Hey everyone. So I’m trying to decide which RAID should I choose for my 6trays NAS. I have 4 x 16TB HDDs, 1x8TB HDD and another one 500GB ssd that I will use as a containers’ docker folder usage. I will be using the NAS to store Media files (movies, tv series, photos, music etc.) and also documents. Currently I have the 2 16tb as RAID 1 that only the Media files are stored and I am in between either creating another RAID 1 with the remaining 2 16Tbs or adding them to the other 2 to create a RAID 5 and have a bigger storage pool Have you had any incident where 2 HDDs were lost-damaged simultaneously (as RAID 5 forgives loss of only 1 drive) or not?

In addition I was thinking of having the 8TB HDD as a standalone to backup the documents and maybe the photos and the docker setups.

Does this make sense to anyone that uses similar setup?

Thanks for your inputs!

  • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
    3·
    4 hours ago

    I use BTRFS w/ RAID 1 (mirror) with two drives (both 8TB), because that’s all I’ve needed so far. If I had four, I’d probably do to separate RAID 1 pairs and combine them into a logical volume, instead of the typical RAID 10 setup where blocks are striped across mirrored sets.

    RAID 5 makes sense if you really want the extra capacity and are willing to take on a little more risk of cascading failure when resilvering a new drive.

    ZFS is also a great choice, I just went w/ BTRFS because it’s natively supported by my OS (openSUSE Leap) with snapshots and rollbacks. I technically only need that for my root FS (SSD), but I figured I might as well use the same filesystem for the RAID array as well.

    Here’s what I’d do:

    1. 4x 16TB HDDs either in a RAID 10 or two RAID 1 pairs in one logical volume - total space is 32TB
    2. 500GB SSD -> boot drive and maybe disk cache
    3. 8TB HDD - load w/ critical data and store at work as an off-site backup, and do this a few times/year; the 4x HDDs are for bulk, recoverable data

    That said, RAID 5 is a great option as well, as long as you’re comfortable with the (relatively unlikely) risk of losing the whole array. If you have decent backups, having an extra 16TB could be worth the risk.