Hi all, so yesterday one of my drives failed, and I was left with only one 2 TB storage drive. Today I went ahead and procured two 3 TB HGST Deskstar NAS drives, with the intention to put them in a RAID 1 array. I'm planning to keep the existing 2 TB (WD Red) drive for non-critical data: downloads, movies, etc.
However, there might be a better solution for my needs, which I am currently not aware of. Snapshot back-ups for example (Crashplan, shadow copy?) or something better, a different RAID configuration.
The drives will be in my general system, running Windows 10. Because of this, I think it would be easiest to make use of the Storage Spaces feature.
My advice is put one drive in the system and use the other for a detached USB backup drive. I then really like VEEAM endpoint backup. It will start a backup when you connect the drive and eject it when finished or protect from ransom ware.
If you just want non versioning flat copy you could always use robocopy as well.
You could have a look at snapraid. You could have 1 3tb and 1 2tb drisk with the other 3tb disk used for parity. That would allow you to add more disks in the future. It's only useful for storage however, not an OS drive or other data which is modified frequently.
I actually migrated my two volumes on workstation from RAID0 (LSI) to equivalent in storage spaces. Additionally to that I also migrated my NAS-es (multiple) to Windows 2016 Essential. So I can share my thoughts.
I both cases WIndows 10 and 2016 Server: NEVER create a volume with a GUI wizard or any kind of UI management console of Microsoft. Either it will try to create volume with parameters that are impossible to meet by underlying service layer (win 2016 !) or even if it succeed it will take default value for the cache size (both 10 and 2016). Do it by command line tool (Power Shell).
AND always provide explicit cache value. I've seen RAID6 equivalent being created with too small cache. And a non zero cache value for RAID0 equivalent. In both cases default values produced worst performance scenario possible (writes) for my use cases.
On the plus side all "low" level tools I use (HDTune, R-Drive) work with those volumes.
I went with my original plan: I used Storage Spaces to create a mirrored ReFS pool with the two 3 TB drives. On the 2 TB drive, I set up Windows File History on the required folders. I feel this is adequate for my needs.
I do plan to buy a NAS sometime in the future, but that has a very low priority.