code syntax. It’s pretty basic in its formatting options, but good enough for me. Most importantly, installation is simple. I simply point to a javascript library hosted by google. Installation requires one line in the template:

<script src='https://google-code-prettify.googlecode.com/svn/loader/run_prettify.js'/>

This add a css class, prettyprint. Use it in a pre tag for a code block. This HTML code:

<pre class="prettyprint">
int main(argc, argv[]) {
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
    return 0;
}
</pre>

is formatted like this:

int main(argc, argv[]) {
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
    return 0;
}

Tag inline code with <code> so that <code class="prettyprint">int i = 0;</code> becomes int i = 0;

Most "normal" (i.e., C-like) languages are recognized with the default. If you like oddball languages, like I do, you might need to specify your language. For example, I specify Scheme when I import the javascript like this:

<script src='https://google-code-prettify.googlecode.com/svn/loader/run_prettify.js?lang=scm'/>

and then again specify the language in side the class

<code class="pretty-print lang-scm">
(define (area-of-disk r) 
  (* 3.14 (* r r)))
</code>

Becomes

(define (area-of-disk r) 
  (* 3.14 (* r r)))

I stick with the default style, which is pretty subtle. If you like more emphatic highlighting, the README has instructions of changing themes and other options like line numbering. It also contains the definitive language list.

Math Formatting with MathJax

I don't do a lot of math, but when I do it's important to me that the notation is clear.MathJax is a javascript library to format math. If you use their CDN, installation is one line in the Blogger template:

<script src='//cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML' type='text/javascript' />

Equations are delimited with \[ \]. Now by entering this:

∖[ x = ∖frac{-b ∖pm ∖sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}} {2a} ∖]

You'll get this:

\[ x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}} {2a} \]

Inline latex is delimited with \( \) so that ∖(e = mc^2 ∖) becomes \( e= mc^2 \).

I like working with MathJax so much, it makes me want to include more posts with math.

Drawbacks

One drawback of this method is that you're entering a lot raw HTML in <code> and <pre> tags. It would be nice

Another drawback is that every page is loading the CSS and JavaScript for code and math on every page, regardless of whether there's any need for it or not.

Finally, while MathJax is well maintained, Google Code Prettify is a bit less active. As I write this, the last commit to the subversion repository was Mon, 03 Mar 2014. I won't be holding my breath for a Swift lexer.