Raid 10 with WD Reds & Greens

Larry365 · 16 Aug 2015 at 19:37

I'm exploring some storage solutions. I'm basically looking for ~8tb of storage with some sort of redundancy.

I've mostly been favoring 4x 3TB Raid 5 but I already have 4x 2TB WD Green drives which were effectively going to waste (expect one which was going to be used as backup for a 2x Red Raid 1).

My latest idea is to go for a Raid 10, buy 4x WD Reds and utilizing the Green drives, effectively giving me free redundancy, and I'm not a massive fan of Raid 5.

My next question is probably obvious.. what issues am I likely to face here? I know its not ideal but at the same time, is this a REAL issue? Am I going to face issues with the green drives (actually two are WD Green and two are Spinpoint Green) spinning down when the reds arent, am I going to have issues with the greens taking time to spin up when the reds are already active? And I suppose read/write speeds will be limited to the slowest drives? (not really an issue as this is mostly for low demand media storage)

Any help much appreciated.
Cheers.

bledd · 16 Aug 2015 at 21:58

Use the greens as a backup of the reds.

Have the Reds in a Synology drive, then have the greens on a Windows machine, use 'Stablebit Drivepool' to create a virtual soft jbod of the greens, this will be 4x2tb = 8tb.

If one of the greens dies, you'll still have 75% of the data.

Robocopy between the reds to the greens. After replacing the broken green, robocopy will copy that lost 25% back to the drives.

nutcase · 17 Aug 2015 at 08:22

What Bledd says. Don't use greeens in a RAID array.

bledd · 17 Aug 2015 at 09:16

And remember, RAID doesn't mean it's a backup. Just protects you against a disk failure, nothing else.

Anything more than RAID5 is super overkill for home use and just a waste of disks.

Larry365 · 17 Aug 2015 at 10:06

Yeh this makes a lot more sense and also solves a few other issues for me. It just shows the value of making a quick thread.

Cheers

nutcase · 17 Aug 2015 at 14:29

I would however disgree with the RAID 5 comment for bigger disks. Home users would tend to have a lesser backup routine so a data loss is more likely - so having an array less likely to lose data is better.

IMO of course