M3_SJ

Hi all,

I did a search but came up negative so I hope I'm in the right forum. If not moderators, do what you got to do :-)

I'm going to have a 3TB capacity home Intel nas server.

It will be the dumping ground for music, movies, photos, and documents. (all highly important stuff)

4 bays.
I was thinking of setting it up like this.

bay 1 - 1Tb seagate
bay 2- 1Tb seagate
bay 3 - 1Tb seagate
bay 4 - 1Tb hot spare

in a RAID 5 set up. (note that bay 4 is a 1Tb hot spare)

I've been getting conflicting recommendations.

One guys says, you should have smaller drivers and allow for either a mirror in case your RAID config gets corrupted.

Another guys this is fine, as if anything were to happen, the RAID would employ the use of the hot spare if need be.

Another guy says, I have no backup to my RAID. So set up as this, but eventually set up another NAS just for backup purposes.


Pls help as I don't know what to do at this point ?

thanks
sj

raptor_pa

Does the raid controller employ auto failover to the hot spare? If raid5 then in this configuration you will have a 2 TB raid ( capacity of one drive is used in writing the parity info - even tho the parity is spread across all three drives as is the data, the parity requires the capacity of one drive. I don't see the need for smaller drives, but you should have some form of redundancy, and also should have a backup plan. Raid1 and raid5 both employ redundancy, but offer protection ONLY for a failed drive, they offer no protection for data or filesystem corruption, for that you NEED a backup plan. I have been working on a commercial raid5 SAN box for the last week and a half that is perfectly functional, but had the filesystem hosed big time.

M3_SJ

yes it allows a failover to the hot spare. I read that.

so backup plan it will be... I'm thinking a 2Tb NAS in another room