I have a DS220+ with 2 identical drives, configured as RAID, so just one volume. Everything was working great, but to access the new object-recognition in photos, I added RAM, which caused some corruption and now the volume is read-only and won’t repair itself (even after removing the RAM). So now I’m preparing to do an external backup and rebuild the NAS. But now I’m wondering: If volume issues are more likely than drive issues, should I forget about RAID, create one volume on each drive, and use the second volume as a local backup? Or is RAID still the best first line of defence? (Or is there a way I can do both with two drives?
With RAID10, you’d have 8TB of storage that is both striped and mirrored. You’d get a 4x increase in read speed and a 2x increase in write speed. You’d be fault tolerant against AT LEAST one drive failure, possibly two depending on which drives fail.
With RAID5, you’d have 12GB that is striped and parity checked. You’d get a 3x read speed increase and normal write speed. You’d be fault tolerant against a single drive failure.
With RAID6, you’d have 8TB that is striped and parity checked. You’ll have a 2x increase in read speed and normal write speed. You’ll be fault tolerant against two concurrent drive failures.
I recommend RAID10 if you want the all around speed boost and fault tolerance but don’t care so much about capacity;
RAID6 if you care more about redundancy;
RAID5 if you want a read speed boost and more capacity with a little fault tolerance mixed in.
There’s also raid 0, which is gonna be hella fast all around but god help you if somebody farts too aggressively next to it; and raid 1 if you just want 4 redundant backups of the same drive.
Personally, I’d go 10 unless you just really want the extra storage.
Wow thank you for the detailed response. After reading through it i think I agree with raid 10 being my best option. Gonna start reading into it more and how to set it up! These hard drives aren’t new so being safe against at least one drive failure sounds safe. Can easily replace one if it goes out. Hopefully 2 don’t go out at the same time but it looks like I potentially will still be safe if so.