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I just purchased a diskless version of the RN628X and purchased 8 10TB WD Gold drives. I have populated the entire unit and with 10TB drives looks like it will be maxxed out. Since this is a totally new setup I am trying to determine for overall performance (possible future drive failures with replacement etc.), would it be better to leave the X-Raid Raid 6 it came up as or switch it to Flex-Raid Raid 10 using all the drives as 1 volume. I will not use more than 1 volume and with maxxing out the drives it won't be expanded by replacing drives in future.
I am mainly interested in the Resync time or rebuild time if a drive fails and the system rebuilds/resync's after I replace the failed drive.
So far at first power up the unit initially started the resync (x-raid raid 6) and went to about 4 % in about an hour, I just changed to Flex destroyed volume and creates a single Raid 10 but it looks like it will take 444:57:24 to finish with only doing .08% in 45 minutes. Most people say the rebuild time of raid 10 in general is way faster than raid 6 but what about for the Netgear ReadyNas 628x.
I would stick with XRaid 6 with 2 disc failure. With 10TB drives, that's a whole lot of data to lose if anything major goes wrong. While it'll take a while to rebuild 1 10TB HDD back into your system, which puts extra stress on all your other HDD's rebuilding the system. In fact if you don't NEED all that space at once. Say you only need around 10TB or so to start out. Maybe stick with just popping in 3 HDD's for XRaid5. As your system grows you can pop in another HDD and as it grows some more pop in another and so on. This way you have less wear and tear on your HDD's. You can spread that out. That's a nice thing about using XRaid. You don't need to pop in all the HDD's at once to use them. Maybe you need 6 of them to start. I have no idea why you need so much storage.
The other thing, a NAS is not a backup solution. Not unless you have 2 of them and one is backing up to the other. Backed up to a off site location is even better. All kinds of things could happen. You could be robbed. You could have a fire. You could have a major NAS crash. Who knows. With 10 10TB HDD's in Xraid6, that's about 55TB of Data you could lose at once if full. Generally when you have that much to backup, you really need a second NAS, with just as much storage space. I'm sure you spent a bundle already.
I would stick with XRaid 6 with 2 disc failure. With 10TB drives, that's a whole lot of data to lose if anything major goes wrong. While it'll take a while to rebuild 1 10TB HDD back into your system, which puts extra stress on all your other HDD's rebuilding the system. In fact if you don't NEED all that space at once. Say you only need around 10TB or so to start out. Maybe stick with just popping in 3 HDD's for XRaid5. As your system grows you can pop in another HDD and as it grows some more pop in another and so on. This way you have less wear and tear on your HDD's. You can spread that out. That's a nice thing about using XRaid. You don't need to pop in all the HDD's at once to use them. Maybe you need 6 of them to start. I have no idea why you need so much storage.
The other thing, a NAS is not a backup solution. Not unless you have 2 of them and one is backing up to the other. Backed up to a off site location is even better. All kinds of things could happen. You could be robbed. You could have a fire. You could have a major NAS crash. Who knows. With 10 10TB HDD's in Xraid6, that's about 55TB of Data you could lose at once if full. Generally when you have that much to backup, you really need a second NAS, with just as much storage space. I'm sure you spent a bundle already.
If a 40 TB volume is big enough, he could also consider RAID-60 and 4 RAID-1 volumes.
RAID-60 actually offers the highest protection against routine disk failures - protecting against two-four failures, depending on where they occur. With 8 disks, the overhead is similar to RAID-10 (40 TB volume).
Multiple RAID-1 volumes has the fastest resync, and is the easiest for data recovery (since only one disk is needed to recover the data on that volume).
Thanks for those good points and information. I needed to deploy the unit so I reset it back to default and kept the original Raid 6. The original data is stored on a small emc san and have about 10TB of data in use. As the data is moved around/worked with it resides in different folders at different times and the Readynas gets daily copies so it gets multiple versions of the same files needing a larger capacity than the 15TB san. This does serve as a 2nd copy backup with the caveat of it being onsite with the original data. We are looking into whether or not we could do secure internet (off-site) backup with about 10TB of data as some systems offer a seed drive option now. Thanks again for the great information.
You can get a NAS for another location and use rsync, or maybe better as you're going over the Internet, rsync with SSH. I just got a second NAS to handle Backups as doing it manually was just to much of a Hassle with 13TB of Data. But after it's all copied, Which mine is busy with right now as I just got it setup last night, I could bring it someplace else and let it continue to do it's thing. Since all the Data will be on it, now it's just whatever is new, so it wouldn't have to transfer much over the internet daily after that. So my ReadyNAS 516 is copying files to my QNAP TS-431. It's a cheap 4 bay ARM NAS, and I'm using 2 8TB Seagate Archive HDD's in it as those are pretty cheap in a RAID 0 setup, which is no redundancy. Don't need it as it's a Backup!!! That takes care of the 6 3TB HDD's in my 516 in RAID 5.
