NAS Storage Options

Amraam · 28 Jan 2016 at 14:18

Building a micro sever (WS2012 GUI) for a basic FS/NAS. Got a 120GB SSD for the OS, just need to decide on the file storage solution. I currently have a 1TB drive in my PC which I'm going to demote to a backup drive. The NAS is mainly going to be for movies and music, as well as a file share for my PC and the girlfriend's laptop.

Now, I want to keep the price to £250 or under for the drives. I'm set on RAID 1 or 10, and would like to avoid 5 if possible. Should I look at getting 4x WD 2TB Reds and put them in Raid 10, or get two 4TB and RAID1 them. The speed gain of RAID10 would be nice but isn't essential in honesty.

What would you recommend please?

Craig321 · 28 Jan 2016 at 14:22

Both the RAID10 and RAID1 options you've mentioned above will give you the same amount of usable space. With that in mind, I would go RAID 1 for simplicity and fewer disks, less space used in your NAS, less heat and so on.

Or, do what I do and go RAID5 which will give you roughly 6TB instead of the 4TB you would get out of RAID 10. Just make sure you have a decent backup. Something like CrashPlan plus one of those huge externals you can buy (you can get 8TB externals now) for a daily backup would do the trick.

Amraam · 28 Jan 2016 at 14:28

Craig321 said:
Both the RAID10 and RAID1 options you've mentioned above will give you the same amount of usable space. With that in mind, I would go RAID 1 for simplicity and fewer disks, less space used in your NAS, less heat and so on.

Or, do what I do and go RAID5 which will give you roughly 6TB instead of the 4TB you would get out of RAID 10. Just make sure you have a decent backup. Something like CrashPlan plus one of those huge externals you can buy (you can get 8TB externals now) for a daily backup would do the trick.

Yeah that's one of the concerns of 5, is the need for a backup. If I run a 6TB array at 50% usage, I'm still going to need a 3TB backup which is more cost again. I may just keep backups of the important stuff. My blurays are on discs and my music is synced with Google drive. It's only a few GB of documents. RAID 10 speeds attracts me but I'd realistically only notice the gains when copying the data across from my current setup - it isn't going to boost downloads etc.

Craig321 · 28 Jan 2016 at 14:34

You still need a backup regardless of RAID. So whether you back up your important stuff from a RAID 10 array or from a RAID 5 array it doesn't make much difference except, I suppose, there's that chance with RAID 5 that the whole thing could fall over after 1 disk failure when it's trying to restore to a new disk so you'd have that slightly higher chance of losing your non-important stuff.

Something like CrashPlan would cost you around £3.50 per month (or less if you pay for a year up front) or BackBlaze (which some prefer) is also only $5 per month. They are both truly unlimited.

I wouldn't go for RAID10 on a home NAS for performance reasons. If it's just storing your music, docs, blurays etc. then you don't need that extra speed.

Amraam · 28 Jan 2016 at 14:53

Craig321 said:
You still need a backup regardless of RAID. So whether you back up your important stuff from a RAID 10 array or from a RAID 5 array it doesn't make much difference except, I suppose, there's that chance with RAID 5 that the whole thing could fall over after 1 disk failure when it's trying to restore to a new disk so you'd have that slightly higher chance of losing your non-important stuff.

Something like CrashPlan would cost you around £3.50 per month (or less if you pay for a year up front) or BackBlaze (which some prefer) is also only $5 per month. They are both truly unlimited.

I wouldn't go for RAID10 on a home NAS for performance reasons. If it's just storing your music, docs, blurays etc. then you don't need that extra speed.

And this is precisely my predicament ha. RAID 5 on paper is ideal as it's 6TB of storage with only 3 3TB drives. It's the potential for failure I'm not keen on, especially as it's going to be running (albeit not accessed) 24/7. RAID 10 is considerably more expensive so I'm almost tempted to just go for 2x4TB in RAID 1.

Also, I have 100GB with Google so I could backup crucial documents there too.