ReadyNAS 104 - Don't want to use RAID

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voidness wrote:

I didnt want to use JBOD because if one of the disks died, the whole volume is unusable right ? where as mhddfs I still have the data on the working drives.  ... I have given up on mhddfs, it sort of worked but very flaky,

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The safest answer would have been one disk per volume.  Users still see all the shares, the only downside is that you sometimes need to balance storage (shifting shares between disks or dividing a share).  With large drives (6 TB and up) that balancing hasn't been a problem for me.

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voidness wrote:

I didnt want raid because I feel that in a raid setup all the HDDs are being used at once if there is any activity whereas in single drive mode, only the drive that being read/written to is being used so each disk might last longer.  

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Total I/O for reads is the same with RAID as without, so the average load per drive on reads is identical.  Writes do expand, because parity blocks need to be recomputed.  

Personally, I'd have chosen the benefits of RAID redundancy in a heartbeat.  While I've never seen any real data comparing drive life with/without RAID, most of my NAS drives have been in place for years.  My NV+ was set up 6 years ago, and is still using it's original drives.  

When I've used JBOD, it's been because I wanted max capacity on that device.  I've done that with backup NAS, but the main NAS has always been RAID with single redundancy.  Though many here favor dual redundancy, I maintain good backups, and would rather take the extra capacity I get with single redundancy.