Using a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device on a boat as your own personal Cloud.

Living on a self-sufficient boat

without giving up The Cloud?!

If you are at all like me, you've begun to rely more and more on one or more Cloud Services.  Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and many, many more basically all offer the same solution:

"You have digital things that are important to you; you pay us a small amount per month and we'll manage keeping it safe and protect you from hardware failures and data loss."

I firmly believe that hosted cloud storage is one of the great conveniences that just about anyone under the age of 70 should be using.  The solutions are downright cheap, given how much storage capacity you can get and how much you would pay to get that data back if you lost it.

I have used all of the above and my provider of choice is Google Drive, though we also use Apple iCloud to automatically backup our iDevices, as least for now.

Life 2.0

We will still have a cloud storage provider when we set sail, but what are we going to do to maintain the security of data and content we create while we are away from internet connectivity and can't sync to the cloud?  We are gong to be capturing pictures and video, notes, maintenance logs, etc., etc., and we won't want to risk losing it.

We also have a lot of CDs and Movies that we want to have access to, but can't afford the physical volume consumed by the discs.  We could use one or more external hard drives and plug them into a laptop when we need that slightly more stable hard drive that doesn't get used as much, but that comes with a bunch of restrictions, like multiple users at one time and the inconvenience of trying to play music or video to a TV from a USB hard drive.  Some TVs will do it, but usually the interface is clunky at best.

NAS is the Answer!

The answer is NAS and if you haven't used one since the early Western Digital days, boy have they come a long way!  I began researching this this fall and quickly decided that the Synology line of NAS seemed to offer what I needed.  Multi-bay devices using an Intel Processor, one or more LAN ports and running some version of Linux for management.  They offered file storage, SMB for mapping network drives, and at least form of Media Server.  Perfect! Just what I was looking for.

NAS Choice

I decided on the Synology DS220+, which was right at $300 delivered.  Synology seems to be a (the?) market leader for high quality Network Attached Storage box solutions.  It is a dual bay, dual LAN port, high-end consumer / low-end business model that seemed to be the right trade-off between price and capabilities.  Power consumption of the box itself is relatively low at 4W (from 12V wall wort adapter, which I hope to remove and tie directly to a fused 12V) when the drives aren't doing anything.  Not too mention, the entire unit can be scheduled to turn off and back on at pre-determined times, allowing the actual power consumption to fall even lower.

It comes bare, meaning, you get to decide on the storage type and capacity that's right for your use-case.  While they have 4, 5 and higher count bay models that also support higher RAID levels, this really just increases performance, and with no more than 4 users at a time and usually just 1 or 2 users, that would be overkill.

Drive Type

Power consumption and ruggedness are the two most important considerations for use on a boat.  That quickly led me down the SSD (Solid State Drive) route.  Unlike traditional, rotational Hard Drives, they have no moving parts, consume less power and can take a lot of G forces before failing.  Vibrations that would kill a rotational HDD are of little concern to a SSD.  Perfect for boat use! 

The SSD we chose is speced at 4W of power consumption, max and close to zero when idle.  A rotational HDD can get close to zero if in standby mode, but will take a second or two to spin up (and consume 10Ws for a short period), and then consume about 3W just spinning and up to about 8W when accessing data. 

SSDs are very fast at accessing data, almost twice that of HDDs, but that really wont factor in for our uses. 

Unfortunately, SSDs are WAY more expensive than rotational drives, AND they have a limited number of writes that can be performed before the NAND FLASH can no longer be trusted to remember the data stored, but given that I can't run to a floating Best Buy or Amazon Prime a new drive the next day, SSD was the obvious choice because of their ruggedness and reduced power consumption. Oh, and while the number of writes is "limited", it's limited to 2,400,000 GB of total data written for the 4TB drive we purchased, so that is completely filling and emptying that 4TB drive 600 times.

Drive Choice

We opted for the Samsung 870 EVO SSD.  This technology is a good blend of reliability and price point.  The plan was to use 1 drive; more on that latter.  It uses technology that allows three "states" to be held by each NAND cell.  Original NAND cells could hold two values, either a one or zero.  There are also quad cells that can store 4 "states" per cell.  The more states per cell, the less silicon real estate is needed and the price drops, BUT, the more states per cell, the less reliable and the fewer writes that can be trusted.

Now comes capacity.  What would we need? How much would be consumed by music CDs and Movies?  How much would we expect to create and need ready access to? NO IDEA!  So, given the afore mentioned lack of floating Best Buys, we decided to get a large drive; 4TB to be exact.

As of the writing of this post, they run about $470.  To give you an idea, a regular HDD in that capacity costs about $70.  And, if we had opted for the PRO version of the SSD (860 PRO, dual value per cell), it would have cost just under $995.

The exact Drive we purchased can be found here:  Samsung 860 EVO 4TB
Need less space?  They also make a 2TB version (Samsung 860 EVO 2TB) and a 1TB version (Samsung 860 EVO 1TB) at the same cost per GB which are viable options.  There is a hefty price premium on the smaller 500GB and 250GB versions so I personally wouldn't bother.

We have 340 CDs and 174 movies stored so far and we are using about 700GB, so 20%.  2TB probably would have been just fine, and 1TB might have been fine with less movies (they take 1-2 GB for a DVD and up to 17GB for a Blu-Ray).  Given that we will be producing our own YouTube videos (about 5-10GB each with raw footage), I'm glad we opted for 4TB.  Plus, the less capacity we use, the longer it takes to reach the Total Data Written limit (end of life) of the drive.

