RN428 Raid 5

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mlknez wrote:

I have an RN428 that i want to populate with 8 10TB drives.  It automatically chooses to use RAID 6.  I would rather use RAID 5.  Is there a way that i can specify that before it starts to build the raid 6 array or do I HAVE to let it build the RAID 6 array, THEN change it?  If so, that seems like a silly way to waste a week of time.

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As TeknoJnky noted, you can destroy the XRAID volume as it is being built - you do not have to wait for that to finish.  So there no waste of a week of time.

Whether RAID-5 is a good idea with a volume of this size is another question.  RAID-5 is certainly more vulnerable than RAID-6, so you should consider the recovery time from a volume failure.

You need to be prepared to lose your volume at any time, since even RAID-6 is not enough to keep your data safe.  Whenever it does fail, you will need to rebuild the volume and restore the data from backup.  That will likely take a few weeks.

Personally I am using RAID-5 - but my volume is much smaller than yours (4x6TB -> 18 TB) and it is fully backed up onto two other NAS.  So I can immediately switch over to one of the backups if the main NAS fails.