4 drives, 1 volume: Smart or Mistake?

[Benzius]

I recently got my first NAS (QNAP TS-451deu). I use it mostly as a Plex media server and media storage (movies for Plex). These files are not super critical to me so I didn’t implement any RAID configurations. I set it up as JBOD (4). I made 1 volume using all 4 drives and started filling it up right away, then a thought came to my head. What if one of the drive fails? Are some (or all) movies spread across all 4 drives? If one drive fails, I'm sure I'd lose some movies but could I lose all of them? What would I do? I almost hit the panic button but then I said to myself, ‘Well they wouldn’t let you make 1 volume out of a bunch of different disks if when 1 drive failed the whole volume is trashed…or would they?’

So, was it a mistake to make 1 volume using all 4 drives? Should I have made 4 static volumes and filled them up separately? Is there an easy way to correct this before something really bad happens.

Thanks in advance.

[Thisisnotmyname]

JBOD generally doesn't stripe (I haven't specifically looked into how QNAP does it but that's probably the case here too) so you would likely be able to recover some data on the drives that didn't fail but it wouldn't be a simple operation. Your scenario could be slightly better than losing a disk in RAID0 but it's also not like you can pop in a replacement and have it rebuild the array. Switching to to RAID10, RAID5, or RAID6 would provide you more redundancy in terms of losing a disk or two (read up on failure rates when rebuilding RAID though, particularly RAID5 with large capacity drives) but as I'm sure others will jump in to announce (it's almost a meme around here), "RAID is not backup." You've stated you don't care too much if you lose all your data and that's fine but if you really do care then you want to back up a second copy elsewhere.

Also, if you were doing JBOD, I would have just done striping and at least gotten more performance out of it given you can lose the array in either case if a drive dies.

[dolbyman]

when any of your drives fails, the volume will fail

you had better setup 4 single drives with 4 sepperate volumes...

[Benzius]

Again, thank you very much.

Back to the drawing board.