What is best RAID

Which RAID

  • 0

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • 1

    Votes: 2 20.0%

  • 10

    Votes: 2 20.0%

  • 5

    Votes: 6 60.0%
  • Total voters
    10
What do you want it to do? iIt really depends on use, size of your disks, speed of them, what performance/size of storage you want...
Backup storage I'd probably say raid 5
 
For backup and storage of older photos ... none of the above. Several individual drives which are backed up off site is better.
 
Technically it doesn't really matter as you should have the raid backed up to a completely separate device anyway.

Although you have to weigh up disk space vs performance (not really important for archive) vs redundancy required.

Remember, raid on its own is not a backup.
 
First thing you need to do is ask yourself is why you need RAID.
RAID does not produce a better backup than non raid backup systems.
 
Anything other than RAID 0 which isn't really RAID at all.
 
Eloise said:
For backup and storage of older photos ... none of the above. Several individual drives which are backed up off site is better.
Click to expand...

Well it protects against failure of the computer hard drive which usually is a single drive.
In which case, for a backup at home, raid 5 is fine in a 4 disk system. It'll allow a disk to fail without losing everything.

But another copy offsite as well is always the best solution, just is case of fire, floods etc. Depending on size you can get some very large USB disks now.

But the important thing is regular backups, scheduled jobs are good. Don't forget about those other important files, documents, etc.
 
Personally I use the triple backup strategy:
- local backup disk
- a synology NAS on the home network RAID 5
- AWS (Amazon) for infrequently used long term storage (sessions/shoots from 2+ years ago)

When it comes to raid I use RAID 5 as we very often have 4-5 concurrent users on the home network in the evening, but you could theoretically use RAID 1 (mirroring),
You then save a drive, while keeping read performance and reliability.

(y)
 
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Stan Bax said:
Personally I use the triple backup strategy:
- local backup disk
- a synology NAS on the home network RAID 5
- AWS (Amazon) for infrequently used long term storage (sessions/shoots from 2+ years ago)

When it comes to raid I use RAID 5 as we very often have 4-5 concurrent users on the home network in the evening, but you could theoretically use RAID 1 (mirroring),
You then save a drive, while keeping read performance and reliability.

(y)
Click to expand...
Not sure why you say RAID 1 as you get more space with RADI 5 on 4 drives you have 3times your single drive size, with RAID 1 you only get two times.with RAID 5 you get both protection and more space.
 
Snapsh0t said:
Anything other than RAID 0 which isn't really RAID at all.
Click to expand...

Technically it does go against the RAID description where the R means redundancy, although you still need a RAID controller.

But there are some uses for it. My primary storage is RAID 0, mainly for spanning and space reasons. BUT.. it's replicated in near real time (file locks allowing) to my backup storage.

Feel free to use RAID 0 just be very aware of its down sides. Although really any RAID array has potential to become unrecoverable (corruption, hardware failure etc) without warning.
 
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I don't use a NAS drive anymore as i find them expensive and single minded.
consider an HP microserver running windows 10 and hubic as your cloud back soluion.

much better
 
Mr Bump said:
I don't use a NAS drive anymore as i find them expensive and single minded.
consider an HP microserver running windows 10 and hubic as your cloud back soluion.

much better
Click to expand...

I have a HP miniserver running as my backup system. Watch for the offers, they regularly come in at arounf £120-130 and for £20 extra you get 3 years next business day warranty :)
 
Chaz Photos said:
How do they differ from a NAS?
Click to expand...
A HP Microserver is a NAS without an OS included (essentially). Gives you more versatile options such as running a BSD based OS such as NAS4Free or Linux or even Windows.
 
Raid 0 for ultra fast boot drives m.2 style or gaming ssd's.

Raid 1 will give redundancy for a minimum of 2 discs

Raid 5 will give read speed and redundancy for 3 discs

Raid 10 will give read/write speed and redundancy but min of 4 discs needed.
 
Brazo said:
Raid 0 for ultra fast boot drives m.2 style or gaming ssd's.

Raid 1 will give redundancy for a minimum of 2 discs

Raid 5 will give read speed and redundancy for 3 discs

Raid 10 will give read/write speed and redundancy but min of 4 discs needed.
Click to expand...
I am talking for a NAS so fast boot not come into it for me on this occasion.
 