Lesson Learned

Solid State Drives are known for being exceptionally reliable.  HOWEVER, Murphy and his law can affect them just the same.  About 3 months after using the NAS, I suddenly started getting S.M.A.R.T. errors, which is an acronym for a self test that has been built into all drives for quick a while.  It is meant to let you know that a drive is experiencing a problem and that a backup should be made and the drive replaced.  I dug into the errors and sure enough, the drive was having some pretty severe failures and they were becoming more frequent, quickly.

At this point I had transferred about 15GB of photos, 56GB of music (340 CDs) and 600 GB of movies (174 movies) and didn't want to go through that ripping process again. Fortunately we had not taken the CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays to the dump yet, so it was recoverable if we lost everything.

This was a very fortunate experience in a lot of ways.  It reminded me that "more reliable" is still not necessary all that reliable.  Early-life-failures happen with electronics, even though these drives have a very strong 5 year warranty.  I was positive that Samsung would replace the drive because of that strong warranty.

It made me realize that I really need to have a dual drive solution, especially since the NAS supports it.  This would allow redundancy and the chance of two drives failing at nearly the same time is incredibly low, especially in early life.  If one drive fails in the future, well then I likely would either backup to a rotational (cheap drive) and keep using the NAS until I can get a replacement, or I'd just turn off the NAS and live without it until I could get another drive, to have the best security of preserving the data.

The downside is the exceptional cost (investment?) of ANOTHER 4TB SSD.

Setup

The bare drive had to be loaded into the NAS, which involved setting the four included screws into the carrier included for each of the two possible drive bays, then sliding it in to the NAS bay until it clicks.  Plug in power, and at least one ethernet cable and you are ready to turn it on with the button on the front.

By default, it will get an automatically assigned IP address from your router.  I eventually set my router to always assign the same IP address to it to make it easier to find (10.0.0.10), and you can also give it a memorable name in the configuration so that you can just type that into a browser address bar to connect.

Configuration and Management is done from a windowed environment and will look similar to this:

Most settings are found under the Control Panel and data can be accessed under File Station, however the part I really didn't appreciate is how extensible it is with a huge list of add-on packages that can be Installed; all supported and/or vetted by Synology.

Capabilities and Services

This isn't meant to be a deep dive article in how to set-up and configure, but let me list out the services that exist AND that we will use on the boat. (There are many more; a lot of them aimed at business users.)

• Media Server - Our Music, Video and Photos can be streamed from the NAS to just about any device (computer, smart TV, tablet, phone, our marine radio)
• iTunes Server - Stream content as if it is being streamed from a computer based library
• Plex Server - Super fancy way to present and stream your library if you are connecting from a device that has a Plex client (phone, tablet, probably some TVs, etc.)
• Personal Cloud - We will be able to use our NAS device as a Google Drive type appliance.  We will have a remote shared drive on the NAS that we will both attach to from our computers and tablets and access it just like Google Drive.
• Auto-Cloud Sync - When we DO get access to data, the NAS will notice that, and start syncing any changes of data since the last time (it can also be a subset of the data; maybe everything but movies, for example) up to our Google Drive account.  Basically the NAS acts as a robust holdover until we get access to the actual Cloud.
• Media Wiki-server - Ever use Wikipedia?  Ever edit or write an article using a Wiki?  If not, it's super easy and a Wiki is a great repository for things like digital manuals, instructions, log of places visited, maintenance log, etc.  Some of these need to exist on paper too, but having a digital copy is gravy.  Not too mention, being able to use my tablet to pull up a manual in the engine compartment and being able to text search, zoom in, etc.!
  
  
  

  

  Mira Wiki

  
  
• Calendar Server - We will be able to both connect to one shared calendar on our phones, tablets and computers, just like we do now.  Instead of that calendar data residing on a Google Account, it will reside on our NAS.
• Contacts Server - Same as above, but for contacts.
• Chat Server - This one seemed unlikely to be used until I thought about it.  I'm at the helm and Sue is down in the cabin taking a nap.  I need her help soon and want to get her, but don't really want to leave the helm.  I can text her and she will get an alert on her phone on the Synology Chat app, using the NAS as the chat server.  Have a guest on board? They can be added super easily.

Upgrade

Since I plan on using so many of those services, I opted to upgrade the internal 2GB memory with a 4GB SODIMM (like a laptop) stick to top it out at the supported 6GB of RAM (though there are a lot of users out there running much more).   Synology sells a "supported" memory stick at a hefty price.  You can find it here for $89. 

From my reading, if you have a problem with the NAS and have un-supported memory installed, they will not support you,...until you remove the added memory stick.  Plus, memory is memory (if a reputable brand).

I opted to get the Samsung version of the same thing for $17. 

Could we have gotten by without it?  Probably, but $17 and no floating Best Buy.

Installation is super easy.  Power off the NAS, remove the right most drive/empty carrier.  The memory slot if easily visible and can be easily popped in.  Replace the drive/carrier, power it back up and you are set; nothing else to do.

Summary

I only expected to get about 4 of those features listed above, but as I learned more of the capabilities, I quickly realized that this device would easily be able to be our "cloud" on the high seas and believe it will become a focal point of our data and entertainment management on-board.  4 watts of continuous draw going up to 8-10W during use is not trivial, so you may want to do some power management and turn it off when not using it, or schedule it to only be on during normal use times.  With 3000W of solar, and a huge bank of Lithium-Ion I think we will be able to keep it up and running most of the time, but we can adapt as needed.

Lastly, I'm also glad I began this process early; it is so much easier with true broadband and it also allows me to test out the approach and allowed me to find that early-life-failure of the SSD.

Thoughts?  Questions?  Let me know in the comments below!

Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.  I will only include links to products with which I have had direct, positive experiences.