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Forum Discussion
PeteCress
May 14, 2017Apprentice
RN316, six drives: RAID 5 vs RAID6?
It finally dawned on me that the reason my RN316 came up with RAID5 was that OS6's initialization process makes that decision for the user: 4-6 bays, the user gets RAID5 unless they jump through some hoops within 10 minutes that no normal first-time user would know about.
I've been all spun up on the assumption that, somehow, I need RAID6.
I chose RAID6 for my Ultra-6 just on GPs: having the array survive 2 drives failing seemed better that just one drive failing .... and the space was sufficient for my needs.... No actual knowledge or experience whatsoever was involved in that decision: it was strictly from the gut.
But with OS6 choosing RAID5, it's starting to dawn on me that just maybe some smart people somewhere decided that 5 was appropriate for 4-6 drives.
Now that I have two boxes: the old Ultra-6 and the new RN316 - with the Ultra-6 destined to run OS-6 and become the backup box for the RN316, I'm thinking that I would already have 2-drive redundancy in that each box could tolerate the loss of one drive, and what're the odds of both boxes losing a second drive before I can get a replacement delivered and synch'd (which would seem to be about four days max)?
So I'm thinking: "Why try to fool Mother Nature?... Just keep the RN316 as RAID5".
Once the 316 settles down and I become confident in it, I will replace the Ultra-6's OS with OS6, let OS6 do it's thing with setting up the array as RAID5 and everybody should be happy....
Do People Who Know see any flaws in this line of thought?
If you had just these two boxes: would you feel comfortable with both of them being RAID5?
(FWIW, I also have a slightly-offsite (in the garden shed) DriveBender box that is air-gapped from my LAN except when I'm running a weekly-monthly-depending-on-when-I-think-of-it mirror backups. ... It's no prize, but it does stumble along and makes me feel a little better vis-a-vis a fire or destructive burglery.)
3 Replies
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- mdgm-ntgrNETGEAR Employee Retired
Personally I'm quite risk averse and use RAID-6 on both my primary unit and my backup.
- SandsharkSensei - Experienced User
A lot depends on whether you work with files actively on the NAS or if you copy them there for archival and the effort that it will take to re-create anything that is lost after the last backup.
I have a backup NAS for each of my NASes and could put one of the backups online to replace one that went down (they normally come on only for the backups). I don't work on anything directly on the NAS that's really important, and my primary computer is a workstation with RAID 1. I do often download directly to the NAS, but re-downloading is easy, and not terribly consuming of my time. So all my NASes are RAID5.
- NASguruApprentice
I agree with Sandshark and feel Raid5 is more than sufficient to cover a failure when there are 2 NAS in a primary/secondary scenario. It also seems the NAS approved hard drives have a lot less failure rates than previously design hard drives so that the risk is very minimal even when it does happen. That said, I typically have a spare HD on hand of equal or larger size for my primary NAS just in case the inevitable happens.
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