Swapping drives in a JBOD system - Just waffling a bit

Soldato
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I am utterly pig ignorant to RAID. I have toyed with, and learned a great deal, and I do know bits, but not enough to say that "I KNOW".

But I was just been tlaking with a mate, and we have had a couple of thoughts going on between us.

I have a stupid number of drives, I have 4 NAS ( 2x2TB + 2x2TB + 4x3TB + 4x4TB ) and my Server ( 120SSD, 3TB, 4TB + 5x10TB ) witch has loads of drives and so I have plenty of storage that is simply wasted, I will admit.

My mate has 2x2TB + 3TB + 4TB

Now, we were wondering about swapping over drives on his setup.

One of the 2TB Drives is playing up, and sometimes it does not show up.

Now, he did originally have his 2x2TB striped and I told him to play with JBOD cause that will at least keep the good drive safe and he did and it has, but the idea still kept the drives and then added the 3TB and now the 4TB.

Now I have said to him, that these drives will be ext2fs and therefore will be readable by Linux even i na non raid setup, as they are treated as entirely speperate drives.

As such, he should be able to mount them all individually and be able to safely get at his data, so he can get rid of BOTH the 2TB Drives and get a new 4TB.

Am I right in thinking that?

But then will making a new JBOD setup, wipe the drives? I dont know what his controler is nor do I know how he set it up, I have never seen his setup, and as I said earlier, even if I did, I dont know it I have the jellies (Thanks Pikachu ) to know what I am doing.

He has about 6 TB of data in total, I said that he is more than welcome to borrow one of my 4 Drive NAS drives to back his stuff up before he does any playing, but he fears thats going to take a while... I say better take all week then lose everything foreever!

I upgraded mine from 4x3TB to 4x4TB by simply powering off the Mirrored drives and swapping those to 4TB and then it offered to rebuild the array and then I did the same with the original 3TB Drives and swapped those for the 4TB and it did the same, but then once that was done, it then told me that the drives were expandable and so I let it to that, and it used the extra TB in each drive.

Annoyingly, while I could have done that in the other 4x3TB drive, I have set them up as a single drive --- Oh that may be JBOD, but Im sure its stripped ( Waste of time with NAS )

Anyway, after al lthis waffling with my mate and I, I have said that the best thing to do, is setup a small program to dimply make a copy of your data from your PC to a NAS that I borrow you, then when its done, take the 2x2TB Out of your setup, and place a 4TB in their place, they can be had for pennies these days ( well, you know... Kind of ) and rather than use RAID, just use the drives normally and seperate the data on them like normal people would... And stop putting all your eggs into the one basket.
 
Soldato
Joined
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If your files are only on a single drive (JBOD or otherwise) then all your eggs are in one basket.

You don't want a situation where the loss of a single drive (or loss of the entire NAS/Server) would result in the loss of anything important.

RAID0 (striping) shouldn't be used for anything you care about as it doubles the chances of a total loss.

I'd always run either mirrored or with parity. I personally like the flexibility offered by Unraid's parity system.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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10,383
Location
Behind you... Naked!
If your files are only on a single drive (JBOD or otherwise) then all your eggs are in one basket.

You don't want a situation where the loss of a single drive (or loss of the entire NAS/Server) would result in the loss of anything important.

RAID0 (striping) shouldn't be used for anything you care about as it doubles the chances of a total loss.

I'd always run either mirrored or with parity. I personally like the flexibility offered by Unraid's parity system.

Yes, thas very obvious, and the ONLY reason that I have setup a STRIPPED RAID in my main PC, is purely to speed them up a tad, and they are quicker. Im gettign about 180MB/s from them and games and apps etc, start up much quicker, plus I have all the data backed up anyway, so I have no worry about data loss.

Also the server was knocked up to keep things safe, that is seperate from the NAS Drives, the NAS drives are in my shed ( concrete away from the house ). I do mirror and soon I iwll simply stop using the NAS Drives altogether, but at this time, the server is being a backup for the NAS Drives, I may yet keep the NAS Drives to act as backup for the server... At least just for the important files anyway...pr0n obviously
 
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