Changing from RAID1 to RAID0.....

[StevieP]

I've just got a Synology DS213 with 2 x 2TB drives in there and at the moment it's running in RAID1 (or more accurately, Synology Hybrid RAID, which from what I understand, amounts to RAID1 with a bit more flexibility!)

Anyway, I've been thinking about it and with the exception of my own personal photo's and video's (which isn't a huge amount), I'm wouldn't be all that bothered if I lost the data stored on there!

So I'm wondering if I'd be better off doing a scheduled backup of my photo's & video's to an external USB hard drive (which I understand is something you can set up on the DS213) and then re-doing the NAS in RAID0 to get the benefit of the full 4TB storage as well as the improved performance? (RAID1 = "striped" which is better speed??)

What do you guys do on your NAS's??

 

[dfarrall]

What are you using the NAS for at the moment? Seems a bit pointless going RAID0 if its just to store things on, not only do you lose all redundancy but theres no need for massive speed anyway?

 

[StevieP]

I see your point and truth be told, the main reason I went for a dual bay NAS in the first place was so I could have the backup of my data being on 2 disks in case one failed!

But once I sat down and thought about it, my photo's and video's will (at the moment) easily fit on an external 500GB USB 3.0 hard drive, which will give me the peace of mind that I've got a backup - the rest of the NAS is invariably for movies and music (which are relatively easy to replace) to stream to the various devices around the house!

The main draw isn't to get improved speed but rather having 4TB of space rather than 2TB!

 

[dfarrall]

In that case do you have to raid the drives? If you could keep them separate you could backup important things on both drives and just dump the rest on either.
That way you have important stuff backed up on the other drive incase one fails, rather than losing it all.

 

[ChrisD.]

RAID1 still gives you increased read speed over conventional RAID as it's reading the data from two HDD's instead of one, so twice the spindles. RAID 0 will only give you write performance increase which for your scenario wouldn't be worth it. If you need the drive space then buy larger drives, I would never use RAID 0 to give increased storage due to its drawbacks.

 

[ecksmen]

Raid is not a replacement for backups - don't forget that you can have logical failures such as over writing / deleting files which you can retrieve from backups. Relying on RAID only protects against single disk failure (or more depending on configurations).