I have a Nap TS-451+. Currently it has 1x 10TB hard disk that I use for Plex. I want to take the Plex hard drive and actually put it in the Plex server (at the time I was using a laptop for Plex, now Im using a desktop). The Goal is to purchase 4x 4TB NAS hard drives, I plan on running this in a RAID 5 with Hot Spare.
I need to know the best way to back up a Mac and 2 PCs? 1 of the PC I will be just backing up my steam games directory, the second PC would be mostly pictures and documents. The Mac would be Pictures, Documents, Music and such.
Im about to place a newegg order so I figure now might be a good time, considering the rate shipping is going.
Four drives is about the minimum for RAID5. With three you may as well be using RAID1. You don’t have enough for a hot spare.
Edit; OK, I am wrong. With 3 drive RAID5 you get double the usable space of a 2 drive RAID1. I usually think of performance, and a 3 drive RAID5 only has the same performance of a 2 drive RAID1.
I would reconsider the hot spare idea. Look into the pros and cons. I would rather run all four drives in RAID5 and if shipping time is slow for you keep a cold spare drive in a closet.
Hot spare just automates the drive replacement on failure. That has value, but more in a larger environment where the staff may not have time to get around to replace drives quickly. At least that’s my opinion.
Comes down to this for me to keep a spare 5th drive it would be an extra $100. Thats $100 that could be used else where, Like a new monitor or TV I wanted to upgrade at some point. Plus with 3x 4 TB drives I should have around 8 TB of storage, which would be more than enough for what I plan on using it for.
I think shipping times are slow for about everyone. Plus some PC components are becoming scarce. Its hard to know when things will get back to normal.
Oh hey another thing I just thought of. It was embarresing at the time!
Be sure when you configure the RAID that you pick a size that will not only fit on every drive currently in the array, but every drive you might ever buy to replace a drive.
This happened to me with LInux mdraid. Was not paying attention and it picked to use all of the available space. Those were 80 GB drives and they had “extra” space beyond 80 GB. A few megabytes I think.
When we needed a replacement it was also an 80 GB drive but it didn’t have those extra megabytes and couldn’t replace the failed drive.
Maybe modern NAS operating systems make sure to handle this for you. But it’s probably a good idea to make sure that if you use 4 TB drives make sure you’re using only 4,000,000,000,000 bytes of each one, because that’s all the guaranteed space you get. (If I wrote the zeroes out correctly.)
Thats why Im buying the same models. My NAS is only 4 bay, so I won’t be adding any more. Id assume if I want to upgrade the array at some point, ill have to move the data off to upgrade the drives.