Every24 hours my 516 will backup to that QNAP. Took me a little bit to figure it out and get it working. The QNAP interface is a lot differnt from the ReadyNAS. Though you could get a low cost ARM ReadyNAS also. After all, it's just backup. So you may want to look into something like that.
It depends on the business impact of a NAS failure.
If the impact is high, then getting a second NAS on site would be a good precaution. I'd use rsync backup (as opposed to ReadyDR), because that makes it easy to cut over to the backup NAS if the primary NAS fails. I'd also keep SMB, AFP, and NFS off on the backup (turning them on if you need to cut over). That gives you a bit more protection from ransomware infecting the PCs.
You could get an RN528x perhaps, but if you need to run the business using the backup NAS, you probably don't want to go lower than that.
Cloud/Offsite backup is important too - adding disaster recovery.
That's true! If you need to get backup and running FAST and having the option to switch right over to the other, clearly you really want to clone the system you already have. I'm uisng rsync myself. Not quite sure what ReadyDR is. I figured though that I'd need another ReadyNAS to use that? I have a cheap QNAP to backup to instead. So using rsync. It's still backing up right now. 3 days so far. It's only using about 1/5th of my Gigabit Network to transfer, so this QNAP NAS is not very fast. Between the ARM CPU, and these Seagate Archive HDD, it's taking it's sweet old time. It is about 13TB of data. It should be a whole lot faster when it's backed up everything and all it has to then backup is anything new.
My old ReadyNAS with a ARM CPU though really wasn't any faster over my Network this this QNAP either. My 516 will eat up most all of my Network transfering from my PC. Buesness needs and Personal needs won't be the same. But if you have a lot of Data to backup, it's good to have another NAS like you have, as powerful, as a backup using rsync and being able to switch to that IF anything at all happens with your main NAS. Always best to have the Backup NAS someplace else. They can be side by side to get all the data transfered and once that's done, move it someplace else. Connected over the internet with rsync continuing to backup. Maybe you'll never need it, but crap does happen. More valuable your Data, the more Backup's of it you should have.
That is good advice on shutting those features off on the Backup. I only have SMB on, on my Main NAS. I just turned all 3 off on the QNAP. That was easy enough.
ReadyDR is netgear-only, and is limited to the business-class (x86) ReadyNAS. It is backing up a BTRFS snapshot (likely using btrfs send and receive underneath). It is very efficient, since only changed data blocks are sent. But you do need to restore the destination to a share in order to access it.
My 516 will eat up most all of my Network transfering from my PC.
Just to clarify this for other folks...
Routers and switches have enough internal bandwidth to maintain 1 gigabit in each direction on each port (at least the Netgear ones do). So file transfers between the RN516 and PC will max out those two ports (in one direction), but won't interfere with traffic going between other devices (and won't interfere with internet traffic).
I have a cheap QNAP to backup to instead. So using rsync. It's still backing up right now. 3 days so far. It's only using about 1/5th of my Gigabit Network to transfer, so this QNAP NAS is not very fast. Between the ARM CPU, and these Seagate Archive HDD, it's taking it's sweet old time.
Of course rsync does use more CPU then the other backup protocols, and the archival disks are at their worst when you do sustained writes to them.
Still, at 200 mbps you should be backing up about 2 TB a day - pretty decent.
Ya, ReadyDR, I thought was a Netgear only thing and on the higher end NAS units only. I'm still not really sure about the whole Snapshot thing of BTRFS.
rsync is not using a ton of my CPU on the ReadyNAS, but it is on my QNAP. Maybe a average of around 70% with that ARM CPU. It's still backing up right now. It's backed up almost 10TB's so far.
As for the 200mbps, that's Download speed. Upload is only 10mbps for me. Upload is what you're using sending Data to the cloud. So no, not super fast. About 1/3 of the speed of rsync over my Network to my other NAS. Since it's about 27mbps Clearly not as fast as transferring to and from my ReadyNAS 516 to my Windows PC. But I can live with it.
Still faster then uploading to the internet. With the 1TB cap which is almost not enough now, there's no way I could ever upload as much data as I have to the cloud without costing me a whole lot more money. Cheaper to get a low cost NAS and a couple large HDD's and use that. I already had the the 2 8TB HDD's I was manually backing up to. So all I needed was a cheap NAS, setup as a RAID 0. Basically giving me 1 large HDD. Zero Redundancy, but Not a huge deal as it's a backup. I have 2 free bays for when I need more room with getting larger HDD's for my main NAS. I have the 6 3TB drives. I'd like to slowing start changing them out in the future to maybe 6 or 8TB drvies. I'm not in a huge rush. I'll wait for prices to drop some more.
