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Recommendation for 12TB X-RAID2 to Mirror Ultra-6 ?
My main storage is an old Ultra-6 running X-RAID2 (i.e. it can lose 2 drives without losing the array). I've been trying to chince out and use a 20-drive DriveBender box to mirror it for backup ...
- If the Ultra 6 has enough performance for your needs then the step up to the 316 should be good. I would use the 316 as your new main NAS with the Ultra 6 as the backup. If you want a big step up in performance we do have the new RN526X and RN626X which have two 10GbE ports. We also have some 8-bay units the RN528X and RN628X which we announced earlier this month at CES.
- You'll need at least 5. Using base-10 that'd give you 12TB. Using base-2 (which is what we use in the GUI on both RAIDiator-x86 and OS6) you'll get 10.91TiB. OS6 doesn't have the expansion limits that RAIDiator-x86 had. You can add additional 4TB disks later. You can also add higher capacity disks as you could with RAIDiator-x86.
- I believe WD REDs now can be used in up to an 8-bay (if you want to use more disks than that you need to look at enterprise disks which are much more expensive). We do have expansion chassis but the expansion chassis would have its own volume. If you had a single volume and the cable connecting the two boxes became disconnected that would cause big issues.
How about 6TB drives?
It would seem like a 314 with 4 6-TB drives would allow for 10+ TB w/RAID-6.
I see several articles about problems with rebuild times and increased chances of some sort of error defeating RAID-6 as drive capacities increase - but it's all above my pay grade.
You certainly could do that. It would depend on budget and what you want to achieve.
If you get a 6-bay you don't have to fill it immediately. So you could put in 4x6TB disks for now and add more later. 6TB disks are cheaper than higher capacity ones.
You should consider how you anticipate your storage needs will grow over time. Using RAID-6, 6x6TB disks will give you double the volume capacity of a volume using 4x6TB disks. That's a lot of volume expansion just from adding a couple of extra disks (not needing to replace any).
Another point worth noting is that you can use a 316 to attempt to recover data from an Ultra 6. You can't use a 314 to do that unless there were four or less disks in the Ultra 6. See ReadyNAS: Migrating disks from RAIDiator to OS 6
Backing up data using backup jobs from one NAS to the other is of course preferable, but this is handy to know.
Of course if your Ultra 6 hardware died in the future you could at that point consider if you need to get a new 6-bay to attempt data recovery if your backup is not up to date.
By died of course I mean the chassis dying. Moving the disks to another chassis won't fix a problem with/on the disks.
When it comes to RAID, RAID-6 certainly provides more protection than e.g. RAID-5. No amount of RAID is a replacement for backing up data. RAID is great and redundant RAID levels used properly greatly reduces the chances of needing to do a full restore from backup, but there is still the possibility that may be needed. Better to be safe than sorry.
As disk capacities increase so do rebuild times so the chances of running into multiple disk failures during a rebuild do go up as disk capacities increase all else being equal.
X-RAID2 uses RAID-6 if you configured it to use dual-redundancy.
mdgm wrote:Another point worth noting is that you can use a 316 to attempt to recover data from an Ultra 6. You can't use a 314 to do that unless there were four or less disks in the Ultra 6. See ReadyNAS: Migrating disks from RAIDiator to OS 6
OK, if the 6-bay uint is set up for RAID6, 4 drives still gives you a degraded but usable volume. So couldn't you, in a pinch, still recover using a 4-bay system? Maybe a bad idea, but useful as a last resort?
And, of course, he could migrate to OS6 on the Ultra6 to make it even easier.
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