To raid, or not to raid...

[dnige]

Hi All,

I need some opinions on this. I've just purchased a TS-251 with 2 x 3-TB WD Red drives. This NAS is for home use and will host my music, films, photos etc.

I currently have the NAS set up in a RAID 1 configuration however, I am contemplating changing this configuration to two single drives. The reason being that although RAID will provide some redundancy against an HD failure. It won't protect if the actual NAS dies or there's a fault with the backplane or whatever else. My thought was that I would only use one of the drives and create a replication job to run every night or more frequently depending on the performance hit.

I work in the IT industry and have seen many servers fail not due to faulty drives but to raid controller problems. As this is a home system I don't have the funds to have a second replicated box.

The data being stored on the drive won't change too frequently so I could probably forfit potential 24hr data loss?

Any thoughts folks?

Cheers

Nige

[pwilson]

Hi All,

I need some opinions on this. I've just purchased a TS-251 with 2 x 3-TB WD Red drives. This NAS is for home use and will host my music, films, photos etc.

I currently have the NAS set up in a RAID 1 configuration however, I am contemplating changing this configuration to two single drives. The reason being that although RAID will provide some redundancy against an HD failure. It won't protect if the actual NAS dies or there's a fault with the backplane or whatever else. My thought was that I would only use one of the drives and create a replication job to run every night or more frequently depending on the performance hit.

I work in the IT industry and have seen many servers fail not due to faulty drives but to raid controller problems. As this is a home system I don't have the funds to have a second replicated box.

The data being stored on the drive won't change too frequently so I could probably forfit potential 24hr data loss?

Any thoughts folks?

Cheers

Nige

When a drive dies under RAID, you simply "hot-swap" in a replacement, and let the NAS rebuild all by itself. Total labour on your part: 2 minutes. (Lower that to 30 seconds if you use an electric screwdriver).

When a drives dies under non-RAID solutions, (including Single Drive volumes), you have to rebuild the NAS from scratch, and restore your data, which will cost you a weekend at the very least. If you don't value your data enough to keep using RAID, that is your choice, but unless you are religious about doing your Backups, and are willing to invest a weekend every time you want to replace or upgrade a drive, you should stick with RAID1.

If you are a Linux expert, and you actually enjoy manually rebuilding your NAS regularly, then switching to Single Drive volumes would indeed provide you with an education. If you prefer to simply "ignore" your NAS, and let it worry about itself, or if you'd rather spend your weekends doing fun things, then you should probably stick to RAID.

Check my signature below, so see how I run on my NAS.

[Toxic17]

Personally I'd use RAID1 and Backup externally to a USB3 external drive. it gives you redundancy, and a Backup.

Your option of not to RAID gives only a Backup.

[pwilson]

Personally I'd use RAID1 and Backup externally to a USB3 external drive. it gives you redundancy, and a Backup.

Your option of not to RAID gives only a Backup.

Yes, Backups are required regardless of the Volume type chosen. RAID is not a substitute for actually making Backups. I personally favour eSATA over USB3.0, but otherwise, I'm sure we are in complete agreement.

I backup my NAS (except my Multimedia share) daily. I backup my Multimedia share monthly.

[dsmithdewarcom]

raid controller problems

QNAP and similar NAS devices use software RAID (Linux mdadm).

In the use case you describe, I would put one of the disks in an enclosure for backups, and run the other as a non-RAID volume in the NAS. No point in having RAID if you don't need redundancy.

If as has been suggested you find the admin overhead too onerous, and RAID is not some kind of hobby for you, you can ditch the QNAP.

[dnige]

Thanks for all the help.

I'll look into a cheap backup solution drive and leave it on RAID 1.

N.