Jayst84 said:
As Eloise said earlier, I wouldn't (don't) bother with a RAID set up for archiving files. Why would you? Multiple separate disks is going to be cheaper and more secure, for effectively zero performance loss, as you don't need fast read/write speed for your archive.
Click to expand...
Not sure what you are trying to say? you have 4 drives in a 4bay NAS so there are multiple disks I not say I am interested in speed
 
Chaz Photos said:
Not sure what you are trying to say? you have 4 drives in a 4bay NAS so there are multiple disks I not say I am interested in speed
Click to expand...

I'm just wondering why you would have them in a RAID set up.

Put those 4 drives in different locations and you have a heck of a lot more data security, and you don't have to worry about your RAID controller going tits up or anything either.
 
RAID 10 so you can afford the loss of two disks.
In RAID5 if you lose a second disk whilst the array is rebuilding due to failure, kiss goodbye to your data. The risk is greater with larger disks and disks of the same make/model bought in the same batches.
 
another option if speed isn't a big factor is to run something with windows 10 on it and use the storage spaces setup. It allows you to pool drives and essentially work as a software raid setup so you can set it for redundancy or like in my case so one disk mirrors the other. Speed hasn't been too bad for me, i regularly stream in hd from it without issue using plex and the nice thing is that if the motherboard fails it isn't reliant on a raid card so you just plug the drives into another windows 10 machine and it automatically detects the storage pool again. You can also add extra disks when you like without having to rebuild the whole setup. won't be the popular vote i am guessing but i have been quite pleased with mine
 
afasoas said:
RAID 10 so you can afford the loss of two disks.
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Only as long as they're not in the same mirrored pair. If they are then you can kiss goodbye to your data.....
If you've got mirrored stripes rather than striped mirrors and you lose a disk from each stripe then I think your data is toast too.
 
Personally, i'd set it up as 2 mirrored (RAID 1) drives. That way you have a copy of everything on each drive automatically duplicated to a second. There is always the risk that the NAS box blows up everything at once but not that likely. As an added option i would have a separate external drive to copy everything to on a regular basis or, if you have a decent internet connection you could look at a cloud backup. Bear in mind your download speed is probably a fraction of your upload so think about that if you need to recover from a cloud service!

RAID 1 also gives you the option to remove the drive and place it in a desktop PC to look at the data. Any form of striping etc will leave you with a bunch of useless paperweights if the failure exceeds the redundancy paramaters.

Just my personal preference.

B->
 
As above 1 for the consumer, 5 or above for the backend systems for google.com :)
 
BLZeebub said:
Personally, i'd set it up as 2 mirrored (RAID 1) drives. That way you have a copy of everything on each drive automatically duplicated to a second. There is always the risk that the NAS box blows up everything at once but not that likely. As an added option i would have a separate external drive to copy everything to on a regular basis or, if you have a decent internet connection you could look at a cloud backup. Bear in mind your download speed is probably a fraction of your upload so think about that if you need to recover from a cloud service!

RAID 1 also gives you the option to remove the drive and place it in a desktop PC to look at the data. Any form of striping etc will leave you with a bunch of useless paperweights if the failure exceeds the redundancy paramaters.

Just my personal preference.

B->
Click to expand...
Best not to think of it as a copy. Think of it as a single drive as deleting and corrupted files are instantly replicated.

And yes I've seen many raid arrays nuke themselves.

As I say it doesn't really matter what level you use as you should have a separate copy of the data to the raid array.
 
FWIW I'd recommend running two freeNAS boxes and using the ZFS file system. One as your primary server, the second as your backup server.
As well as supporting RAID (or RAIDZ in ZFS speak) ZFS allows snapshotting. You can snapshot data periodically to provide PITR (point in time recovery). Incredibly useful when you've been ensnared by a crypto-malware. Your files in their un-encrypted state will still be available in an earlier snapshot.
Snapshots can also be used to ship differential backups to a remote system.

I run ZFS on Linux on two different file servers.
On the primary server (always on) snapshots are taken daily and retained for 60 days providing me with 60 days of file history.
Each night a job runs which which wakes up the backup server and ships the latest snapshot over to it. If something goes wrong with the primary server, all I need do is switch on the backup server and with a few tweaks, it can be pretty much business as usual.
 
neil_g said:
Best not to think of it as a copy. Think of it as a single drive as deleting and corrupted files are instantly replicated.

And yes I've seen many raid arrays nuke themselves.

As I say it doesn't really matter what level you use as you should have a separate copy of the data to the raid array.
Click to expand...

Deleted files are easily sorted by turning on the admin option to use a recycle bin on the Synology boxes. I tend to preach multiple copies of anything important as the more you have the less likely they will all be lost!

B->
 
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