With a 2-bay RN422 with 2 × 6TB HD, is it possible to have a RAID1 volume of 4 TB mirrored on both drives + a RAID0 volume of 2+2=4 TB expanded on both drives? I'm in FlexRAID but I'm not able to do so on ReadyCloud: I'm not able to specify the RAID1 volume *size*... Am I missing something?
Thanks for your help,
Luc
Model: RN422|ReadyNAS 422 2-Bay with up to 20 TB total storage
With a 2-bay RN422 with 2 × 6TB HD, is it possible to have a RAID1 volume of 4 TB mirrored on both drives + a RAID0 volume of 2+2=4 TB expanded on both drives?
Netgear did make quite a few changes to flexraid back in 6.7, but I don't see any way to do this.
You might consider just using JBOD (two 6 TB volumes), and back up some shares on disk 1 to disk 2 on a reasonable schedule.
Thanks Stephen for your suggestion. Yep! I shall think of that... I find a pity not to use RAID1 feature though. I've been using it for years and years on my ReadyNASes, it's really a peace of mind... Maybe the best option is to wait for cheaper 8TB drives! 😉
FWIW, I agree it would be nice to be able to partition drives manually, so you could set up the configuration you outlined. The UI might be quite complicated though.
I find a pity not to use RAID1 feature though. I've been using it for years and years on my ReadyNASes, it's really a peace of mind...
Bigger drives are of course one way out.
RAID1 has the advantage that the mirroring is instant. Backing up to another drive on the NAS isn't instant, so there would be some data loss. Though the independent volume doesn't need to be synced, which has it's own advantages.
A backup on a different device is really the only way to keep the data safe though.
Yes Stephen, you're perfectly right. The fact is that, for the 1st time since 10+ years I've been using Netgear NASes, I bought 2 of them, one for me and one for my son, to make those offsite backups you speak about, automatically, through a fiber connection between our 2 houses. Maybe we could look at a solution even more effective: 2 × JBOD, each one backing-up to the other one in the other NAS. Do you think with ReadyDR on (I just discovered the pretty new & cool features around there !...), this could be achieved in real time (or nearly real time)?
Do you think with ReadyDR on (I just discovered the pretty new & cool features around there !...), this could be achieved in real time (or nearly real time)?
ReadyDR isn't a "high availability" solution - which means that the backup repository needs to be restored before you can access individual files. It is quite efficient, so you probably should look at it. It backs up snapshots, so you'd need to make sure they were scheduled fairly often on the source share.
rsync-over-ssh is almost as efficient, and creates a copy of the share files. Snapshots won't be the same as they are on the original, but you can use snapshots to recover previously backed up versions.
Both should work. I have more experience with rsync (using it to back up my primary NAS to other NAS on site). I use cloud backup for disaster recovery (currently I'm using Crashplan for that). But your idea of backing up to an off-site NAS is perfectly sound, and lots of folks do it that way.
