[NV+ v2] 4 disks, 2 separate RAID-1 volumes?

His post here, shows that he does not understand the advantage of X-Raid2. Yes, he may prefer two Raid-1 volumes and that is fine as long as he fully understands that the second volume if set up as a backup of volume 1 will only be viable if the lost of volume 1 is due to disk failure. Any other problem will most likely take out both volumes.

illmatic wrote:

StephenB wrote: sticking with RAID-1 pairs is a good approach. It gives you more options if things go wrong. To go a little further, when I bought my first NAS around 2009, I paid $150 each for two 1.5TB drives, which was plenty of space for me at the time. Last month I decided to expand, so I bought two 3TB drives for $150 each. Thus my current primary NAS has 4.5TB of usable disk space in RAID-1, for which I paid $600. Had I gone with RAID-5, I would have had to buy 4 drives back in 2009. I would have paid $600, and had -- you guessed it -- 3x 1.5TB = 4.5TB of disk space. So it doesn't feel "wasted" to me. I appreciate your comments and advice but wanted to eliminate the speculation over my reasoning for using RAID-1.

My reply back to him was that he could have started with the two drives just as he states in 2009 and then if he had selected X-Raid2 rather than Raid1 added additional drives as he desired. If he had added the two 3TB drives has he has now, then he would actually have more storage space.

I'm not saying he has to do it this way, it's an option on the ReadyNAS units that others did not offer. I know I was glad to have it when I upgraded my volume from 4x1TB to 2x1TB + 2x3TB.

Also, as one who has lost important data in the past due to a disk problem (not even a failure) decades ago, I have been searching for a viable, reliable easy to maintain backup. When I added my second NAS and set it up as an rsync backup of my primary volume, I finally found it. I do not consider the drives in a second NAS as wasted space. I call it peace of mind.